Coming on three years ago, I wrote about toxic productivity. Among my pithy comments were the following nuggets:
Tag: lawyers
Martin is a lawyer who has closed many residential real estate transactions. Back when he was starting out, Martin read the relevant statutes and regulations and prepared all the documents himself. For each transaction, Martin drafted a Statement of Adjustments, adding numbers in his head. Eventually he used a calculator, and then a software program. Then, he hired a law clerk and taught her how to do it. Should the situation arise where Martin needs to prepare a Statement of Adjustments manually, he can easily do so, because he knows everything that there is to know about them. When a dispute arises as to the accuracy of a Statement of Adjustments, he can resolve it.
Back when I was attending Vanier College in Montreal, I met a girl named Marta who was quite beautiful. I could see myself dating someone like Marta, so I tried to get to know her. I was very happy when Marta told me that she thought that I was a nice guy, she liked me a whole bunch, and she cared very deeply about me.
Back in law school, my criminal law professor told us that our job would be to use every bit of our intelligence, ingenuity, and strength, and to work tirelessly, to deliver the best possible outcome for our client. “But,” he told us, “if at the end of the day, someone has to go to jail, make sure that it is your client.” He was warning us not to become so zealous in our representation of our client that we crossed over the ethical or legal lines.
Categories
Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later
“Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
~ Joe Biden.
It used to make sense to me to try to scare businesspeople into wanting to pay legal fees. I would tell them one of my many stories about clients who started a business without including an adequate budget for legal fees.
Categories
Stabbing Back in the Law Firm
I liked some of my partners all of the time; most of my partners most of the time; and one or two, almost never. I suspect that my partners, as a group, had similar sentiments about me.
The first thing to know about being a partner in a law firm is that you do not have to like all your partners all the time, but you are supposed to pretend that you do.
By Maureen T. Mckay
In an earlier article in our series, Murray Gottheil quoted these words from Leo Tolstoy: “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The sad truth is that there is unhappiness in all families, and many families do not like to share their secrets. Working with these families on business succession requires professionals to be trusted, and, as Arthur Ashe said, “Trust has to be earned, and should come only after the passage of time.”
By Maureen T. McKay
One upon a time, I had a client named Jack, whose mother had granted him a Power of Attorney (“POA”). Some years later, Mom’s capacity became questionable. Jack’s sister, Jill, wanted to have Mom create a new POA in her favour that would terminate Jack’s POA. The future of a family business hung in the balance. Someone was likely to come tumbling down the hill. The dispute made quite a few family members unhappy, and quite a few lawyers a lot of money.
“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” ~ Mary Karr
In an earlier article, I wrote about taking responsibility for planning for the succession of our personal and business affairs and threatened that Maureen McKay and I would write subsequent articles to explore this topic.