What About Paris? ™

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October 30, 2009

London's Charon QC: On Libel.

The Outlaw Charon. Quite a few inspired posts lately on defamation law and news by the velvet-voiced Brit pundit, academic, lawyer, broadcast journalist and ladies' man Charon QC--known to his close and admiring friends as "Mike Semple Piggot", an unlikely Anglo-Norman handle, of course. WAC? will accept the latter as his real name for purposes of passing muster under the Ned Beatty blogging and commenting No-Wank/No-Weenies/No-Cowards Zone test: "No real name, no real publish; get a life, please". CQC is a stand-up guy, and a rare lawyer-blogger: one with stones. Not another digital weenie. See "How our senior libel judge stamps on free speech--all over the world".

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2009

Milton Supman (1926-2009)

No Boomer growing up in Detroit in the 1950s could miss Soupy Sales. You think of him as a Howard Stern for kids--and for his studio crew, who often sounded as if they were rolling on the floor laughing. Always having secret fun. He died Thursday. His character "White Fang" was born on a U.S. battleship in the South Pacific.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

October 21, 2009

Luxembourg

See I Prefer Paris by ex-New Yorker Richard Nahem yesterday and today: private doors, public gardens.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:17 PM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2009

What happens to your clients "after they've seen Paris"?

In the words of the old song, "How ya' gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've see Paree?" How do you satisfy them with Paris--once they've see Paris? How do you satisfy a client with "great", once you've already delivered it? You must get better to avoid falling behind.

--Harry Beckwith, The Invisible Touch (Warner Books 2000)

Posted by JD Hull at 04:41 PM | Comments (1)

October 19, 2009

What one admired Brit says about Yanks.

The world, unfortunately, is much like a playground at a third-rate junior high school in a mixed neighborhood.

"Unbounded confidence and undeniable resilience of the American psyche." Many non-US nations--and their citizens in all walks of life--"resent" the United States. We saw that sentiment rise again in mid-2003, when America invaded Iraq. Talent, verve and energy, wrong-headed or not, is threatening to those with less of it. These qualities make people way nervous. But Americans, too, "resent" one another. We are hardly immune from the small-mindedness that often colors our world.

Human nature, I guess. No one wants to feel uncomfortable around the force, energy, talent, resources and self-confidence of those that have it, and often flaunt it in subtle ways.

It's worse if you sense, imagine or observe that the World's Alpha Entities--nations or individuals--are constantly in your face. Hey, if you're of the paranoid persuasion, it's like they are even laughing at you. At you, and at all your friends and family, Jack. The Romans were feared and hated in every country they commandeered. The problem (gulp) was that they were very good for several centuries at what they were doing. You had to give them credit for that.

Think about American towns and cities where people routinely deride outsiders who have accomplished much in "bigger ponds". Note the traditional irrational "fear" of New York City, America's hands-down best town, and New Yorkers. The fact that many New Yorkers are aggressive and often overbearing can't defeat the truth that the city is brimming over talent and ideas. Same with LA and DC.

There have been petty jealously-fests everywhere since the beginning of history. Talent, truth and quality--especially when served up with energy--makes people nervous. Better to surround yourself with "like-minded" people than be made to feel nervous about the fact that you will not or cannot grow to a higher plane. Yes, be comfortable at all costs.

The world, unfortunately, is much like a playground at a third-rate junior high school in a mixed neighborhood. And Americans--ranging from (a) the quietly great to (b) the mouthy mediocre--are still part of all that. Re: the latter group, which is legion, America--for all its greatness and promise--indeed has its moments as a world headquarters for sour grapes, insecurity and moral pretension.

These days, we are drowning in all manner of jack-asses who need to be right 100% of the time on everything from the primacy of Jesus to whether an airline employee is a stewardess, stew, flight attendant, flying waitress or in-flight server. (Some lawyers even freak out over "Chinese wall"--a useful term more quickly understood than Asian wall.)

Lawyers--supposedly seekers and guardians of truth, the architects of business and officers of the court--lie to clients, courts and each other out of habit.

Manners, professionalism and "appearances" are Everything.

Directness, facts, honesty and efficiency are Besides The Point.

Consider lawyers who proclaim loudly and self-righteously that profanity is "unprofessional". Yours truly loves to swear, and forcefully, at the right times. I am heavily involved in the "let's restore real people-speak to the workplace" movement because not using your real speech, especially among lawyers, is phony, prissy, a hypocrisy. Sue me, folks. I am ready for you.

But spoliation of evidence, compromising clients with half-assed work, lying to clients about the true status and quality of projects and positions taken, and making "Eddie Haskell" overtures with adversaries and courts--a sad if amusing "lawyers club" standard--is just biz as usual.

Clients, not adversaries, to many of us, are the enemy; clients are scammed more than anyone, and routinely. My take: lawyers spend as much time hiding their mistakes from their clients, and fighting with them, as they do serving them. Most of us should have never entered the profession. We are not up to it. It is too hard.

Lots of lawyers--maybe a majority--never get it. The law is not a club for white guys who are smart enough to do personal injury cases, walk and chew gum at the same time, and wear decent suits at lunch. It's a service industry, Jack. Most lawyers--in America, we are a dime a dozen--aren't that important. Get used to it.

And it's not of course just Western Law Cattle that's the problem. Consider America's often-intolerant and increasingly shrill Extreme Religious Right. Consider our often-mindless Overly-PC Left (i.e., many blue state residents who are supposedly better educated than the religious right and should know better) that has apparently abandoned the First Amendment in an effort to make people think and talk just like them.

A nation of phonies? A culture that ignores complexity and nuance? A people who fear quality--and even fight it?

You want to see insecurity, irony and hypocrisy out the Wazoo? Look to America. Look to lawyers. Look to other white collar execs and pros. Yes, look to all the world. But take a hard look at you and yours. And get some standards. Keep revisiting your integrity. Demand something better of yourselves and others.

Are you seeing and telling the truth?

Brit Richard Lewis at Cross-Culture tells the truth--whether it is popular on his own tribal playground or not. He does not shy way from tackling and sorting out complexity and ambiguity. He does not preach. He is a man who was "global" before global was cool. He is an exception to the "talent + energy makes me nervous" pattern.

Lewis knows who he is, knows the world in all its wonderful variety, and knows--and admires--us Yanks, warts and all. You see it again and again in his writings.

Read "A Country that Can".

Posted by JD Hull at 12:12 PM | Comments (2)

October 15, 2009

Juries That Work: Simple Rules.

And from the Milwaukee-Texas axis. Here's a gem we missed featuring two of our favorite students of the Science, Art and Holy Surprise of 'Twelve Good Men and True'. See Anne Reed's August 21 piece at her Deliberations and the discussion of Mark Bennett's "Simple Rules for Better Jury Selection", which Bennett continues to update, at Defending People. For excitement, brightness and a little color--and to make this item longer--we offer an illustration from a past WAC? piece about how federal and state jurors in the same metropolitan area can differ from each other in unexpected but exotic ways. Below is one who will take more than his share of notes.

Tom Wolfe, NYC, state court juror, sharp dressed man.

Posted by JD Hull at 02:24 AM | Comments (2)

October 13, 2009

Why not Global in place of Patriotic?

A wise man's country is the world.

--Aristippus (435-360 BC), as quoted by Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosphers

"There is hope. I see traces of men."

Aristippus was shipwrecked on the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea. He and his fellow survivors did not know where they were or if the island was inhabited. But he sees geometric figures drawn on the sand.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

October 08, 2009

Second City: Manchester, England

"It's a mean old town to live in by yourself." Still gritty and real, the city once had an economic school of thought named after it, via England's Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Life's hard everywhere these days, not just in Manchester. But don't wimp out and mail it in. Get Mean and Eternal like Johnny Winter. Have nice day, law cattle.

Mean Town Blues

Posted by JD Hull at 11:43 PM | Comments (1)

"Play it again, Mike": Prof. Hazard on U.S. courts seen abroad.

(from a July 30, 2009 post)

If you have European clients, you already know that in-house lawyers across the Atlantic do not like to have their company's commercial disputes heard and decided by American courts (even by our most efficient and respected U.S. district courts). Their reasons, however, turn on more than the obvious and commonly-given ones: lengthy and expensive proceedings, juries hearing civil disputes, and the fear of large damages awards, including punitive damages.

One more reason is the perception abroad of the extraordinary "localism" (generally county-based) of judges and juries in the state systems. Still another is the effect that contingency fee arrangements can have on the litigation process.

There are several more reasons. And every one of them can be troubling to both non-U.S. and American in-house lawyers.

At the podcast series of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution (CPR), do not miss the interview by Mike McIlwrath, an in-house lawyer with General Electric in Europe, of Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., now at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, in "American Exceptionalism: U.S. Civil Justice v. the Rest of the World". The July 17 interview is No. 75 in CPR's International Dispute Negotiation series. Hearing the Hazard interview is a "non-billable must" for any American business lawyer (in-house or outside firm) acting for clients in more than one jurisdiction, within or outside of the U.S.

Geoffrey Hazard is a well-known American law professor and author in the areas of civil procedure, federal jurisdiction and ethics. He has also taught law at Boalt, the University of Chicago, Yale, and Penn Law. One of his former students--and his research assistant when Hazard taught at Yale--is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Mike McIlwrath is Senior Counsel, Litigation for GE Infrastructure-Oil & Gas, and works out of Florence, Italy. Last year, the IDN series earned both McIlwrath and New York-based CPR an award for ADR excellence from CEDR, an ADR group in London.

Geoffrey Hazard

Posted by JD Hull at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2009

Your Antler Dance: Real life, Real Courage, Ray Ward.

Got something holistic, holy and global for you right here. WAC? is about happy corporate clients--and how hard it is to get client service right. It's also about happy lawyers, a prerequisite to great service: family, friends, rest, food, exercise, health, and renewal. And a spiritual life, even if it's a druid-like Antler Dance you and Nadine made up on your own after being over-served one spotty evening at Kelly's Irish Times on F Street, NW. Something eternal, infinite. You need it all, all right, and rightly mixed.

But WAC?, the "blog", has serious limitations. Note re: "blogs"...we're still getting used to the overly-effeminate new age low-testosterone (unless anonymous--then it's way manly) digital neighborhood and the goofy glossaries. "Blogs". Arguably no one with a real job has time to read "blogs". Like, dude, "blogs", who cares?

Anyway, Real Life, which happens to us and those we love, is cruelly shortchanged by this "blog". Most "blogs" don't tell you how to live. We fall short there, too. Consider the lawyers, generic dweebs, wuss-breeds, Weenies, the law cattle who should just moo-out and leave the profession (so they can work in quiet bookstores, and be better metro-sexuals), white-collar slaves, other peasants-by-choice, Gen-Y Looters, and even the next lowest-of-the-low--spineless no-name bloggers and commenters sans Club Ned exceptions--WAC? makes fun of and would like to liberate from bondage.

All these unfortunates need the restorative powers of a wise universe. And WAC? needs it, too. A lot.

So if we were going to read just one overall blog to meet all our life-and-lawyer needs, it would be Ray Ward's Minor Wisdom, a blog which first grabbed us by the lapels 4 years ago.

It is what a blog should be: brave, personal, well-written and damn interesting. A gifted and well-rounded human and lawyer, perhaps put here on Earth to make up for some of the rest of us, Ray writes on everything from excellence in lawyering, writing and appellate advocacy to Christian mystics, politics, music (well, real music), Darfur, Chad, human rights, and human rites. Ray knows we are all just here for a cup of coffee--so make the best of it, and help others whether you are rich or not. He has a sense of humour. He never moralizes. He's curious. And fear seems truly to have been replaced by faith. You ready for that? Would it help you? We know it would.

Ray Ward, The main Rain Man

Posted by JD Hull at 04:11 PM | Comments (1)

October 06, 2009

What's a Nyilv Nosan Muködo Társaság, anyway?

You don't know that one? And what is that strange German symbol-thing you keep seeing in your due diligence--"GmbH", yeah, that's it--what does that mean? How about: S.A.? Oy? Hevra Pratit? And "Cyfyngedig". To be sure, that old rascal Dr. Quaalude, your Corporations prof at Siwash Law, didn't cover any of these. But increasingly lawyers are helping clients to do business with foreign companies and in foreign jurisdictions--and are even guiding clients as they set up shops abroad. See for starters the International Directory of Corporate Symbols and Terms, first published in 2002 by member firms of the Salzburg, Austria-based International Business Law Consortium. An American law prof, writer and businessman named Dennis Campbell is the IBLC's founder and director.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

October 05, 2009

Caesar's town in Toscana

The Army Camp. Been here now for a week doing three different projects. I am usually quite happy in Europe no matter what I am working at, even if I am rarely a full-time tourist. But here having to work--at all, at anything--is tantalizing. There is enough of the highest peaks of Western civilization here to put in giddy overdrive your head and heart for days and days--all in a very compact and walkable area that never loses its human scale, and class.

Beginning around 60 BC, Julius Caesar founded the town on both sides of the Arno River as settlement for retired Roman soldiers. The mix of things that happened here after that--politics, trade, money, power, greed, literature, art and architecture--is remarkable given that Florence at heart was, and is, a small town nestled in the country. Only 350,000 people live in this world famous center. A haughty, slightly snobby and wonderfully disassembled lot.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:39 PM | Comments (3)

October 03, 2009

Montmartre

Posted by JD Hull at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)

October 02, 2009

The Economist: The U.S. Manufacturing Slump.

In a continung recession, the Wolf will visit every house. See in yesterday's issue of The Economist "Wanted: New Customers". Excerpt:

Manufacturers were hammered in the recession of the early 2000s in large part because they were at the centre of the preceding boom in capital spending. They seemed far removed from the housing and finance bacchanalia that spurred the latest recession. Indeed, employment never recovered from its previous collapse. But much of America’s manufacturing output is destined for new homes and buildings, from bricks to bulldozers, and a lot also goes into cars. When sales of both collapsed, manufacturers were clobbered.

Posted by Rob Bodine at 12:40 AM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2009

Distinguish your law firm--if you can.

It's not about the lawyers anymore. No one cares you're a lawyer. Not an impressive club. A big so-what. In America, they made it easy to become a lawyer. Some day, everyone, including your waitress in Richmond, Kentucky, will be a lawyer. So get going. Distinguish your firm by serving clients. And get higher standards.

Secret: You do that by surprising clients you already have. But most of you can't--or won't--do it Why? It's hard. Rule 4: Deliver Legal Work That Change the Way Clients Think About Lawyers. From our annoying-but-true 12 Rules. Note: Blase, our happy waitress below, is a night law student. She is going to graduate from law school soon. She's a fine student. Through persistence, charm and the way she talks about real life, she will land a position as an associate at your law firm, inadvertantly make you look bad at your job, and generally eat your lunch. She gets it. She wants it. And most lawyers, even at fine firms, are pretty easy to beat. Nice people--but no guts, no gospel, and no plan. But Blase will surprise first co-workers and then clients with her work, her energy, and her Moxie.

Have a nice day.

Posted by Rob Bodine at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)