Law And More

Spitzer, Scruggs, Lerach - Their "other selves" made them do that other stuff

That pop culture phrase - The devil made me do it - might have basis in science. 

According to landmark new research on identity and personality, there are more selves in us than we present at the office and at "Honey, I'm home."  That devil could be just one of myriad selves.  Apparently Eliot Spitzer, Dickie Scruggs, and Bill Lerach had a couple of other selves fused to the do-gooder one they presented to the world.  And maybe with the next Big Scandal we won't shake our heads in shock. To paraphrase The Shadow, that iconic voice from old-time radio, who knows what selves lie in the DNA of mortal men and woman. 

A provocative read on this is the 2008 book "Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality, Identity, and the Self." It's by science journalist Rita Carter who also authored "Mapping the Mind."  The most simple and most persuasive example Carter presents is that of the Professional Woman. 

Here's my version of Carter's PW case study. 

At 6:00 AM, PW introduces the baby to strained peaches, with great patience and creativity and listens to her husband practice his closing statement for a trial, also with great patience and creativity. 

At 7:00 AM she cracks the whip with a flood of emails to subordinates. 

At 9:00 AM she sucks up to the board of directors. 

At 10:00 AM she ducks out for a romantic interlude with her lover. 

After lunch, she searches for short cuts on how to do her work, which she finds beneath her and boring.  

Near the end of the day, she regrets not having the guts to embezzle.  

At 7:00 PM, she is the good mother, wife until it's time for berating subordinates again. 

And, we all know how this story of respectability and accountability ends. One PW finds the guts to embezzle and feign a suicide. Everyone is shocked as the "facts" come out.  She and her lover are in a region of planet earth they can't be extradited from.

This research confirms what the more perceptive of us always suspected: Life's a stage and the best actors get everything they want. But our mores, laws, and regulations have to be structured to keep aberrant scripts from being acted out in a way, time, and place that destroys the social fabric.  Shakespeare's history plays contain plenty of lessons on all that.

Saving Souls on Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Is Patrick Keane typical of the many of the ambitious, determined, optimistic human beings who walk along Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and into Harvard Law School?  I don't know.  What I do know is that going through that door makes it significantly harder to save one's soul.

In Jay McInerney's 1996 novel "The Last of the Savages," Keane is typical, at least, of working-class, ethnic, Roman Catholic strivers who find a way out of that, into the upper-middle class, and later in midlife in need of salvation.  Keane is also typical of us who use one of the most unimaginative tools to accomplish that: Attending Harvard Law School.  That fine institution, which prides itself on diversity, lets the Keanes and the Genovas in.  I matriculated in the mid 1980s, but ever so briefly.  The more imaginative like Steve Jobs start companies. 

Keane did his three years at Harvard Law.  In that, he's certainly a type.  The Keanes have the drive and emotional strength to not veer from that road more traveled.  He goes on to a white-shoe law firm in downtown Manhattan.  His sense of how the world works and his gut tell him that making partner hinges on getting married - right.  A few weeks after his engagement to a Judge's daughter is announced, he makes partner.  Managing the pampered Judge's daughter and the Judge is more challenging than he expected but he sticks with the marriage and intends to continue doing that unless she's the one who bails.

A dumb plot gimmick is that Keane is gay.  That isn't needed.  The confusion, torment, and lack of being at home in himself are palpable, without throwing in that. After all, when I started out professionally a number of my male and female colleagues put together marriages of sexual protective coloring, without any extreme angst.  That's what they did in those days, just like the Keanes/Genovas First Gen white-collar wannabes went to college and more. It was a must-do, end of story.

The novel wraps up w/o Keane's being willing to save his soul. His alter ego Will Savage, of the manor born, has better luck.  After struggling with his background of wealth and privilege, Savage lives in the answer, not the question.  His coordinates for existence are his.  Keane's coordinates for existence remain drawn by others, ranging from Savage to his own family of origin.  There is no Keane.  There is only Keane overseeing the daily and yearly construction of Keane by external forces.

Had Keane not attended Harvard Law School would he have had fewer obstacles in his way to redemption?  Without a Harvard Law JD, he might have simply graduated Yale and gone on to be an underpaid editor at a book publisher.  Keane had a love of poetry.  That platform lacks the money, prestige and upward mobility to support an extreme class makeover. His game would have fallen apart.  Had I not left Harvard, there was no way I could have saved my own soul, never mind those of others.

Here is an e-book I recently published for those less well defended than Keane. Those who read it and thought about have reported back to me that their souls seems saved.  You can access this short book free Download savingsoulsonparkavenuekstreet.pdf.

Slouching toward Fundamentalism - I have a hunch the absolute morality crowd will win, for now

In that 2008 easy-read "What's Next" by Jane Buckingham there he is: Alan Dershowitz.  He gets his own chapter and what he essentially devotes it to is the issue of science or reason vs. religion or fundamentalism. He predicts the clash of the two world views will shape the next decade or more. That gets summed up in the chapter's section "Absolute or Relative Morality."  Law students are struggling with that - as are the rest of us.

In a scary time, such as the era of the Black Death and the current economic/technological dislocations, there seems to be a flight to the safety of absolutes.  That's how the Dark Ages happened and that's how planet earth and the U.S. political scene got very comfy with fundamentalism.  Wonderful stuff.  I know.  I grew up a Roman Catholic.  God told the Pope the truth. That was a big relief to me to know someone knew what the real deal was.

The new Pope of the People, of course, is the 2nd Counterculture, at least here in the U.S.  They're the ones in charge of the truth, ranging from green to lead paint public nuisance litigation.  They could position themselves as a fun bunch, at least not as grim as the New Right, but like all reformers they're too busy enforcing dogma to make themselves appealing. 

One 2nd Counterculture told me that she saw from her window that all my lights were on and that was a crime against humanity.  When I didn't shut off enough, she sought "injunctive" relief.  She told the management about me.  She must have told many many others too. There was some stuff about saving the planet under my door.  I had to spend a bundle on light-proof drapes. 

For right now, I have a hunch the 2nd Counterculture might just win.  We're all so scared.  Until that terror, including of terrorism lifts, it's going to be certainty for some time.

Over the past decade, "they" got the Rhode Island courts to hear the lead paint public nuisance case twice.  In July, when the RI Supreme Court [yeah, it got that far] rules on that case, there may be a third trial. The plaintiff - that is the state of RI - speaks the language of absolutes.  The language of law might shout all that down, but I wouldn't bet on it.  We humans are suckers for certainty, e.g. after leaving the Roman Catholic Church, like the confused character played by Woody Allen in "Hannah and Her Sisters," I wound up wandering in and out of other truth pit stops.

"Public Nuisance Voodoo: Business Breaks The Spell" - Download Free E-Book

With their public nuisance special language, rituals and media coverage, state attorneys general and plaintiff lawyers have cast a spell on the American legal system.  If all this weren't burdening American business, the whole thing would go down in history as just another cartoonish excess.  But it is a burden. 

In the new e-book you can download free below, we look at the way the voodoo of public nuisance operates and how business is breaking the spell.

Download publicnuisancevoodoo.pdf

Hedge Legal Careers - Do a 35-page e-book

Lawyers know being published helps their career and the brand of their law firm.  Traditional wisdom is that books help more than other vehicles.  After all, Scott Turow, Alan Dershowitz, Philip Howard, Mark Herrmann, and AnonymousLawyer.com did well for themselves by knocking out a book or more.  So did non-lawyer Walter Olson who has significant influence in legal circles.

But, investing time in getting a full-length book written and published is often too big a risk for already time-challenged attorneys. After all, the book may not have any impact on a career, or could have a negative one.

In addition, equally time-challenged readers are only consuming parts of authors' books.  For example, in the April edition of INC., Leigh Buchanan recommends one chapter of "The Game-Changer" by brandname A.G. Lafley [think PG Chief Executive] "if you read nothing else." The lion's share of those who bought Bill Clinton's autobiography read only about 100 pages.

Good news:  There's a proven way to hedge that investment by writing and publishing an e-book.  Below you can download media intelligence expert Chip Griffin's 35-page e-book "The New Media Cocktail."  What are the benefits of hedging this way?  Here are just some:

• You are in complete control.  There are no middlemen, be they agents, publishers, publicists.  You can plan it all and do it all.

 

• It's dirt cheap to produce and distribute.  Since an e-book can be short, you probably don't need a ghostwriter.  If you do, ghostwriters like myself will do the job for anywhere from $5,000 [for 35 pages] to $9,000 [for 85 pages].  Having a traditional book ghostwritten could run from $20,000 to $60,000.  Formatting it into a PDF is free.  Copyrighting it through the Library of Congress [downloadable forms online] is $45.  What about laying it out?  That's not absolutely necessary since your audience is hungry for content, not beauty.  But I advise clients to scout out a low-cost graphics pro to make the manuscript look professional.

• You're not asking anyone for anything.  Most likely you will offer the e-book free.  Actually, freeconomics is the way to go in this market.  Provide something free and you are halfway there to hooking that fish.

• Success all depends on how cleverly and aggressively you promote.  How can you pick up on the art of promotion?  Observe what the best in the legal business do.  Those range from Mickey Pohl at Jones Day [See PRACTICE PERSPECTIVES] to Bill Marler at Marler Clark [See blogs]. If you're a print person, then some useful reads are "Get Slightly Famous" by Steven Van Yoder and "Realty Blogging" by Richard Nacht and Paul Chaney.  If you decide to hire publicity help, look for a pro who mixes old and new media.

• You're not burnt out by doing a full-length book and having to put up with all the elite middlemen in the publishing industry.  They are underpaid so like all members of the creative underclass they will tend to torment the rest of us successful hustlers.

So, how do you go about your e-book.  Here are some guidelines:

• Identify a niche topic people are interested in and that you can simplify and write about in, say, 35 to 85 pages. For instance, if you have been involved in any aspect of the lead-paint litigation, you might leverage that to advice on how China might approach the lead-paint issue.  U.S. law firms, defense and plaintiff, are looking beyond the U.S. for new business.  Bill Marler of Marler Clark conducted a seminar in China about U.S. product liability laws.

• Come up with an engaging title.

• Adopt a conversational style.  The popular legal blogs, ranging from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Law Blog to Overlawyered.com, have down cold a me-to-you tone and a dramatic way of presenting information and a point of view.

 

• Ask yourself: Would I get anything out of reading this?  Remember, marketability is increasingly determined by the usefulness of the content, not by the brandname of the author.  Check the rankings of big-name authors on Barnes & Noble or Amazon and you will see that their recent books are probably not moving.  The market is hungry for something it can use to survive professionally and hopefully leverage for competitive advantage.

• Do a fast draft.  Put it away.  Take it out and make it a masterpiece of insight.

• Key in "PDF" files on Google and you will come up with a free service.

• Key in "Library of Congress" or "Copyright" and you will find forms to download.

• Ask around for a reliable graphics service to lay out your book for a PDF file so that it communicates class.

• Start a blog on Typepad.com for the platform for launching your book.

• Leverage that blog to notify all the legal media, print and digital, about your book.

• Post catchy headlines on your blog in order to attract visitors who will read your book.

• Do an e-mail blast that doesn't appear to be an e-mail blast, sending a compelling transmittal note about the usefulness of this e-book and attach a copy.

• Ask third parties to help you create buzz about the book.

• Keep promoting the book, at least three times a day.

• Decide on the topic of your next e-book. You want a series of about five annually.  If you develop true-north confidence you might consider creating a comic book about an erudite legal concept that you will simplify. A good read on that is "Made to Stick" by the Heath Brothers.

Download NewMediaCocktail.pdf

Why, Dickie, Why? - Part of the answer is in Scott Turow's "Personal Injuries"

Some of us who are newbies at understanding why people with everything reach for more - and implode. I am one of those innocents about the force fields which suck up human beings. See, until I lost my business and my mind in the beginning of the 21st century I was a relatively closed system.  So, for weeks now I have been interviewing psychologists and lawyers for the answer to one question: Why did Dickie Scruggs do what he allegedly did?

The explanations I received weren't satisfying, at least not to me.  They seemed too clinical or too legal.  I wanted the raw insides of a human being who manages to cross the line between being cagey to being headed to the slammer, along with losing his law license.

Well, I got lucky recently.  I found Scott Turow's 1999 novel "Personal Injuries."  As you get it right away, why someone does something is rooted in great complexity, including what he might perceive as an "injury" to him.  The novel is about personal injury attorney Robert Feaver who bribes judges.  Now, this might be getting way ahead of the Scruggs' saga but the Feds and his lawyer convince Feaver to wear a wire. In exchange he will do no time, can attend to his dying wife and pay the meager fine of $250,000.  Any rat tale is a beauty and this one is too.

As usual, Turow brings his keen instincts about the mysteries of what drives humans to this mess.  Here are some of the key sentences which demonstrate that psychic ability:

• "I was long accustomed to the dumb ways people get themselves in trouble."
• "He was the kind of fellow who'd be described as 'too much.'"
• "It's a complicated business being someone's only hope."
• "Over the years I had learned that it was only the poor whose desire for money was bounded by pure reason."

An added treat is that the narrator of the tale is George Mason, a lawyer who defends Feaver.  A recurring character in Turow, in a later novel Mason, when a judge, gets his own dark night of the soul coming face-to-face with his own illusions and shortcomings. Aptly, Turow titles that later novel "Limitations."

But, the limitation we and Turow come up against in trying to unravel the why in the Scruggs' possible fall from grace is this: We will never really have a complete answer.  Scruggs never will either.  That undertow which drags even the shrewdest and the most cautious of us out to sea seems to be unknowable.  If it were, why couldn't religion, family, wealth, power, love, mission, fear "save" Scruggs, Richard Nixon, Bill Lereach, and John Kennedy, Jr.?   

Father Forgive Us - Steve "Turnaround Kid" Miller Included

Just on the basis of this amazing book "The Turnaround Kid" alone, Robert "Steve" Miller should have a few buildings at his alma mater Harvard Law School named after him.  Miller eventually decided against a law career, went to Stanford for an MBA and the rest is turnaround history. Perhaps it's Stanford which should name all those buildings "Robert Steve Miller."

As Allan Sloan almost gushes today in THE WASHINGTON POST, this unusual book provides rare insight into a fallible leader and human being. Maybe it's timing passing [Miller is 66], maybe it's suffering [Maggie, his wife of 39 years, died in 2006] - whatever - this corporate powerhouse has the courage and insight to look at himself.

All this rivets me.  One, I did speechwriting for Miller at Chrysler.  And two, since 2003, I have been drilling down into my own past and present and sharing what I think I'm finding on this and my other blog.  Like readers are embracing Miller-in-full, they have been connecting with me, sins included.  Had Miller and I been in a 12-step program, "they" would be saying that we were "doing our amends."  Perhaps we are.  Perhaps this reaching out for forgiveness and self-forgiveness is a prerequisite to whatever is next.

Miller has already done that moving on.  He has remarried.  He is wrapping up the turnaround of Delphi.  Whatever he does after Delphi will, I have a hunch, be different and done differently than what he did in the past 66 years.  He has probably become the man he always wanted to be. 

Me?  After five years climbing out of what was most likely a self-created hell, I am willing to attempt to go where my talent, intelligence and psychic ability [Some call me "Medium."] are going to take me.  The first 58 years of my life weren't too hot.  But in the past several years, things seem to be looking up. 

"The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America's Most Troubled Companies," Robert "Steve" Miller, Collins, $25.95, due out in April 2008.

Reasonable Doubt - Who/What Does This Protect

Judging others is a what gossip and tribal politics are all about.  But ask human beings to stand in formal judgment of their peers - and they fall apart.  That's one reason, contends James Q. Wilson in his book "The Origins of Reasonable Doubt," courts gave juries that escape concept of not convicting someone if there existed a reasonable doubt.  This was intended, Wilson argues aggressively, to provide moral comfort to jurors, not necessarily to protect defendants or the justice system.  Wilson presents his analysis within the context of how behavior which deviated from social mores was dealt with way back to the Middle Ages.

In his review of this book in the February 27th edition of THE NEW REPUBLIC, Richard A. Posner takes on a number of Wilson's assumptions. And the biggest of them, notes Posner, is Wilson's belief that, "the evaluation of a modern legal concept requires the exploration of its historical origins."  With that cleared away, Posner points out it's irrelevant to the utility of the concept of reasonable doubt how it began.  Conjections about that may make for interesting reading but have no bearing on if and how the concept serves society and its legal system currently.

Both the book and the book review show brilliant minds trying to make sense of the complex ways in which we justify judging and punishing our fellow man.

No Coincidence: Corporations Got Weaker, State AGs Powerful

Corporate America used to be about power.  Money was an offshoot of that power. 

But that power became less.  Government, institutional investors, hedge funds, private equity, and non-governmental organizations [NGOs] gained more of a say in how corporations were run.  Proof of that, as journalist Alan Murray tells us in his 2007 book "Revolt in the Boardroom," is that in 2006 about 1400 heads of companies lost their jobs. And the result of it has been the surging power of the state attorneys general.

Yes, New York AG Eliot Spitzer wrote a new rulebook on how aggressive the state AG could be with business. That, of course, established a new model, one that Jerry Brown, Marc Dann, Patrick Lynch and Jim Hood seem to have been following.  But Spitzer couldn't have changed the rules had not corporations been transformed from one of the most influential institutions of the 20th century to one heavily controlled by outside forces.  Among those outside forces, the marketplace probably has the least impact. 

Murray describes how the power that the corporation does have currently is essentially wielded by the Board of Directors.  Therefore those who want to get something done to or in the corporation are now bound to approach the board.  Thanks to the new governance rules in-place since Enron, board members face fines, ruined careers, shaming and perhaps even worse if they don't address alleged internal problems brought to them.  That's exactly how the heads of AIG, Hewlett-Packard, and Boeing got fired.

It's obvious that those who want to protect or harm a corporation will work through the board.  Most often the go-betweens are the lawyers on all sides.  At AIG, Hank Greenburg might have kept his job if he hadn't cooperated with the board which was getting heat from lawyers in communication with Spitzer. 

The converse can also play out.  Boards wanting to protect or harm corporate players can do that by how they interact with outside parties, including the state AGs.

For all of us who want insight about how power operates now, "Revolt in the Boardroom" is an instructive read. 

 

"Limitations" by Scott Turow

There are too many of us like Judge George Mason in Scott Turow's 2006 novel "Limitations."  We somehow got the message from our culture [Mason is Southern pedigreed] or ourself that we ought to be noble in our thoughts and actions. That's why less than noble behavior from the past gnaws at us enough to drive us to right it or at least in a ham-handed way heal it.

With typical gentle irony, Turow has Mason meet his past - and it blows him off.  When a college freshman, and an unhappy, idealistic one who ill-fitted in the messy world of realities, Mason joined in taking sexual advantage of a lost soul who wandered onto campus.  The next day she's still there, only with her story.  Mason wants to right the situation for her. But then push comes to shove and the more decisive Lord-of-the-Flies type leader gets her off campus and out of their lives and - memories.  All this happened before such sexual rites of passage were against the law.

What awakens the nobility of conscience is an appeal Mason has to rule on.  Now, such behavior is against the law and the boys involved could face six years in jail.  Meanwhile, Mason's law clerk who is enraged by the Judge's not-quite-perfect nobility pushes back with anonymous death threats.

Clearly, Turow wants to puncture Mason's smug, self-absorbed balloon, but not brutally.  The victim from the past, when he reaches her, asks if he's in a 12-step program, bouncing around the nation making amends.  She ends the conversation with the word "strange."  When the clerk's deeds are uncovered, Mason eventually takes the high road and is attempting to have him treated by the legal system as a psychiatric case.  In that way, he won't be exposed to prison and may be able to get his law license back.

An extra piece of the plot line, superfluous I think, is that Mason's wife is being treated for cancer.  He tries to do all the right things there too.  Cute.

By throwing this noble soul into crisis, Turow allows us all to forgive ourselves for our own limitations and just continue doing the best we can.  This self-forgiveness has become either a fad or trend in spiritual circles.  For example, from the West Coast has come plenty of buzz about Joe Vitale's "Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for wealth, health, peace and, more."  The system involves self-cleansing, as often as needed.  That can be done efficiently, many times during the day, by verbally going through this ritual.  Say:

• I love you
• I'm sorry
• Forgive me
• Thank you.

I guess I am one of the nobles with some unfinished business in my closet.  Around Christmas I started this self-cleaning.  Just as Vitale predicted, my business took a whole new direction, in both the volume and quality of clients.