The "Do We Need to Know..." Trilogy: Part 3 - The Skeptical Client

When I was the general counsel of a large publicly-held company, we had a chief executive officer, my primary advisee (not my primary client, mind you, that was the corporate entity), who I think truly believed that the law and lawyers were put in the world for no reason other than to place barriers or hurdles between where he was and where he wanted to be.  No surface answer was ever sufficient to satisfy him.  "Why can't we buy back stock now?"  "Why can't we sell stock in our public traded subsidiary?" "Why can't we sue X or Y for this?"  "Because that's the law" or "because I said so" was never enough.  And despite the fact that he wasn't a lawyer, his natural smarts and suspicious take on the whole game made the cross-examination as intense as any grilling to which a Kingsfield-like law professor could ever subject a student.

Before I would talk to him about a matter, particularly one as to which I knew he would not like my answer, I asked myself the question "what do I need to know?" and the answer was often that I needed to peel the artichoke all the way down to the heart.

[Jeff Lipshaw]