BarTalk October 2003
Volume 15, Number 5

Lion Taming For Beginners

by Tony Wilson

In the mid 1990’s, I was nvolved in one of three transactions in my career that came from the very depths of hell. Not just your run-of-the-mill hell, but that scary little room in the basement of Hades where the Devil himself shudders with fear every time he walks by the door. In the first of these nightmares, one of my clients was selling her very profitable business to a purchaser sophisticated in the art of turning successful enterprises into unsuccessful ones. Although my then-client was (and I imagine still is) a wonderful person, she didn’t hit it off with the purchaser, and the purchaser didn’t hit it off with her. I suppose if they were left in a conference room together for more than 15 minutes, they might have started hitting each other with table lamps and telephones if their respective lawyers hadn’t moved the weapons to another room in anticipation of the carnage. So it’s fair to say the transaction started poorly and got worse. In a deal worth millions, they argued up to the last minute over a $500 sofa, some light bulbs and as memory serves, stationery.

In the belief that my client was getting royally jerked around (which she most certainly was), she wanted me to get really tough with the Purchaser’s lawyer, who I was dealing with on an hourly basis. I was more or less instructed to yell at him about the sofa and other business issues. Shock and awe him with aggressiveness (before “shock and awe” was used to sell war and beer on television). Fight with him, á là Churchill, on the beaches and oceans about light bulbs and stationery. Never surrender.

I believe my colleague, a charming and intelligent man far more senior to me, had similar instructions. We ignored them, and spoke of golf.

Because we weren’t going to “get angry” with each other just to score Brownie points with our clients, we decided to let them fight out the silly stuff themselves like gladiators at the Roman coliseum; the winner getting the sofa and the loser getting the light bulbs and a moment or two with the lions. A month after the deal closed, my colleague took me out for a pleasant lunch and said, “This is the way it always used to be and this is the way I still do it after a big transaction”; a lesson in lawyer collegiality I have never forgotten.

There’s one bar I have some knowledge of back east which is comprised of very fine lawyers and wonderful people. But the legal market there has caused some of them to compete for business so ferociously that those of us outside the fray can only watch the blood-sport in mild amusement, like audience members at the Coliseum admiring the lions before dinner.

One lawyer gets a speaking engagement at a conference. Others are not happy with the fact that they didn’t get the speaking opportunity instead, and lobby the organization for spots on a panel. Because of all the politics, the organization throws its hands up in frustration, and sets up complicated rules on who gets to speak, inevitably requiring all lawyers to “sponsor” (i.e., “pay”) for the privilege. Still another lawyer spends innumerable weekends away from his kids editing a book published by the same organization. Some of his competitors, who had every chance to contribute their weekends too (but didn’t) are upset that the guy who did the lion’s share of the work had his photograph on the back cover. The need to present or write something has become a battleground where a paper is a sword, and a speech is a spear; each aimed at the other lawyer. And it’s all in the hope it will lead to the Gravy Train of Higher Profile. Yet the whole value over profile is so questionable, it’s reminiscent of my days a lifetime ago in university student politics, where it’s said, the competition was so fierce because the stakes were so small.

Maybe I’m leading a sheltered life in a B.C. bar where we all get along very civilly, and send each other our conflicts and Christmas cards. Frankly, I’d just as soon we avoid gladiatorial exercises in planting firm flags in colleagues’ chests and concentrate our attention on the hungry lions heading our way.

Tony Wilson is a Franchise and Intellectual property lawyer at Cawkell Brodie, and has written for the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun and Macleans magazine. His e-mail address is twilson@cawkell.com.

This article originally appeared in the October 2003 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.