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Fat Cat Lawyers
July 7, 2009
We enjoyed Alex Wade’s take on prenups last week, and asked him if he had any more columns from yesteryear up his sleeve, with one caveat: they had to be relevant to contemporary news. Our sometime scribe took a minute or two to ponder, and then sent us a deluge. Here for starters, from the Independent on Sunday almost six years ago to the day, is a piece about Fat Cat Lawyers. As Wade put it: “Everyone’s talking about errant bankers and overpaid BBC execs, but there’s a yet more deadly breed of Fat Cat out there. You have been warned.”
There has been a lot of talk about fat cats lately. They tend to preside over publicly quoted companies, which they contentedly steer anywhere so long as their supply of cream is endless, their cushions always comfy, and their lives free of anything resembling fidelity and commitment. We have, though, grown tired of them. Just as real felines, particularly fat ones, have an extraordinary ability to irritate, simply by existing, it seems that the time is ripe to give their human counterparts a good kicking.
But if we’re having a go at fat cats, we should not forget their hidden ally. This is a slippery, dangerous breed, Machiavellian to the core and less than furry to the touch. It is rarely seen in public, and never in the context of awkward public meetings with disgruntled shareholders. I am talking about the Fat Cat Lawyer, whose modus operandi I understand, having once aspired to be one.
My aspirations date to the days of the tech-stock boom, when thin young things were heedless of just how fat they could become. A bizarre metamorphosis occurred in my life, leading me from the singularly fat-free world of newspaper law to the whirl of haute cuisine that is sports law. Before I knew what had happened, I was a Vice-President of a large multinational company. In this, I was not alone, since everyone was a vice-president. And just like everyone else, I found a new temptation to keep me occupied. I became obsessed with just how fat I could get.
It was the share options wot done it, m’lord. There they were, dangling like a friendly, shiny sword of Damocles over my conscience. HQ, somewhere in Europe, had set up a London office, to work closely with the L.A office, which of course reported to Germany. Subsidiaries sprung up everywhere, all funded by the deal recently completed in Japan, or was it Mexico, which itself meant that vast swathes of new employees were needed. To get the best, they had to be incentivised. How could a mere salary be enough? The only way to sustain market pre-eminence was to introduce a share option scheme.
As a very important vice-president, I had a large hand in the drafting of the share option scheme. It did not for long remain an unprejudiced hand. Try as I might to retain my lawyer’s objectivity, I became more and more resentful as one 25-year-old graduate in the principles of Applied New Media and Negative Space was recruited after the next. All on absurd six figure salaries, and invariably for subsidiaries of the behemoth parent company which seemed to hand out funding for business plans carved onto the back of out-of-date PDAs. The ambitions were grandiose, the arrogance breathtaking. And the share option scheme meant that everyone would get rich, very, very quickly, for doing next-to-nothing, just so long as a VC fund put in a hefty wedge of capital, or, the holy grail, one of the subsidiaries floated.
Everyone, that is, except me. One of the CEOs had a peculiar hatred of lawyers, especially any as obviously grasping as him. Over beers at the end of a hard day wearing our respective new clothes, it was fine for him to tell me of his schemes for personal enrichment, a faster car, an overseas villa, more fat. But as a would-be Fat Cat Lawyer, any suggestion that I too wouldn’t mind the odd share option was taken apart in less time than it takes to down a Bacardi.
No doubt he had my best interests at heart. Being a Fat Cat Lawyer was a temporary aberration, never my destiny, and this wise and fat man, a perfect example of corporate excellence, could see straight through me. There was also, of course, the problem of perception. Fat Cat Lawyers don’t get where they are by being skittish in the sun. They are subtle, sly creatures, whose work is best done under cover of darkness. They know all the tricks of the trade, how to string everyone along and purr at just the right moment. They are, in truth, far more pernicious than the fat cat CEOs and managing directors currently under public scrutiny, who are mere dogs by comparison.
If you ever see one dozing in the midday sun, best give him a good kicking while you can. Trust me: it’s the only language they understand.
Pictured courtesy of pixel_unikat: a remarkably fat cat.
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Seven of the Best Alternative Professionals
August 30, 2010Susan Casey’s new book, The Wave, is soon to be published. It brilliantly illumines the world of professional big wave surfing, at the same time as exploring the phenomenon of rogue waves (specifically, those which top 100ft).
Suitably inspired, we thought we’d take a look at a different kind of professionalism than is usually to be found on these pages. Those featured in our magnificent seven of alternative professionals may not wear suits for a living, still less spend their time in the boardroom, but they couldn’t do what they do if they weren’t every bit as dedicated, focused, driven and downright professional as those at the helm of a City law firm, finance house or PR company.
Hamilton is the star of The Wave, and no wonder. Based on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, the man is a force of nature, a 6″3′ powerhouse who makes big wave surfing look like a walk in the park. But it isn’t. The wave known as Teahupoo, surfed by Hamilton in Tim McKenna’s picture below, is a killer. Only years of focus, training and preparation make Hamilton able to ride this wave with such aplomb.
2. Danny Way
Warning: do not watch this footage if you are afraid of heights (and squeamish). American skateboarding star Danny Way has been rebuilt more times than the bionic man. He’s also made a small fortune from a sport so often wrongly derided as ‘for kids’. Definitely not one for a suit and tie, Way nevertheless deserves respect – as much as he would appear to need a permanent personal medical staff.
3. Shane McConkey
Professional skier Shane McConkey died in March 2009 while skiing in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy. His death robbed the world of extreme sports of an athlete known for combining BASE jumping with skiing, as seen in such feats as skiing into a BASE jump off the Eiger. RIP.
4. Shaun White
There are those who say that White, snowboarder extraordinaire, has the kind of hair that is inimical to success. We say, like Forbes magazine, that if White earned $9 million from his endorsements in 2008 alone, what’s he worth now? We also say: don’t try what White does at home. Or anywhere, really.
If BMX riding is jejune, does it matter? Not to Macaskill, a man who’s worth a lot of money thanks to his remarkable ability on a bike.
6. Lynn Hill
There are rock climbers, and there’s Detroit-born Lynn Hill, the woman who made the first free ascent of the infamous Nose Route on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. Currently sponsored by the Patagonia gear and clothing company, Hill has done it all, taking phenomenal risks in the pursuit of her calling. Take a look at the intensity of her gaze: this woman would have been a genius at whatever she’d chosen to do.
She has the best name of any sportsperson, ever. She also looks pretty good, too, and is even better at her chosen discipline, wakeboarding. And discipline is the name of the game: as with everyone here, however outre their worlds, however extreme their sports, if they weren’t disciplined they’d not only be impoverished but also, quite possibly, dead. Respect.
- Written by Admin
- Filed under Communication
Hats off to the News of the World
August 30, 2010
Fantastic sting by the News of the World, whose legendary undercover reporter, Mazher Mahmood, has pierced the heart of some disgraceful match-fixing in professional cricket. Hats off, yet again, to Mahmood, but, strangely, we feel slightly sorry for him. Will he ever be able to retire into the sun and live a normal life? Somehow we rather doubt it.
Pictured: something which is decidedly not cricket.
- Written by Admin
- Filed under Communication, Legal Business
Judge Dread, truly dread
August 24, 2010
An Englishman’s home is his castle. This ancient tenet of English society means that when a burglar breaks into an Englishman’s home (or castle), the homeowner, or feudal Lord, is entitled to defy him. The tools of defiance are many and varied but include diplomacy (“isn’t it past your bedtime?”), wheedling (“please, my good fellow, won’t you go away?”), lies (“see that castle across the street? It’s full of gold bullion”) and weaponry (“is that a nuclear missile in my pocket, and why aren’t you terrified to see me?”).
This last, however, causes problems. When a homeowner, eager to defend his castle, shoots a burglar, all hell breaks loose. Tabloid hacks break out in sweats as they find themselves compelled to blame European laws and the politically correct for daring to wonder whether such force was necessary when, really, all that is in issue is whether shooting dead an intruder was proportionate to the perceived threat and context.
In the US, this question was recently answered in the affirmative by the excellently named Judge Carlisle Overstreet. The 65-year-old judge shot and killed an unarmed bandana-wearing burglar after the man broke into his home and started coming upstairs. According to the estimable Legal Blog Watch, the dead burglar, John Howard Jr. (who, says the Augusta Chronicle, delighted in the nickname ‘Killa’), was one of two men who broke into the judge’s house in the early hours of the morning. The other, William Omar Jacobs, turned himself in and was denied bail.
This sorry or inspirational tale begs a question. If it had happened here, would it be the first time in recorded history that a judge had killed a burglar? In fact, is this unprecedented across the pond, too? And more to the point, if anyone says the judge acted disproportionately and that he really shouldn’t be canonized, are they politically correct stooges from a morally abased, utterly bankrupt European superstate (or something like that: we confess that tabloidese eludes us)?
Pictured: a judge says “Clint Eastwood isn’t the only one who likes large handguns.” But note: she’s not Carlisle Overstreet.
- Written by Admin
- Filed under Communication, Legal Business
