It is nice -- it hit right at review season, so everyone who's got the forms to review me just got a firmwide email mentioning me as part of this team. And while you could make the case sound like I did in the post, it actually wasn't morally problematic at all, I didn't think.
Fuck "morally problematic," anyway. You did good work, and people know it. Excellent day for you.
certainly nothing morally problematic that 80 million in fees to the firm can't reconcile you to.
sure, maybe some of us in comments will nag and gnaw, attempting an internet emulation of conscience.
but even we can be made to see the moral unproblematicality of it, for, oh, just a few points on that 30%.
oh, and teasing aside--congratulations.
i hope the good work will receive its due notice.
it would be a real shame to spoil such a triumph by having one of those silly Internet things blow up where it looked like someone on the team was making a derogatory reference to the deal on a blog ... care.
You're right, I should be more careful. This would be a lousy moment to get fired for blogging.
LB's bosses and coworkers are banned!
Note that I never make even the most veiled reference to my dark masters.
YAY! LB fights for the man, and the man wins!!!
Seriously tho, congrats. Hope your hard work is rewarded with a megabonus that can fund your escape. If, you know, you want to escape.
12: Off topic, but when you actually listen to the words of that song, it's just a horrible situation. "Gosh, we're both cheating -- isn't that funny? Hee hee!"
Now you've done it, NCP. Prepare for 500 angry comments arguing about whether cheating is wrong.
Yeah, I figure the idea is that the 70's were really, really different in attitudes to that sort of thing. Or, of course, there's the rarely-sung final verse where they shoot each other, and reprise the chorus as they die.
"Gosh, we're both cheating -- isn't that funny? Hee hee!"
Even as a kid that struck me as an extremely unlikely thing to happen. No, Rupert hit his peak with "The Telephone Song" and it was all down hill from there.
in law school, my contracts prof used those lyrics to illustrate how both parties terms have to mirror each other.
which transformed it from a song i loathed, into a song i really, really loathed.
i mean, as bad as the lyrics are, the tune is just flatulent.
Rupert hit his peak with "The Telephone Song"
Wikipedia tells me this was actually called "Answering Machine." Anyway, Yay! 80 million dollars! Boo! Widows and orphans!
Congrats, LB, you disgusting human being.
it hit right at review season, so everyone who's got the forms to review me just got a firmwide email mentioning me as part of this team.
That sounds like perfect timing. Congratulations.
I was actually hanging out with a banker friend this weekend, and mentioned a perfectly normal tactical move in a litigation I'm working on -- stalling for time until my client can safely go bankrupt. And she was shocked by the immorality of it all. Leaving me thinking "Jesus, you're a private banker! This sort of machinations are news to you?"
I really need a somewhat more palatable profession.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the lyrics to "Escape," but it seems to me that he is tired of his lady, reads the ad, responds to the ad, and shows up to meet (surprise!) his own lady, and they have a rebirth of their relationship. Not cheating, right?
Congratulations. We've had a string of Unfogged successes: The Carp won an appeal. Di Kotimy got a case thrown out. LB wins big. Jeopardy appearances.
Go Team Unfogged!
24--
depends whether 'lady' = lawfully wedded wife, as sometimes does.
also the small question of whether he had informed lady of intention to seek female company elsewhere--not as though cheating impossible outside bounds of holy matrimony.
if your point is that there is some indeterminacy in the lyrics such that it might not be cheating, then i'm glad to say:
thank god i don't remember them well enough to perform the exegesis.
wretched song on any score.
24: No consummated cheating, but demonstrated intention to cheat on both parts.
26: Doesn't matter if he informed his lady, if she was the one to put the ad in the paper. They were both tired of each other, both thought they were cheating, and then discovered they were both hiding their secret desires from one another.
I guess this seems like the most likely exegesis to me, given not only the lyrics, but the pop-cultural time when they were written.
28--
i see--i had not considered the intention/consummation distinction that lb points out in 27.
to my old-fashioned mind, cheating need not wait for consummation; it has already occurred earlier, e.g. at the time of placing the ad.
Experiencing the presence of God is not central to Lutheran or Catholic Christianity, or to many forms of Calvinism. Ecstatic religion is always a threat to organized churches.
that's okay, j.e..
failing to experience jesus in your heart is just another form of cheating.
Yes, kid, and I agree that expressing intention to cheat is no good, but they found each other out in such a way that reveals the possibility for a rebirth of love through humping in the sand. Requisite happy ending!
stalling for time until my client can safely go bankrupt. And she was shocked by the immorality of it all.
See, that's *because* she's a banker. Stalling until you can go bankrupt is the only moral action, inasmuch as this whole debt/bankruptcy game is completely stacked in the banks' favor.
I assume that the client in question is some big corporation rather than some poor individual, but even so.
no ending can be happy that involves getting sand in your crotch.
to my old-fashioned way of thinking.
I'm tearing up as we speak. Heart-warming.
35 demonstrates the dry sandy void that is Kid Bitzer's romantic soul.
For my part, I do not like piña coladas, am so-so on getting caught in the rain. I am not into yoga, I'm reasonably intelligent, and while making love at midnight sounds great, the idea of "dunes" does not do much for me.
37
huh? that needed demonstrating?
14: Wait, there's debate about that?
Wait, there's debate about that?
Ah, the innocence of youth.
Kid Bitzer's romantic soul.
collective soul, right? Kid Bitzer is multiple people? Don't ruin my image.
Congrats! But what does it mean to safely go bankrupt? Isn't bankruptcy just generally bad, even for corporations?
- clueless associate
Way to go LB!! And very nicely timed.
I am always afraid someone will come over to my apartment right after I've been on Unfogged and see in my search toolbar things like "escape pina colada lyrics." Or something worse!
Isn't bankruptcy just generally bad, even for corporations?
No, bankruptcy can often be a useful way to avoid paying certain debts, such as damages awarded in a lawsuit. Especially for corporations.
45: "danger sex pabulum site:unfogged.com"
bankruptcy:
bad for little guy, good for big guy.
Sounds like Jimmy Buffet, with the pina coladas etc. One of my ex-supervisors got her whole philosophy of life from Jimmy Buffet. True story. She bought and read his books and pondered their wisdom.
Bankruptcy is always a good thing for the bankrupt if it's needed. Remaining solvent is better, but being in debt for the rest of your life, with the debt increasing every year, is a nightmare.
43: Bad for the entity that's actually going bankrupt, but through the miracle of limited liability, the natural persons who own an entity can often walk away from it after it's gone bankrupt with no harm done. That's where the 'stalling until you can safely go bankrupt' part comes in -- there are various time periods from the moment you declare bankruptcy where the bankruptcy court will look back and unwind transactions. In this case, we're trying to get a year from the last distribution before declaring, so the natural-person-clients can hold onto that money.
42 is wrong.
we are not multiple people.
we are simply written by multiple people.
(some of whom might have slightly less arid romantic souls
if they weren't squelched by others of us who
ooofff!
thump!
I was actually hanging out with a banker friend this weekend, and mentioned a perfectly normal tactical move in a litigation I'm working on -- stalling for time until my client can safely go bankrupt. And she was shocked by the immorality of it all. Leaving me thinking "Jesus, you're a private banker! This sort of machinations are news to you?"
I hate strategy.
See, I work in mortgages, where everyone is trying to avoid bankruptcy like crazy...
Ah, the innocence of youth.
More the self-righteousness of those raised by divorced parents in which one cheated and the other was emotionally damaged for several years. (Guess which one I lived with?)
Or youth. Whichever.
That's funny, I put "/moralizing" in a fake HTML tag and it made it disappear. I didn't know that could happen.
</moralizing> will produce </moralizing>.
54: I just meant that you apparently haven't been reading this site long enough to remember the huge argument we once had about this very issue.
Yeah, I thought that might have been what you meant, and I intended on asking for a link.
Goddamn. I retract my moral outrage, at the risk of starting that.
You can see why we try to avoid this issue.
we're trying to get a year from the last distribution before declaring, so the natural-person-clients can hold onto that money.
And their creditors, who they owe it to, won't get it? And they won't have to declare personal bankruptcy? Good deal, I need to start a corporation.
Limited liability -- the very foundation of our economy.
This thread feels a little too identifying to me. Like with Westlaw or PACER or whatever it wouldn't be hard to figure out exactly which deal this is talking about.
Highly recommended on the Rupert part of the thread:
"Bermuda Love Triangle" by Stew of The Negro Problem.
Takes it one step further.
64: Yeah, it was probably ill advised. See the archives for my general disgruntledness and ambivalence about getting fired.
35 demonstrates the dry sandy void that is Kid Bitzer's romantic soul.
"Romantic soul"? That's a new one on me.
62: One of the main things corporations are for ("limited liability").
63, 69: yeah, I know, in the abstract I know it quite well. But it's something to see how it plays out...I thought there were ways of "piercing the corporate veil" or however you lawyers refer to it so the actual people can't just walk away from a ton of debt. But I guess that's really hard to do.
People try to pierce the veil -- what I'm in the office for this weekend is writing a brief to oppose a motion made on that basis -- but it really is very difficult.
Limited liability is like the forgiveness of sins by grace. We Christians get away with more shit.
It's funny, one thing I've learned about human nature as a lawyer is how astonishingly trusting people are. I work on cases where people made agreements for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the basis of a handshake, or not even a handshake, every day, and of course they get screwed. I find it absolutely mystifying.
74 -- But that's because you've got a sampling problem: only the handshakes that go bad get all the way to you. What if only 1% of handshake agreements fail -- is it worth the expense of lawyers drawing up papers that'll never be needed?
72 -- Hah, me too. Mine's summary judgment, though.
Gentlemen can rely on each others' word, surely?
And not just the expense, the damage to the relationship often done by even suggesting the possibility papers might be needed. Easy to second guess when things go wrong, but a huge amount doesn't.
77: Possibly, but I'm talking about my clients.
75: I guess, but half the deals I see, everyone would have been better off with a contract they'd written themselves on a napkin.
And not just the expense, the damage to the relationship often done by even suggesting the possibility papers might be needed. Easy to second guess when things go wrong, but a huge amount doesn't.
This may just come from never having had enough money to take seriously myself, but while I agree that this is how people think, I just don't get it. Over a thousand bucks or so, or whatever your personal standard is for the amount of money you'd walk away from without thinking about it, how could anyone think of it as rude or untrusting to get responsibilities and expectations explicitly agreed upon in writing? I do not understand businesspeople at all.
Oh, me too, sister, but one thing I learned was to take what people thought, and what they thought they were doing, seriously. If I thought of something they hadn't, that was good, and what I was there for, but just as often they knew and just wanted to assume the risk.
This is a big story in the music biz, when someone signs over his business affairs to a good buddy. It even happened to Leonard Cohen and Billy Joel.
80: You're talking about business people, right? Not friends who lend friends some money? I think I'm on the other side: I have a hard time understanding what's hard to understand. You wouldn't want an explicit marriage contract that spelled out all expectations in minute detail, for example.
It even happened to Leonard Cohen and Billy Joel
Micky Hart had to leave the Dead for a while after his dad screwed them.
Over a thousand bucks or so, or whatever your personal standard is for the amount of money you'd walk away from without thinking about it, how could anyone think of it as rude or untrusting to get responsibilities and expectations explicitly agreed upon in writing?
So, LB, do you have a prenup?
You know, if my marriage broke up, the amount of money that I'd walk away from without thinking about it as important compared to the other issues gets right up there in the everything I own range. I don't think most people feel that way about real estate deals.
i think it's a tribute to your romantic soul, lb, that your sentence in 86 is almost completely incoherent.
Is it? I suppose so. I could also say things about the incoherence of pre-nup as applied to a marriage where neither party came in with any assets.
But mostly I'm kind of boggled by the comparison. I'm a general commercial litigator. The deals I'm talking about are supposed to be arms-length business deals; while every so often I run into something with family members or lifelong friends in a dispute, and those are guaranteed to be complicatedly awful, mostly the people doing handshake deals that I'm talking about are 'sophisticated' businesspeople dealing with strangers.
I think the incoherence stems purely from the length of the clause "amount of money that I'd walk away from without thinking about it as important compared to the other issues" and not from the meaning you're trying to convey.
Yeah, yeah, I take your point LB and you're almost certainly right on a personal level (that would be my attitude, and I'd rather marry someone who shared it...although this *would* be an interesting time for one of our divorce lawyers to chime in). My point was just that marriage is toward the extreme end of mixing relationship and contractual elements, but many business deals have relationship elements. It's obvious enouugh why pre-nups can be seen as rude or untrusting, because the relationship element is really preponderant there, but it's generally present in some way even in arms-length cases. I mean, I'm sure you're right that people should get over that, but I can understand why sometimes they don't.
And also, it's very possible to think of ways to contract around future issues even in cases where people enter a marriage with no tangible assets (e.g. your JD was an asset), but people don't do it for good reason (it's rude and untrusting!). Pre-nups are saved for cases of extreme financial discrepancies coming in. Like Paul McCartney should have had one.
Does a nuptial agreement have to be pre-nuptial?
As LB mentions, most couples in an objective reality get married before they have any net worth, making it guesswork as to what will eventually need to be divided up when the unthinkable happens.
The conventional answer is that pre-nups are for second marriages, particularly to protect the rights and inheritances of the children. And because 2nds occur later in life, with established lives instead of prospective lives to make together. And just because.
Didn't have a JD. (although I take your point -- I had a year of law school under my belt, and was clearly going to have a JD).
And of course there are circumstances where even in a business relationship, the relationship is going to get in the way of business formalities. I'm just continually amazed by how often it happens, and under what you'd think would be totally arms-length circumstances.
OK, all is comity, but what I really want to know is...how do I start a corporation, do some heavily leveraged investments, and then walk away from the debt if the investment goes south?
88, 89--
sure, i just meant syntactically. the sentiment was crystal clear:
who cares about money
if i've lost my honey?
without my joe,
i wouldn't care for dough
there's only one buck
for which i'd give a darn.
Marriage is an explicitly defined legal relationship. The purpose of a pre-nup is to override that contract, not to institute a contract where there otherwise would be none.
Getting married - "making it legal," as they say - is at least partly the result of a desire to enter into precisely the sort of arrangement that LB recommends for businesspersons.
.how do I start a corporation, do some heavily leveraged investments, and then walk away from the debt if the investment goes south?
Just remember, your corporation has rights as an individual. If everything goes wrong, the corporation is responsible. Not you.
I had a year of law school under my belt.
Girls don't have things under their belt. That's why they're girls. "I had a year of law school on my chest" would have been OK.
Corporations have rights, and also feelings. You think that they can't be hurt, but some of the hateful things people say just crush them.
OK, all is comity, but what I really want to know is...how do I start a corporation, do some heavily leveraged investments, and then walk away from the debt if the investment goes south?
Pretty much just like that. Of course, if the corporation has no assets or cash flow to back the margin loans, the lenders will make you personally guarantee the corporation's debt to prevent this from happening.
If you give the corporation assets to make it look creditworthy, and then once you borrow the money give those assets back to yourself, the lenders may try to force the corporation into bankruptcy and make you give the assets back. In which case you'll need to hire LB to drag it out long enough to prevent them from doing this.
Girls don't have things under their belt. That's why they're girls.
Suddenly, I understand the 'no relationship policy'.
Thanks, Jake! I have to say though, it sounds almost as difficult as having a real job. Although I'm sure the pay would be better.
What if only 1% of handshake agreements fail -- is it worth the expense of lawyers drawing up papers that'll never be needed?
Charley is just messing with you guys. He wants more screwed up deals so we have more work.
If the deal goes well, you do not care whether it is a handshake deal or a 200 page contract.
You only care when the deal goes bad.
The importance of a good agreement, be it commercial or personal, is to spell out expectations.
Think of it as assumption of the risk. Everyone knows what the deal is if things go bad and can make decisions accordingly.
In my view, prenups are simply just an important part of spelling out expectations.
But, they are serious documents, not "boiler-plate" agreements. I have seen a number of divorces where one party forgot about a pre-nup and made some really bad decisions.
They can be particularlly important if one party is giving up a career or is involved in a family business.
The problem with prenups, I would assume, is that while otoh I'm all for spelling out expectations, otoh it has been my experience that guess what, things don't always work out in the way that people plan, and you have to be able to be flexible and fucking realize that life isn't so much following a blueprint as it is making it up while you go along.
What B said, except she didn't spell it out. I'm against prenups, of course, basically because I'm against nups.
otoh ... otoh ...
Since I prefer not to have the same abbreviation stand for different things in the same unit, I choose to interpret this as a freestanding word which can be repeated, like aut ... aut ... and et ... et ... in Latin or nor ... nor ... in English.
Since I don't give a shit about Ben's pedantic hangups, I used otoh/otoh knowing that people are perfectly smart enough to translate appropriately.
Apparently "aut ... aut ... " can be used in Italian as well as Latin, and in fact the title in Italian of Enten/Eller in that language is Aut/Aut.
I see that my 106 has been grievously misunderstood.
guess what, things don't always work out in the way that people plan, and you have to be able to be flexible
Funnily enough, this happens in business relationships as well. Right now, someone in LB's firm is discounting a bill for reason X that isn't covered by the agreement with the client.
B is absolutely correct. Sometimes you need to modify documents or make new ones.
The same thing is true with Wills and Trusts. Sometimes, a child (for example my son) might not be kissing your ass as much as he should. You need to be willing to go back and reduce his share of your estate.
Oh, and flexibility is fabulous if both people have it. It is funny how, in business or in personal relationships, only one side wants to be flexible.
111: Yeah, that's an obvious answer, but I doubt people actually do that shit. We wrote wills ages ago and I don't think we've updated the things at all. And yes, we suck. We're also underinsured.
It really isnt hard to update Wills or other documents. But it is like everything else. It takes a willingness to get up off your butt.
A lot of people are underinsured, despite life insurance and umbrella policies being relatively cheap.
Gotta have an umbrella.
You could always use otoh,otth or otoh:otgh.
You should have a nice thick binder to put your successive prenups, nups, postnups, and wills into, and timestamp each one.
115: Right, I'll get up off my butt and do all that shit while I'm also getting up off my butt and quitting smoking and volunteering in the school and applying for mortgage loans and all the other crap. Break me a give, Mr. Libertarian.
Emerson:
Dont forget partnership agreements. Gays and heterosexual couples actually have it worse. If they live together, they really should have an agreement. Unless they are going to get along when they decide that they hate each other.
(I did talk to the insurance folks the other day and have 'em send me a ton of info about different policies and expanding our coverage, blah blah, though, so there.)
You email your lawyer and you write, "Please change this_______. If there is a reason not to change this, please let me know. When can I come in to sign it?"
This is the simplest of the things you list. Quitting smoking = hard. Applying for a mortgage = hard.
volunteering in school = relatively easy.
Good for you. Get quotes for several people. Life insurance is dirt cheap right now. So are umbrella policies.
121: Oh, sure, if you have a 'your lawyer'. I am a lawyer and I don't have a 'my lawyer' -- we've got wills I wrote, figuring that the only important thing is who gets the kids if we both get killed in the same accident.
How about if you are both unconcious?? Advanced Medical Directives? Powers of Attorney???
Come on, Mrs. Lawyer, get on it.
You cannot tell me that you do not have a law school classmate that you can call.
122: Nah, I'm not gonna compare quotes. I love our insurance company. LOVE them.
And yeah, I don't have a lawyer either. We had our wills done when Mr. B. was in the military b/c they had free lawyers n shit. I should probably get one of those "make your own will" forms or something.
124: Yeah, yeah, but what if--even though you find your parents Very Difficult People--you nonetheless trust that they're not gonna do anything you'd be rolling over in your grave about if the worst happens?
I dont understand what you are saying. Your parents do not automatically get to make those decisions for you. In many states, you have to go to court (and spend lots of money) to get someone appointed.
I really can't think of anyone who does that sort of thing. A prior firm I worked at gave lawyers free wills from their Trusts & Estates dep't as a benefit, but not this place. I'd have to just find myself someone reputable but in my price range, and I haven't done it. And of course for people who aren't lawyers, it's not trivial at all.
If we're both in comas somewhere, and my folks are in state, presumably they'd be the ones most likely to make decisions.
Of course, my mother in law is a freaky Catholic, so I suppose that could be kind of an "issue."
It's more of will drumming up business. My parents both have people they consider "my lawyer" now - and they are the lawyers that handled their divorce. In both cases it was the first time either one of them had personally needed the services of a lawyer.
Wills are just not that complicated anymore since the estate tax issue. You need more than Will-in-a-box, but not much.
I dont think you need to have a lawyer "on retainer."
But, if you want to change your will, you call the lawyer who wrote it for you. It is simple to change it. That is all I meant.
If it's that easy, why don't you write me a will, Will? Thanks!
I'll deal with my coma when I get to it.
Yeah, the lawyer who wrote our wills is up in Washington state. Bah.
But fine, I'll probably sit around and write my own damn will sometime soon now that you've nagged me about it.
It isnt hard. Put everything in trust for PK until he is 30. Decide who the trustee will be, the substitute trustee, executor, substitute executor.
Of course, whatever state you are in is probably somewhat different from VA.
I work on cases where people made agreements for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the basis of a handshake,
I recently had someone try to hire me for a freelance design job for which I quoted a couple of thousand dollars. When I told her I wanted her to sign a letter of intent she got all nervous and affronted. She asked if she could see "a few drawings" of logo designs to see if my work would meet her expectations, to which I replied, in sum, "Bitch, that's the hard part!"
We didn't do business. I could have used the money, but by the end of our discussion I was sure I would never have gotten it anyway.
And this is why I work for the Man. Because he just hands you a check every month.
I forget where I saw it now, but a paean to capitalist virtue that I read once gave the example of trade between Britain and Europe during the Napoleonic war. Despite Napoleon's economic boycott a great deal of trade went on, but no contracts could be legally enforced. Supposedly they were always honoured regardless, because the trading partners expected to have a continuing relationship, and couldn't afford to let each other down.
People who believed this might regard lawyers as an unnecessary encumbrance on business.
I didn't mean 75 to be advocacy of handshake over a writing. Only as explanation.
I've had to tell people that the verbal guarantee they counted on isn't enforceable. No way. Since when? 1677.