ABA Section of Business Law
ABA Section of Business Law
Business Law Today
July/August 1999
Snap Judgments
What? Forget e-mail?
Come on, it’s the ’90s. Paper shredding is so passe.
Today’s businesses no longer deal with heaps of paper scraps. As e-mail continues its reign, execs are simply hitting the delete button for privacy.
According to a New York Times article, many companies are calling on employees to purge all e-mails that are not necessary for legal records. In fact, bookseller Amazon.com has gone so far as to discourage some messages from even being written. "Quite simply put, there are some communications that should not be expressed in the written form," a recent company memo said.
The chill in cyberspace comes from the not-so-user-friendly impact that e-mail messages have had in Microsoft’s run-in with the Justice Department. Since lawyers are now asking for e-mail as part of discovery, companies are busy dumping anything that can and will be used against them. But even deleting may not protect the 83 million Americans who now use e-mail at work. Some programs save messages on a server so that even after a message has been zapped from a desktop, it’s lingering somewhere in the network and can be easily tracked down.
To calm some of this e-mail anxiety, a senior research analyst at the Gartner Group consulting firm suggests that companies set simple guidelines on what is appropriate regarding e-mail.
Sonny, where are you . . .
Even as Gen. Colin Powell continues to urge Americans to do more volunteer work, pro bono for many in-house lawyers means little more than liking old Sonny and Cher songs.
According to the American Corporate Counsel Association, only 38 percent of corporate lawyers did pro bono work in 1997. The ACCA says in-housers face a "unique set of obstacles," including a corporate culture that doesn’t value pro bono work.
To encourage corporate lawyers to change their me-first ways, ACCA has started giving awards to companies who do pro bono work. The group also held an on-site clinic at its annual meeting to give lawyers the chance to provide legal aid for seniors.
For all the support ACCA has given corporate lawyers, we can almost hear its newly motivated members closing out the annual meeting with a rousing rendition of "I’ve Got You, Babe."
Loosen up or lose out
Dressing for success for today’s lawyers has taken on some interesting twists. No longer slaves to suits, lawyers are trying hard to match their attire to their clients’ style.
While a Wall Street Journal article indicated that West Coast lawyers have mastered the finer points of dressing down, some East Coasters are afraid to break with tradition and venture into the unknown universe of "casual" and "business casual."
Firms looking to do business in Silicon Valley, though, need to loosen up or they will end up missing out on big business, the article said.
"Traditional stuffed-shirt lawyers in suits don’t cut it in the Valley," said Tower Snow, a lawyer whose firm represents San Jose’s Cisco Systems. "We dress casually because our clients prefer it."
Back East, however, many lawyers continue to turn up their delicate noses at the notion of retreating from time-honored civility. However, they have no problem allowing their less couth counterparts in their Northern California offices from rolling up their sleeves and dressing like the natives.
Despite their "When in Silicon Valley" mentality, it’s probably not too hard to pick out the East Coast transplants. Just look for the lawyer in pressed khakis and starched button-down.
What boom?
The current economic boom may actually be a bust for large public businesses as more file for bankruptcy amid a much-touted era of prosperity.
According to a Cornell University professor who specializes in bankruptcy law, more businesses with assets in excess of $200 million turned to Chapter 11 in 1998 than did the year before. In fact, except for 1991 — ironically dubbed the bankruptcy boom by the folks at Cornell — no other year has seen as many high-dollar companies throw in the towel.
Even more intriguing is the fact that half of 1998’s bankruptcies were filed in Delaware. Once known simply as the first state, it’s become the last stop for businesses on the way out. Experts attribute Delaware’s stronghold on bankruptcy claims to the state’s corporation-friendly bankruptcy laws. Professor Lynn LoPucki’s study gave further insight into the increase in bankruptcies by attributing companies’ failures to high ratios of debt to revenue.
We don’t mean to brag, but we had a hunch that debt had something to do with a company’s going belly up. Delaware we would never have guessed, but then that’s what academia is for.
Kids are us?
If you’ve always dreamed of combining the hassle of business travel with the exhaustion of family vacations, you’ll be glad to hear that an increasing number of people are doing just that and bringing the kids on work-related excursions.
The number of children tagging along on business trips has risen 230 percent in the last 10 years, with more than 24 million business trips including children, the Los Angeles Times reports.
According to the article, reasons for the tagalongs range from money to a lack of child care.
"I couldn’t have afforded to take my daughter to Disney World otherwise," said an administrative assistant at a convention in Orlando. In fact, many companies and organizations are starting to take a more family-friendly approach to business travel by providing child care at convention centers and hotels.
While these day-care services help businesses get work done even with babies on board, it’s not entirely clear if these new programs are the result of tantrums thrown by traveling children or by their overloaded parents.
Smilin’ associates
In what may be a new take on the ol’ bait and switch, firms are offering stunned associates plenty of perks to stick around.
No longer saddled with the injustice of a life of hard work for high pay, associates are receiving bonus money, time off and trips abroad to entice them to stay longer with the firm, the Wall Street Journal reports.
New York’s Shearman & Sterling, for one, is sending associates to Europe, giving them time off to learn a foreign language and paying juicy bonuses to those who stay with the firm another year. Associates traditionally leave firms quickly, with a quarter of them leaving each year. According to the National Association for Law Placement, three quarters are out the door within seven years.
By keeping associates around longer, firms can rack up more billable hours at senior associate rates and everyone knows what that means — more spending money for next year’s sabbatical in Paris!
An ounce of prevention?
It may seem like another bad infomercial — "Brett Merl is not just the founder of the Legal Club of America, he’s a member too!" — but this network of 6,500 lawyers across the country says it’s changing the way Americans use legal services.
The club, founded by Merl in 1993, provides card-carrying members (who pay a "low" annual fee) a range of free and discounted legal services from pre-qualified lawyers. In fact, club members pay only $210 for a simple divorce — a bargain indeed. Upon joining, members are referred to an affiliated area lawyer whom they can consult for free regarding new legal matters. Seizing on popular lingo, Merl considers the club "preventive medicine for the legal industry."
"If an attorney is consulted for even simple transactions, the time and cost of future legal proceedings can be avoided," Merl said.
Of course this mixed medical metaphor does raise certain questions about how the club would handle malpractice claims.
— Heather Brewer
