Contract Lawyer Quotes

Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

Before I could answer, there was a soft knock on the door. I turned to see an auburn-haired, green-eyed, freckle-faced young woman walk in. Her hair was a mass of soft curls and she wore no makeup. My first impression was to describe her as a plain-Jane. On closer inspection, hers was a strong and unique face. She dressed in slacks, silk blouse, and no visible jewelry. All of which, to me, indicated serene confidence. Her green eyes were piercing with almost a wild look to them. She handed the contract copies to the lawyer.

Why should love require a contract? Why put yourself into the clutches of the state and give it power over you? Why invite lawyers to fuck around with your assets? Marriage is for the immature and the insecure and the ignorant. We who see through such institutions should be content to live together without legal coercion.

To put it another way, every love relationship is based upon unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love. On the one hand, they are living a sort of dream; on the other, without realizing it, they are drawing up the fine print of their contracts like the most hard-nosed of lawyers. O lovers! Be wary during those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!

As my lawyer dad would say, I had breached a contract with the devil.

A word now about the bar exam: It's a necessary chore, a rite of passage for any just-hatched lawyer wishing to practice, and though the content and structure of the test itself vary somewhat from state to state, the experience of taking it - a two-day, twelve-hour exam meant to prove your knowledge of everything from contract law to arcane rules about secured transactions - is pretty much universally recognized as hellish.

On the second floor was the office in which Houston pounded an ancient typewriter with two fingers, always setting an example of unceasing hard work for his admiring students. They had no hint of the fact that their hard-driving dean had contracted tuberculosis while serving as a GI in France in Word War I. Houstan always seemed vibrant and impassioned in the chase for justice as he tried to expose his students to everything relating to the law that might give them an advantage. . . . "I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston," Marshal told me. "I saw this man's dedication, his vision, his willingness to sacrifice, and I told myself, 'You either shape up or ship out.' When you are being challenged by a great human being, you know that you can't ship out." So Houston rescued Marshall and launched him into a career as one of the greatest lawyers in American history.

A world without love is a world governed by rigid contracts and inexorable duties, a world in which – God forbid! – the lawyers run everything. The mark of really loving someone or something is unconditionality and excess, engagement and commitment, fire and passion.

Nowadays… deals are transactional rather than personal. Instead of placing your faith in a person, you get lawyers to write safeguards into the contract. This is an historic shift from a trust economy to a risk economy. But trust is not a dispensable luxury. It is the very basis of our social life. Many scholars believe that capitalism had religious roots because people could trust other people who, feeling that they were answerable to God, could be relied on to be honest in business. A world without trust is a lonely and dangerous place.

lawyers. An error at the hour of signing a big contract, or negotiating an acquisition, could easily cost you millions, or be the deciding factor between summers in Ibiza with your model girlfriend or taking a consolation-prize job as product manager at Oracle instead (look,

How are the lawyers going to draft that clause of the contract?  Jason must provide Robert with epic battle footage?

Now she looks like a hapless stay-at-home mother, which is what she is, rather than the competent, respected, well-paid contract lawyer she previously was, and will be again, very soon, once her children start school, which people assure her will happen in the “blink of an eye.” The days are long but the years are short, her mother says. This will apparently make sense to her one day.

June 5: Eunice Murray calls the studio to report Marilyn is ill, and Dr. Lee Siegel is dispatched to her home. He discovers that she is suffering from sinusitis and has a temperature of 102 degrees. Marilyn’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, receives a letter stating Fox’s intention to sue for breach of contract. June

On New Year’s Eve of 1976, Trump proposed to Ivana, later presenting her with a three-carat Tiffany diamond ring. But before there could be a wedding, less than a year after they met, there was the prenup—ultimately, as many as four or five contracts. The negotiations between Trump and Ivana—Roy Cohn urged Donald to begin married life with codified financial arrangements—followed a pattern that came to define Trumpism: boasts of wealth and influence, a highly public airing of grievances, and dramatic battles staged in gossip columns and courtrooms. The marriage would start—and later explode—to the accompaniment of lawyers.

The Canonization" For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout, With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his honor, or his grace, Or the king's real, or his stampèd face Contemplate; what you will, approve, So you will let me love. Alas, alas, who's injured by my love? What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned? Who says my tears have overflowed his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove? When did the heats which my veins fill Add one more to the plaguy bill? Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still Litigious men, which quarrels move, Though she and I do love. Call us what you will, we are made such by love; Call her one, me another fly, We're tapers too, and at our own cost die, And we in us find the eagle and the dove. The phœnix riddle hath more wit By us; we two being one, are it. So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit. We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love. We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no piece of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs, And by these hymns, all shall approve Us canonized for Love. And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love Made one another's hermitage; You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage; Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove Into the glasses of your eyes (So made such mirrors, and such spies, That they did all to you epitomize) Countries, towns, courts: beg from above A pattern of your love!

There is no substitute for due diligence. To this day, my father reads every lease our firm enters into. Before any building acquisition, every single lease must be reviewed. Yes, there are lawyers involved and that is technically their job, but he believes—and I do, too—that there is nothing like knowing the full story of a property, right down to the basic maintenance contracts.

The land was torn apart in a legal dispute. Soon it was so devastated, nothing could live here- not plant or animal. Only lawyers. But eventually the place fell into lawlessness, and lawyers can't exist in an area of lawlessness, so they went feral. Some say they still roam the land. You'll suddenly hear someone yell, 'Objection!' and then you'll be torn apart like an improperly witnessed contract.

I don't understand why anybody old enough to know the score ever gets married, anyway. Why should love require a contract? Why put yourself into the clutches of the state and give it power over you? Why invite lawyers to fuck around with your assets? Marriage is for the immature and the insecure and the ignorant. We who see through such institutions should be content to live together without legal coercion

Ironically, Jericho could have left sooner than he did: “Even though I’d been working in WCW for over a year I had never signed my contract. I wasn’t holding out for more money or having a legal disagreement, I simply never put the pen to the paper and returned the contract to WCW’s lawyers. Nobody seemed to realize it and I decided to see how long I could go without signing. It was astonishing that no one in the office had ever followed up with me about it, but this was the same company that once sent me a FedEx with nothing inside, so it wasn’t too hard to believe.”18

Man is born free but is everywhere in chains,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects. They took the issue of human bondage to the sovereign parlement courts of France—and won, in nearly every case, liberty for their black and mixed-race clients. The infuriated Louis XV found his hands tied. The phrase “absolute monarchy” is misleading: Ancien Régime France was a state of laws, of ancient precedents, where the spark of enlightened reason could and occasionally did ignite great things.

What it demands next - again, like many trades - is the ability to see the problem before you ... and then, just as immediately, the rat's tail of problems that might follow. Much the way that, for a contractor, a house is not just a structure - it's a snarl of pipes engorging with ice in the winter, of shingles swelling with humidity in the summer, or rain gutters belching up fountains of water in the spring, of cement splitting in the first autumn cold - so too is a house something else for a lawyer. A house is a locked safe full of contracts, of liens, of future lawsuits, of possible violations: it represents potential attacks on your property, on your goods, on your person, on your privacy.

Bob Cavallo remembers early on in the process, ‘We were at odds with each other. Our contract was up; five years had gone by since Purple Rain. We met at the Four Seasons with his lawyer and his accountant, me and Steve Fargnoli to discuss some kind of rapprochement because he had fired us. Basically he said, “I’ll work with you again but you’ve got to help me make this movie.” I read the treatment and said, “This could be an interesting thing,” and I said, “I’ll try to put you together with some young hip writers and maybe we can come up with a script quickly, ’cause this is pretty detailed.” And he went, “What are you talking about? That is the script.” It was thirty pages. And he said, “I’m going to shoot it, I know exactly how to do it.” So I said, “Maybe we could get this on Broadway for you. Would you be interested in that?” And he said, “No.” Now he was pissed that I didn’t think this was a good enough script, so we shook hands and that was the end of it. Then, about a year later, we were suing each other. But even when we sued each other, it was kinda funny. I said, “How could you not pay me?” He said, “How could you sue me?” He said, “You can’t have my children, those songs. You’re gonna give your involvement in those songs to your grandchildren?” And I said, “Yeah, I put ten years of my life into you, and you sucked all the air out of the room. I couldn’t really manage anybody else except for your friends.

The thing many people don’t realize about corporate lawyers is that they are nothing like what you see on TV shows. Sherry, Aldridge, and I will never step foot in a courtroom. We’ll never argue a case. We do deals; we’re not litigators. We prepare documents and review every piece of paperwork for a merger or an acquisition. Or to take a company public. On Suits, Harvey does both paperwork and crushes it in court. In reality, the lawyers at our firm who argue cases don’t have a clue what we do in these conference rooms. Most of them haven’t prepared a document in a decade. People think our form of corporate law is the less ambitious of the two, and while in many ways it’s less glamorous—no closing arguments, no media interviews—nothing compares to the power of the paper. At the end of the day, law comes down to what is written, and we do the writing. I love the order of deal making, the clarity of language—how there is little room for interpretation and none for error. I love the black-and-white terms. I love that in the final stages of closing a deal—particularly those of the magnitude Wachtell takes on—seemingly insurmountable obstacles arise. Apocalyptic scenarios, disagreements, and details that threaten to topple it all. It seems impossible we’ll ever get both parties on the same page, but somehow we do. Somehow, contracts get agreed upon and signed. Somehow, deals get done. And when it finally happens, it’s exhilarating. Better than any day in court. It’s written. Binding. Anyone can bend a judge’s or jury’s will with bravado, but to do it on paper—in black and white—that takes a particular kind of artistry. It’s truth in poetry. I

Socrates chose to drink hemlock rather than to follow morality in contravention of Athen's laws. As depicted in Plato's Crito dialogue, Socrates had been convicted by a jury of 500 Athenians of impiety and of corrupting the young. He was sentenced to die by drinking hemlock. His friend Crito tried to convince him to escape rather than to accept the immoral judgement of the Athenian state (Socrates had not corrupted the young but educated them.) Socrates responded by pointing out that he had lived in Athens as an Athenian citizen, accepting all of the benefits of its government and laws. On this basis, he had a type of "Social Contract" obligation to continue to accept the Athen's laws and legal judgement. He saw this as a moral obligation, even if the judgment at hand was itself immoral. Thus, for Socrates, and Plato, the law has its own morality, even when its results are immoral.

The weight room is empty except for Peter. He’s at the bench press, lifting weights. When he sees me, he smiles. “Are you here to spot me?” He sits up and wipes sweat off his face with the collar of his T-shirt. My heart squeezes painfully. “I’m here to break up. To fake break up, I mean.” Peter does a double take. “Wait. What?” “There’s no need to keep it going. You got what you wanted, right? You saved face, and so did I. I talked to Josh, and everything’s back to normal with us again. And my sister will be home soon. So…mission accomplished.” Slowly he nods. “Yeah, I guess.” My heart is breaking even as I smile. “So okay, then.” With a flourish I whip our contract out of my bag. “Null and void. Both parties have hereby fulfilled their obligations to each other in perpetuity.” I’m just rattling off lawyer words. “You carry that around with you?” “Of course! Kitty’s such a snoop. She’d find it in two seconds.” I hold up the piece of paper, poised to rip it in half, but Peter grabs it from me. “Wait! What about the ski trip?” “What about it?” “You’re still coming, right?” I hadn’t thought of that. The only reason I was going to go was for Peter. I can’t go now. I can’t be a witness to Peter and Genevieve’s reunion, I just can’t. I want them to come back from the trip magically together again, and it will be like this whole thing was just something I dreamed up. “I’m not going to go.” His eyes widen. “Come on, Covey! Don’t bail on me now. We already signed up and gave the deposits and everything. Let’s just go, and have that be our final hurrah.” When I start to protest, Peter shakes his head. “You’re going, so take this contract back.” Peter refolds it and carefully puts it back in my bag. Why is it so hard to say no to him? Is this what it’s like to be in love with somebody?

3. Serving Two Masters Derrick Bell has pointed out a third structure that impedes reform, this time in law. To litigate a law-reform case, the lawyer needs a flesh-and-blood client. One might wish to establish the right of poor consumers to rescind a sales contract or to challenge the legal fiction that a school district is desegregated if the authorities have arranged that the makeup of certain schools is half black and half Chicano (as some of them did in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education). Suppose, however, that the client and his or her community do not want the very same remedy that the lawyer does. The lawyer, who may represent a civil rights or public interest organization, may want a sweeping decree that names a new evil and declares it contrary to constitutional principles. He or she may be willing to gamble and risk all. The client, however, may want something different—better schools or more money for the ones in his or her neighborhood.

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

Strauss finally had Oppenheimer exactly where he wanted him. Yet Oppie seems to have reacted calmly to the news, politely asking all the right questions, trying to explore his options. Thirty-five minutes after entering Strauss’ office, Oppenheimer rose to leave, telling Strauss that he was going to consult with Herb Marks. Strauss offered him the use of his chauffeur-driven Cadillac and Oppenheimer—distraught (outward appearances to the contrary)—foolishly accepted. But instead of going to Marks’ office, he directed the driver to the law offices of Joe Volpe, the former counsel to the AEC who together with Marks had given him legal advice during the Weinberg trial. Soon afterwards, Marks joined them and the three men spent an hour weighing Robert’s options. A hidden microphone recorded their deliberations. Anticipating that Oppenheimer would consult with Volpe, and unconcerned about violating the legal sanctity of client-lawyer privilege, Strauss had arranged in advance for Volpe’s office to be bugged.20 The hidden microphones in Volpe’s office allowed Strauss, through the transcripts provided to him, to monitor the discussion as to whether Oppenheimer ought to terminate his consulting contract or fight the charges in a formal hearing. Oppie was clearly undecided and anguished. Late that afternoon, Anne Wilson Marks came by and drove her husband and Robert back to their Georgetown home. On the way, Oppenheimer said, “I can’t believe what is happening to me.” That evening, Robert took the train back to Princeton to consult with Kitty.

sighed. “I can’t say that you weren’t expected.” “I’m just going to be walking around here and taking some measurements. It says here… you own eighty acres? That is one of the most gorgeous mansions I have ever seen,” he rambled on. “It must have cost you millions. I could never afford such a beauty. Well, heck, for that matter I couldn’t afford the millions of dollars in taxes a house like this would assess, let alone such a pricey property. Do you have an accountant?” Zo opened her mouth to respond, but he continued, “For an estate this size, I would definitely have one.” “I do have an accountant,” she cut in, with frustration. “Furthermore, I have invested a lot of money bringing this mansion up to speed. You can see my investment is great.” “Of course, it would be. The fact of the matter is, Mrs. Kane, a lot of people are in over their heads in property. You still have to pay up, or we take the place. Well, I’ll get busy now. Pay no mind to me.” He walked on, taking notes. “Clairrrrre!” Zo called as soon as she entered the house. “Bring your cell phone!” Two worry-filled months went by and many calls were made to lawyers, before Zoey finally picked one that made her feel confident. And then the letter came with the totals and the due date. “There is no way we can pay this, Mom, even if we sold off some of our treasures, because a lot of them are contracted to museums anyway. I am feeling awfully poor all of a sudden, and insecure.” “Yes, and I did some research, thinking I’d be forced to sell. It’s unlikely that anyone else around here can afford this place. It looks like they are going to get it all; they aren’t just charging for this year. What we have here is a value about equal to a little country. And all the new construction sites for housing developments suddenly popping up on this side of the river, does not help. Value is going up.” Zo put her head in her hands. “Ohhh, oh, oh, oh!” “Yeah, bring out the ice-cream and cake. I need comforting,” sighed Claire. The cell phone rang. “Yes, tonight? You guys have become pretty good to us, haven’t you?! You know, Bob, Mom and I thought we were just going to pig out on ice cream and cake. We found out we are losing this estate and are going to be poor again and we are bummed out.” There was a long pause. “No, that’s okay, I understand. Yeah, okay, bye.” “Well?” Zo ask dryly. “He was appropriately sorry, and he got off the phone fast, saying he remembered he had other business to take care of. Do you want to cry? I do…” “I’ll get the cake and dish the ice cream. You make our tea and we’ll cry together.” A pitter patter began to drum on the window. “Rain again. It seems softer though, dear.” “I thought you said this was going to be a softer rain!” It started to pour. “At least this is not a thunder storm… What was that?” “Thunder,” replied Claire, unmoved and resigned. An hour had gone by when there was a rapping at the door. “People rarely use the doorbell, ever notice that?” Zo asked on the way to the door. She opened it to reveal two wet guys holding a pizza, salad, soft drink, and giant chocolate chip cookies in a plastic container. In a plastic

Was this luck, or was it more than that? Proving skill is difficult in venture investing because, as we have seen, it hinges on subjective judgment calls rather than objective or quantifiable metrics. If a distressed-debt hedge fund hires analysts and lawyers to scrutinize a bankrupt firm, it can learn precisely which bond is backed by which piece of collateral, and it can foresee how the bankruptcy judge is likely to rule; its profits are not lucky. Likewise, if an algorithmic hedge fund hires astrophysicists to look for patterns in markets, it may discover statistical signals that are reliably profitable. But when Perkins backed Tandem and Genentech, or when Valentine backed Atari, they could not muster the same certainty. They were investing in human founders with human combinations of brilliance and weakness. They were dealing with products and manufacturing processes that were untested and complex; they faced competitors whose behaviors could not be forecast; they were investing over long horizons. In consequence, quantifiable risks were multiplied by unquantifiable uncertainties; there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns; the bracing unpredictability of life could not be masked by neat financial models. Of course, in this environment, luck played its part. Kleiner Perkins lost money on six of the fourteen investments in its first fund. Its methods were not as fail-safe as Tandem’s computers. But Perkins and Valentine were not merely lucky. Just as Arthur Rock embraced methods and attitudes that put him ahead of ARD and the Small Business Investment Companies in the 1960s, so the leading figures of the 1970s had an edge over their competitors. Perkins and Valentine had been managers at leading Valley companies; they knew how to be hands-on; and their contributions to the success of their portfolio companies were obvious. It was Perkins who brought in the early consultants to eliminate the white-hot risks at Tandem, and Perkins who pressed Swanson to contract Genentech’s research out to existing laboratories. Similarly, it was Valentine who drove Atari to focus on Home Pong and to ally itself with Sears, and Valentine who arranged for Warner Communications to buy the company. Early risk elimination plus stage-by-stage financing worked wonders for all three companies. Skeptical observers have sometimes asked whether venture capitalists create innovation or whether they merely show up for it. In the case of Don Valentine and Tom Perkins, there was not much passive showing up. By force of character and intellect, they stamped their will on their portfolio companies.