A new blog, Legal
Ethics + Legal Technology, put together
by Ben Cowgill, has invited guest
authors, including
me, to post their thoughts this week, on issues related
to professional ethics. While I have often said
that "Adam Smith, Esq." is all about economics and pointedly
not about ethics, I realized there could be convergence
of the two in a drastically unhappy situation (yes, think
worse than Brobeck or Finley-Kumble). This was
my post:
Just when you thought it was safe again (Enron, Tyco,
and WorldCom are so yesterday, and Sarbanes-Oxley is,
for better or worse, firmly part of the gestalt), AIG,
one of the Dow 30, blows
up. At age 79, Hank Greenberg’s 37-year reign
has come to an end. Surprise? Actually, as
I was reading The Wall Street Journal‘s coverage,
my only surprise was that the directors had not given him
the boot years earlier. Consider this description
of the imperial CEO gone nearly loony (Monty Python should
do something on this):
"In his executive suite filled with Chinese
artifacts, Mr. Greenberg had his own elevator guarded
by his own security detail, his own living room adjoining
his office and private chandeliered dining room.
At some monthly management meetings, executives sat around a conference
table in coats and ties without refreshments. Mr. Greenberg,
occasionally in shirt sleeves, was served hot tea in
a china cup by his butler, a former colleague says. At
certain times, when AIG executives traveled with him
on business, they were required to use the small pilots’
bathroom in the front of a corporate plane. A large,
fancy bathroom in the back of the plane could be used
only by Mr. Greenberg, his wife and their Maltese dog,
Snowball, according to a former AIG executive."
Just yesterday I was rolling my eyes at an eerily similar
description of an another imperial CEO, Phil Purcell of
Morgan Stanley, who, for an interview, chose a conference
room next to his office decorated with pictures of him
together with the likes of
Bill Clinton and Tiger Woods. "L’etat, c’est moi," anyone?
So what has this to do with legal ethics? Simple: In
the intensely competitive world of the AmLaw 100, with
the bar being set annually ever-higher for such metrics
as profits per partner, will we see the law-land equivalent
of massive accounting fraud? "Can’t happen here?" And
since when, precisely, were lawyers better businesspeople
than, say, McKinsey alums (Purcell) or CEO’s of Dow 30
firms?
