Smart Litigation - The End Of The Week...
January now seems a rather distant blur and my guess is that quite a few of those New Year’s resolutions are looking decidedly shaky…
Our only one: to keep things simple, is becoming harder to justify with the incessant chatter from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook (yes, it is now the 4th largest portal for the delivery of news content on the web) and various RSS feeds. Information overload – nothing simple about that.
The Big Story
The “Big One” for us Dispute Resolution lot this week is the news that Safeway, now owned by Wm Morrison, has commenced the (almost) unprecedented move of suing its former Chairman and 10 other ex-staff for compensation to recoup a fine of £16.4m it faces for allegedly conspiring with other retailers to set the prices of dairy products.
The comments that have been forthcoming from those involved have bordered on bellicose and nobody, it seems, is going to go down without a serious fight.
Unprecedented or a sign of the times?
It is difficult to know but there is undoubtedly the wider issue of testing the limit of the Directors and Officers (D&O) policy that presumably stands behind some or all of the Defendants. If not, then it is a worrying development.
What should you do? Not worry but it would be as well to make sure that your D&O cover is examined just to see whether it covers this type of issue – one would hope so – and also consider any service agreements.
What else?
We caught the story “Britain must take a cold, hard look at itself” in The Times on Wednesday where Sir John Rose, chief executive of Rolls Royce plc, expressed his view of what he thought needed to be done to put our manufacturing sector back together. There was a strong echo of the late and much missed Sir John Harvey-Jones. However, without a key number of very strong-minded people and a serious investment by the Government (or more likely several Governments), we are unlikely to see a return to the halcyon days of the past.
One startling statistic was the fact that graduates of MIT have established over 25,000 companies with sales of $2 trillion. By comparison, whilst many UK Universities have excellent research and development spin-off centres, they rarely get the investment or faith that is often needed for that wacky, truly brilliant, marketable product (or service) to take off. We need to ask ourselves why we don’t have more entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Biz Stone or Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn?
And Us
Where do lawyers fit into the picture? Our view is that we have built a reputation for ourselves, certainly in Dispute Resolution, where we are an option of last resort: “Oh heck, that contract has gone belly up…”, rather than being viewed as an integral and necessary part of the business. There is a reluctance to view lawyers in this way because of the cost but in our experience a small amount of (informal) advice can go a very long way; the prevention rather than the (inevitably more expensive) cure. The profession also needs to move away from being reactive and start engaging more with its clients and prospective clients to break down the divide.
For our part, we no longer see ourselves as a port of last resort and want you to feel comfortable in speaking to us on anything commercial that needs attention.
Published 05/02/2010. The author of this article is Julian Summerhayes
