Legal Strategy: Are Lawyers Just Overhead? Available to Purchase

The most important lesson I ever learned with respect to my usual professional role—that of a corporation's litigation counsel—came several years ago. After the favorable conclusion of a particularly difficult and long‐standing piece of litigation, I visited the client's headquarters to review the case outcome with the company's CEO and its general counsel. The review soon took a self‐congratulatory turn, at least on counsel's part, but the self‐adulation was brought quickly to an end by the practical CEO.