Winning Legal Wars:
This book is written for business manager. Young lawyers will also profit from the author’s experience. |
This book is based on certain fundamental premises (in which the author firmly believes): |
- If business managers can understand marketing, sales or production sufficiently well to take informed decisions on these subjects, they can also understand legal wars sufficiently well to take optimal legal decisions as well.
- Effective decision-making in legal matters does not require a technical understanding of the laws. The legal manager only needs to understand the legal ‘terrain’ in generic terms. Business decisions regarding litigation can be taken on the basis of generic first principles.
- This is a handbook of simple rules, rules that have the widest application to practically any area of business that has a legal facet. In that sense, this work is a bridge, a kind of hitchhikers guide to the world of legal strategy and tactics.
- By employing these simple rules, laymen are capable of taking decisions pertaining to corporate strategy, to external contractual relationships with partners, customers and suppliers, to internal relationships with employees and employers, to ‘third party’ relationships such as consumer groups and green activists, to relationships with government including specifically revenue collection agencies, and of course, if it becomes inevitable, to litigation. Each point made is illustrated with case study: the facts, the issues, the strategic options, the course adopted and the result achieved, all of course with the lay man audience in mind.
- Legal strategy is not primarily about fighting court cases. It is true that this book relies extensively on actual court cases to demonstrate the practical application of each of the rules but in-court litigation represents a very small part of legal strategy. Most legal issues are resolved through pro-active action at the level of the Board of Directors, at Shareholders Meetings, in the market, in the corridors of government, through strategic position play and through the tactical conduct of legal strategy.
- Litigation is a business tool, one of a variety of weapons employed by business to survive and grow in the market. There is no need to import into legal decisions, an overriding environment of morality and equity.
- The legal machine tries to enforce the law. It does try to provide justice. In any event, how we define justice depends on what axes we choose to grind.
- All closed circuit loops naturally tend to service themselves and not necessarily the purpose for which they were built. Institutional irrelevance is a fact of contemporary life. Is it a surprise if we are to find that this may be true of the legal world?
- All legal systems suffer from ‘systemic’ problems of delays and inefficiencies. This is a necessary part of any meaningful discussion on legal strategy.
- The adversarial system of justice that we follow in India requires lawyers to not merely protect their own clients but to directly and substantially harm their client’s opponents. Psychological and moral violence is an inherent part of the legal world.
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