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Smell Test: Stories and Advice on Lawyering |
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In Smell Test, seasoned business lawyer and author Jim Freund has created a unique and compelling book for lawyers of all ages and experience levels. He entertains the reader with ten fictional short stories about business lawyers who find themselves facing challenging situations--challenges they sometimes rise to yet often come up short.
After each story there is a detailed commentary, in which the author analyzes the key actions taken - the crucial decisional points faced - by the fictional lawyers. The essential questions are then posed for the reader: Do you approve of what Jack did at this juncture: If not, why not? What would you have done instead? It's an invaluable exercise for any lawyer testing his or her judgment on how to deal with thorny situations that face business lawyers.
Jim Freund then explains in detail how he would have handled the particular situation--applying to these difficulties the good judgment honed over a lifetime of practical experience. And he offers valuable advice about the larger lawyering issues involved. The book explores the numerous conflicts that a business lawyer faces: lawyer-to-lawyer, often at the negotiating table, between lawyer and client (or prospective client); and inside the law firm between partners, or partners and associates. Some of the most wrenching conflicts take place within the lawyer's mind, as his better and baser instincts wrestle over how to handle a sticky situation.
A number of the tales in Smell Test have an ethical issue at the core, such as a lawyer deciding whether his firm should take on some questionable (but profitable) new business. Some of the most sensitive moments involve a lawyer agonizing over the implications of telling the truth. Several stories deal extensively with negotiating--lawyers strategizing and bargaining over deal terms, facing difficult choices along the way.
Reading Smell Test is a great way to help you improve your lawyering skills and understand how to deal with similar situations while being entertained by the lively adventures of your fictional brethren. It also provides valuable primary materials for conducting training programs and professional seminars.
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"Jim Freund has done it again. This time he has written a lawyer's how-to-do-it series of fictional short stories about a firm of lawyers confronting situations raising issues of judgment that are illustrative of real-life legal practice. Each story is followed by a perceptive discussion of what went wrong, or right, and how the situation should have been handled. Only a lawyer of Jim's wide experience, great judgment and keen sense for avoiding problems could write this book. Only a person with Jim's sense of humor and story telling skills could combine fiction and practical advice into the compelling "read" that is Smell Test."
Martin Lipton, founding partner, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
"The Manhattan law firm Jenkins & Price forms the stage for dramas of professional and human conflict, angst, fear, greed, courage and - yes, even nobility - stories of business lawyers facing difficult moments in their lives and careers. Whether it's Dwight Bentley agonizing whether he should follow his ethical instincts which might deny his firm lucrative business, Dan Barton trying to explain what he does for a living to his twelve year old, Paul Garson churning over the firm's partnership decisions, Jack Lawrence confronting the possibility that he has unwittingly sponsored false testimony, new partner Ted Ashburn cushioning the counterproductive bombast of pompous senior partner Ralph Landry, Alex Gibson literally cleaning up a client's mess in the men's room or Elliot Cheever dealing with the stinky associate and the gamey one or the other lawyers he writes about, Jim Freund tells stories that not only ring true but illustrate the dilemmas that lawyers face daily. These are the problems they don't teach you about in law school.
Freund tells his stories with zest, in compelling plots told from many vantage points. Then he follows up with commentaries or the lessons to be drawn from the stories. These reveal facets of the stories and the problems that did not occur to the reader, and provide the insights of a wise and insightful practitioner of the first rank.
In all, Smell Test is a masterful achievement that should be read by lawyers, young and old - for although the characters change, the contexts vary and outcomes differ, the problems Freund writes about are both old and new. They renew continuously. Freund has written the casebook for actually practicing our profession."
The Honorable Vaughn Walker, U.S. District Court Judge, San Francisco
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