Judicial jeopardy: where business collides with the courts.

• Author: Barrett, Paul M.

Judicial Jeopardy: Where Business Collides with the Courts.

Richard Neely. Addison-Wesley, $19.95. Judge Richard Neely confirms the corporate general counsel's worst nightmare: in courtrooms across the land, bullies in black robes eagerly slam big business with costly suits brought by whining consumers and malingering workers. The law provides little protection because judges consider statutes and precedents old hat. Political and economic hunches--or worse, petty prejudices--shape important decisions. Afterwards, pointy-headed law clerks fresh from Ivy League campuses are unleashed to "cut and paste the appropriate legal principles necessary to justify the result.'

Neely, a respected member of the West Virginia Supreme Court, calls Judicial Jeopardy a "practical strategy' for how business can fight back. He must have envisioned a battle plan for readers with little interest in balance or complicated analysis. The judge doesn't say the boys in the boardroom are always right, but in this book anyone who opposes them looks dishonest or villainous. Neely's one-sided anecdotes about corporate litigants would make a Chamber of Commerce propagandist blush.

The judge never explains why he addresses his subject in such a narrow-minded fashion. He also fails to acknowledge that he only covers problems involving business being attacked by hostile outsiders, such as personal injury plaintiffs. He ignores the huge majority of commercial litigation in which companies use the courts to clobber each other.

Neely doesn't even deliver on his basic promise. Most of the book's tips range from vague to obvious. One example: "To a practicing businessperson the crucial point is that individual judges and their young clerks have a tremendous effect on the decisions they write.' What an executive would do with this kind of revelation is a mystery.

Other advice gets clouded by contradiction. Neely repeatedly urges business to save money and prevent adverse precedents by settling cases out of court. But he recommends "fighting frivolous litigation as long and as hard as possible.' He doesn't so much as hint as to when to surrender and when to circle the wagons.

By scrupulously avoiding ethical questions, Neely overlooks the possibility that by doing good, business might also do well. On the issue of settling rather than slugging it out in the courts, one criterion a product liability defendant might use is whether the company had hurt innocent people. The A.H...