I'm in mourning. New York super-lawyer Peter Fleming died on Wednesday.
In times when big disputes are managed to inevitable settlements by lawyers working as case administrators, the specialized courtroom trial bar has lost a brilliant character, whose equal is unlikely to be seen again soon.
Closer to home, the accounting profession has lost a unique source of wisdom and advice. Having seen and defended the auditors at their weakest and their worst, Peter brought his counsel with wit, candor and affection – but also with a piercing accuracy that challenged evasion, euphemism and flabby reasoning.
It is no bad foundation for a high-profile advocate to be tall, dapper and sharp of tongue and wit. Peter’s tools also included a pitch-perfect ear for the metaphor that would illustrate his argument.
Drawing on the experience of a football-coaching son, Peter compared the hazards of that role with the well-intentioned but constrained ability of an audit engagement partner:
Both do their best to train and discipline the youngsters in their charge, and to teach them the complexities of their playbook. Then when the team takes to the field, they are limited to coaching anxiously on the sidelines, while the action takes place in a combination of energy and improvisation, largely beyond their ability to provide guidance or control.
Peter made no attempt to temper his dismay at the ambiguity and self-inflicted harm of the large auditors’ confused messages. “You’re killing yourselves in court with all these books of standards,” he said. “Juries don’t understand and don’t buy the excuse of ‘professional judgment’.”
He wanted a simple and focused message. “Spare me all the technicalities. You can distill all your guidelines on quality and expectations down to one sentence,” he would say. “Can this audit work be defended with a straight face to non-experts in a jury box?”
That advice never sank in with the profession’s leaders. We hadn’t spoken for close to a year, Peter and I, but for a certainty he’d have given a familiar snort of disdain, along with an expletive, at the sterile debates over endless politicized differences between competing systems of international accounting standards, and the persistent inability of the profession to avoid repeating the same performance failures he’s seen for half a century.
And then he’d sit at the trial strategy table, with both genuine personal regard and professional devotion to the battle. Polishing his arguments, he would fill up the ashtrays, in defiant disregard of what he viewed as petty rules infringing on his cigarette addiction, while he immersed himself in the single-minded defense of his troubled client’s difficult position.
To obtain his advice, over the years it was my privilege to have it, you took his smoking habit as part of the package.
From the report that he died this week of complications from lung surgery, there was one closing argument he couldn’t win.
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