One Mean Nasty Sumbitch

There are people so nasty and mean spirited that the only time they experience happiness is when they observe someone else in misery.

R. Mervin Smallwood was such a person. He was aptly named. Did you ever hear a name and know instinctively that it just had to belong to some God awful sawed off sumbitch of a person?

RM, as he liked to be called, ardently studied ways to make other people miserable. He especially delighted in kicking anyone who might be down.

Oh, did I forget to tell you that he was a lawyer?

He just loved courses in creditors’ rights, as they taught you how to take away people’s homes and assets. He delighted in spending his spare moments on his boat trying to draft new language for legal documents that would make any slip, no matter how inconsequential, grounds for accelerating obligations and cross defaulting all other agreements between the same and all related parties to the point at which the person making the mistake would be utterly destroyed. His motto should have been “time is of the essence”. Suing corporate financial terrorists he considered lawsuit abuse. If your poisoned someone’s family with bad pharmaceuticals or food products, when that’s the luck of the draw, not grounds for legal action against you unless it could be proved that you specifically targeted meant poison this particular family. He pandered to any monied interest without regard to any other consideration.

Courtesy calls to remind someone that he was subject having his head cut but that if he hurried on down he would get cut a break this time, were not in his bag of acceptable business practices.

In any matter that was about to reach settlement, he would blow up the settlement on the grounds that, if the other side was willing to agree to this, there must be more that they would give up if they were pushed a bit harder. His motto was to leave nothing on the table. Any settlement of a dispute had to give him what he would have gotten had he won the case after trial.

Of course, he was no trial lawyer and had never in his life tried a case. He always worked with others who would have to pick up the pieces of the blown settlements and actually face judges and juries. He adored non binding mediation. He approached mediation as an exercise in making the opposite side spend money for nothing, as he had no intention to resolve anything in non binding mediation. The longer he could make it last, the more money the opposition would waste trying to deal with his stated and ever changing for the worse positions. Since he was on salary, there was little additional cost to his client.

He was what people call an “in house” lawyer, an employee of one company or another who mainly prepared paperwork and bargained when things went wrong. With his personality and approach, management people who would prefer to actually accomplish something soon learnt to avoid him whenever possible. He would tell everyone that he was there to protect their interests, but somehow nothing good ever happened when he was assigned to any operating group issue. He could deliberately fuck up a two car funeral.

And so he moved from job to job, always with little more than a few years’ tenure, and always receiving positive recommendations from employers who thought that if they ever told a prospective employer the truth about the sumbitch, they would be sued for slander. His employment history was a trail of companies that dealt with people who had little bargaining power or who were ignorant about what they were involving themselves in. These were the people he could most easily screw. They never read or appreciated the documents he prepared for them to sign, thinking that it was no use as he told everyone they were non negotiable. They wanted the deal and took the terms. Ignorant people provide a target rich environment for the likes of R.M. Smallwood.

RM had no relationships that were not manipulative. He pretended that he was someone who intimately knew those in seats of power, and name dropped in every conversation. He held out false hopes of social, professional and financial advancement as the direct consequences of being somehow associated with him. Since so many people are opportunistic beyond reason, he had a coterie of hangers on who, of course, never saw a dime out the acquaintanceship. There is justice in this world. He got nothing much out if his phony friends either. But he did get invited to functions, mainly institutional and not personal, at which social climbers are customarily present. Anything that required contribution to a cause or even the slightest personal sacrifice was out of his reach. But he was a master at scrounging tickets that others had paid for to events attended by those above his station. He is the slacker and leech, pretending to influence he never had. The charade is mondo bizaro.

RM did once spend some money on genealogical research, believing that there might just be a link between the Smallwood family and the family of Sir Basil Smallpiece, then chairman of Cunard Lines. It came to naught, and JM used that investment for manipulative purposes by pretending to be suicidal, in his suicide charades, he would always make a point to call someone he knew and tell them “goodbye”, knowing they would summon help for him. There would ensue rushed calls to EMS and hurried trips to RM’s home to save him from self destruction. He himself would never call EMS, for the complete social manipulation would then be lost. The rescuers always arrived to find him about to put the pills into his mouth, and he allowed them to grab him and prevent his self destruction. This carefully choreographed scenario worked so well the first time he tried it that it became almost a signature event thereafter whenever something went awry in his life. He always called a different “friend”, and somehow they just didn’t bruit it about that they had just saved someone from self destruction, feeling that such stories are rarely believed and unlikely to be open to documentation.

RM had a boat and invited folks to go sailing from time to time. They were free to bring along anything they might care to eat or drink, but were much better off if they brought nothing. RM’s boat had no toilet facilities. Those who knew him best believed that to be another intentional instance of gratuitous meanness. Others thought he had a fetish about people relieving themselves and delighted to watch them do it over the side. There was no toilet paper on board either. On one occasion, someone taking a piss to leeward pitched into the sea when the boat hit a wave, and drowned. He wore no life jacket and it takes a while to bring a sailboat around and stop it to fetch someone overboard. Another boat’s wake passing in the opposite direction created turbulence, and the poor bastard drowned. As one might suspect, many blamed RM for the demise of his “friend”. He was unpopular for a sufficient period of time to become morose and pull off another phony suicide attempt.

Ho Hum!

One could posit that God liked him least of all. He had no children and he suffered from an incurable fungus infection that made his underclothing essentially unlaunderable. The removal of his shoes could make a goat wretch. He constantly applied some poultice to himself in various places, trying to do it under the desk or table, or turning his back, but rarely excusing himself and doing it elsewhere. He was, if effect, a walking taking festering pustule. No one could imagine a woman who, even for money, could be intimate with him, and yet, he was married. His wife had an agenda so important to her that she could just let him do it once in a rare while, and then stand in a hot shower for an hour or more trying to get the stench and filth off her.

Once her agenda was fulfilled, she promptly divorced him, but not before making sure that he “found out” that she had been intimate with many men while married to him. He did another suicide act and, sure enough, someone “talked” him out of it.

He made himself emotionally whole by attending committee meetings of the Bar at which arbitration of business disputes was the subject du jour. There he and a group of anal compulsives took turns trying to draft dispute resolution contract provisions that would impose upon the opposite party the most draconian of obstacles to ever obtaining redress of any grievance. They were for contracts considered adhesion agreements in which the terms are usually not negotiable.

He suggested that there should be a specific prohibition of access to any court save only that for his client court should be available to protect intellectual property and for unspecified “emergency” relief. In any such instance, there would also be a prohibition of jury trial and disallowance of any claim for money of any kind in any counterclaim.

No access to ADR should be available to anyone who did not first agree to and participate in negotiations with his client at his client’s headquarters for a period of three months. Thereafter any party could demand nonbinding mediation in his client’s home town location. Mediation would be available upon four months written notice. The purpose of this was, of course, to try to make it as difficult and expensive as possible for anyone to obtain relief against his client.

Of course, someone like this would and did eventually wind up as in house lawyer to some franchisor, delighting in defaulting any franchisee who could be deemed defaultable, without regard to any overall big picture perspective.

His last stand, that ended up collapsing the house of cards his employer was carefully constructing, arose out of a deliciously agonizing timing issue. An area franchisee was getting late in his development schedule because his first store was not performing the way it had to in order to enable obtaining the financing for the development of the second store. This situation was just made for an asshole in house lawyer like RM. His animus was served by insisting that any extensions of the development schedule would be seen by every other area developer as a license to slow development and use any trumped up excuse, and avoid store openings time after time after time. That, he posited, would retard royalty and initial store franchise fee revenue, creating a default risk on revolver agreements. That was, at least at that time, an absurd position, but he saw it as an opportunity to destroy someone’s investment and to resell the territory

YUM!!!

The franchise in question had been an acquired system with a checkered history, and RM’s company hadn’t completely debugged it before RM approved a vigorously aggressive marketing brochure and highly fictional set of disclosure materials.

The franchise investor had family members with money who were ready to help him. Other area developers weren’t even close to meeting their business plan projections either. They all went lawyer hunting, and in most cases found very competent assistance. Why they didn’t all choose the same franchise litigator remains a mystery, but it could be that a concern about collectability caused lawyers to suggest that their clients each proceed in his own interests only and to do so as quickly as possible.

The contracts all had RM’s yummy dispute resolution provisions, and that slowed the proceedings to a crawl. Eventually, however, facing an arbitration panel loomed as a near term event. The company became concerned that RM’s guidance may have created a monster, and it decided to consult with a new set of lawyers for this situation.

The situation was so bad that the new counsel’s advice was that it would be wonderful to lose the case on a breach of contract, rather than a fraud, rationale, because breach of contract awards were dischargeable in bankruptcy, and the claimants, even if they won, would get nothing when all was said and done. Management was appalled, but when presented with an assessment of how the evidence was likely to portray it as having concocted a hard core fraudulent scheme, and how inevitable bankruptcy was for the company that was involved in franchising this particular system. That approach was adopted.

To make a long story short, their new lawyer succeeded in convincing the arbitrators that if there had been a mistake here, it was in not granting the extension of the development schedule, and that could at most be only a breach of contract claim, any award should be based on breach of contract rather than fraud, and that was how it was sorted out by arbitrators looking to find some least argumentative way to award the deserving franchisees without castigating the management of the respondent company.

All the awards matured, and when time came to pay up, that subsidiary of RM’s company filed for bankruptcy. The franchisees who “won” the arbitrations got almost nothing. RM’s company emerged from bankruptcy and continues to franchise the same concept to this very day. But they did fire R.M. Smallwood.

Where is he now? Whose life is he blighting with his presence? What business arrangements is he now screwing up?