Busy Day

Busy Day

I have three major work activities that occupy my days…except when they don’t. I have some days when nothing at all is going on. But then there are days like today that make up for all that free time. Today I started my day with a two hour conference call with my European (Sicily and Lisbon) expert witness partners. We went over my final response to a rebuttal of my rebuttal on a case that occupied much of my August. The way this works is that I write 90% of these reports and responses and my partners may do a particular analysis and the write-up that accompanies it. They also do all the references and footnote/citations. You see, their billing rate per hour is about half of mine and therefore it is far more efficient for them to do the leg work on the references and citations. They are also very good at it and I certainly lack the patience to do such a rigorous task well. It makes for a good partnership because my resume wins the business and our collective hard work gets the job done. Luckily, I like synthesizing information and writing up these reports, just as my partners seem to like doing the report polishing.

After that call I spent a few hours reorganizing and rewriting the report I had written over the weekend to conform to the format we had agreed on the earlier call. Let me take a moment to remind myself that word processors are a modern marvel. The ease of editing and revising reports like this is so much greater with a word processor than it was with straight-up typewriters like we used in college. My iPhone alarm reminded me that I had an investor call regarding my venture company and that ran more than hour (we are once again at a critical juncture). That was followed by a Zoom call with the team I run that is trying to keep that little venture company on the rails and making forward progress. Those two calls back-to-back were more confusing to me than not. That is part of the “charm” of running a venture company. There is always too little money and too little progress being made and too few promises in either of those two directions. The investors always want to hear directly from the scientists and the scientists always want to speak directly to the investors. I am happy to satisfy those requests, but I will tell you that most often the perspectives of the two groups are so diametrically different that it hurts rather than helps the process to leave them disintermediated.

After that Zoom call, what I wanted to do was go soak my head, but we had guests coming for lunch (a high school friend of Kim’s that was considering moving to the area to retire) to join us and her family members that were staying with us for a few days. In other words, I needed to be a good host, even if for only a short while. I was literally “on-call” for another expert witness assignment that is in arbitration (actually, multiple arbitration’s since I did one last week and may have more in coming weeks). After half a sandwich on the patio, I got the call to get ready to join the arbitration Zoom. This was a Zoom with perhaps thirty people on it, most of whom were not familiar to me. I only knew my claimants’s lawyer and the respondent’s lawyer. Strangely enough, the respondent’s lawyer is with a major firm that represented me on another project for six years. It felt funny to be “across the table” from them and given that this young litigator had beat me up once in deposition and once in the prior arbitration hearing, I feel like I was familiar with her in a perverse Stockholm Syndrome sort of way. I spent the next three hours doing repeat testimony of what I did last week and on a case I researched last December and produced a report on with my opinions in mid-January (a lifetime ago before the era of COVID). It is one thing to be dragged through the qualifications mud and to be challenged on your every opinion, but to do it over again with the same characters several weeks in a row is strangely uncomfortable. Rather than feeling comfortable in knowing what is coming, it is decidedly uncomfortable (sort of in a Groundhog Day sense) when you can’t resolve the same issues being laid at your feet over and over again.

We did not finish and I now have to go through more re-direct and arbitrator questioning tomorrow morning. I think of Bill Murray hitting that 6:00am alarm clock and Sonny and Cher singing I’ve Got You, Babe. I finished up with just enough time to do my daily chore of watering our new plantings and looking over Handy Brad’s daily work. Then it was dinner time, back on the patio with our visiting family members and the now-routine issue of trying to do everything on a socially distant basis so that none of us aging Baby-Boomers catch anything that can bring us to our knees. My Sicilian partner calls to tell me he has made progress on his part of the new report format and of course I had to say I had made only minimal progress on this busy day. Then I got a call from my venture company lawyer who wanted to discuss if he and I were on the same page about how to proceed on a fundraising effort. That is somewhat funny to me since the expert witness report I am trying to find time to revise is about a fundraising issue where the two sides disagree on the impact of a particular event on the raise. I have to keep my own fundraise separate from my expert witness case on fundraising. The strange part is that I have to defend my closeness to the fundraising game (I’ve been accused of being “a generation” removed from current fundraising practices) at the same time that I am out trying to fundraise. What’s wrong with this picture?

All this busy activity comes on a week when I have to start my course teaching on Friday. That will be four-hour Zoom sessions on two consecutive days this week and next. There is no such thing as a short Zoom call. Luckily, I had time in the last few weeks to prepare my presentations, so I think I’m prepared. I’ve never taught such a lengthy session via Zoom and this will be my first course at this new University, so I have lots of new with which to contend. I know I have time on Friday to get my game face on, but between now and then I need to get this expert witness report revised and in the hands of the lawyers for review. That will be tomorrow’s task after I do my Groundhog Day routine in the morning. Today I put in almost eleven hours of expert witness work. That is paid for at a decent hourly rate. The venture work is a bit harder to compute since half my pay is equity (what is equity worth in a risky start-up?….probably not too much) and deferred comp that gets paid out of liquidation (sale of equipment). The teaching is almost like a gift, given the low hourly rate entailed.

I don’t really do any of this primarily for the money. I do it to stay busy and engaged. It’s better than a daily vitamin to keep my immune system in gear. What I haven’t figured out completely yet is how to balance out all my busy days and not-so-busy days, but I guess that’s about experience at wandering ever so slowly towards retirement.