First thing we do is kill all the lawyers
Four newspapers and a news wire service in England are facing legal problems, including possible jail time for their editors, for refusing to hand over leaked documents about a potential takeover of a rival brewer to lawyers from a Belgian brewing company from whence they were leaked:
David Sandy, partner at Simmons & Simmons, solicitors for Interbrew, spent two hours travelling across London in a dark blue Skoda to personally serve legal notices to officials of the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Times and the Independent. Later in the day, Geert Linnebank, editor in chief of Reuters news agency, also received legal papers.
I guess the lawyer business doesn’t pay very well in England. You would think an expensive solicitor could afford something a little tonier than a Skoda, an inexpensive Czech-built automobile. It reminds me of the old joke about Skodas. How do you double the value of a Skoda before selling it? Fill up the gas tank. (In fairness, I know that Skodas are much nicer now than they were when that joke was current back in the days of the Berlin Wall....) So what is England doing right that we don’t do?
Posted at 10:49 PM