A new blog, Legal Ethics + Legal Technology, put together by Ben Cowgill, has invited guest authors, including me, to post their thoughts this week, on issues related to professional ethics.  While I have often said that "Adam Smith, Esq." is all about economics and pointedly not about ethics, I realized there could be convergence of the two in a drastically unhappy situation (yes, think worse than Brobeck or Finley-Kumble).  This was my post:

Just when you thought it was safe again (Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom are so yesterday, and Sarbanes-Oxley is, for better or worse, firmly part of the gestalt), AIG, one of the Dow 30, blows up.  At age 79, Hank Greenberg's 37-year reign has come to an end.  Surprise?  Actually, as I was reading The Wall Street Journal's coverage, my only surprise was that the directors had not given him the boot years earlier.  Consider this description of the imperial CEO gone nearly loony (Monty Python should do something on this):

"In his executive suite filled with Chinese artifacts, Mr. Greenberg had his own elevator guarded by his own security detail, his own living room adjoining his office and private chandeliered dining room. At some monthly management meetings, executives sat around a conference table in coats and ties without refreshments. Mr. Greenberg, occasionally in shirt sleeves, was served hot tea in a china cup by his butler, a former colleague says. At certain times, when AIG executives traveled with him on business, they were required to use the small pilots' bathroom in the front of a corporate plane. A large, fancy bathroom in the back of the plane could be used only by Mr. Greenberg, his wife and their Maltese dog, Snowball, according to a former AIG executive."

Just yesterday I was rolling my eyes at an eerily similar description of an another imperial CEO, Phil Purcell of Morgan Stanley, who, for an interview, chose a conference room next to his office decorated with pictures of him together with the likes of Bill Clinton and Tiger Woods. "L'etat, c'est moi," anyone?

So what has this to do with legal ethics?  Simple:  In the intensely competitive world of the AmLaw 100, with the bar being set annually ever-higher for such metrics as profits per partner, will we see the law-land equivalent of massive accounting fraud?  "Can't happen here?"  And since when, precisely, were lawyers better businesspeople than, say, McKinsey alums (Purcell) or CEO's of Dow 30 firms?