Product Description

How the snare of conflicting interests between corporate America and its lawyers points to larger issues in contemporary corporate finance

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #548373 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
"The book makes for sobering reading, precisely because it is about much more than the downfall of an individual lawyer or a black eye to a prestigious firm.... If you read only one book about the legal profession this year, let it be Eat What You Kill. - National Law Review "This is a spell-binding book that... does for corporate and bankruptcy law what A Civil Action did to illuminate the practice of personal injury law.... It is no puffery to describe [it] as a spellbinder and a page-turner.... [Eat What You Kill] deserves to be adopted as supplemental reading in courses in legal ethics, bankruptcy, corporate law, and for courses in the legal professions..." - Michael L. Rustad, Thomas F. Lambert Jr. Professor of Law & Co-Director of Intellectual Property Law Program, Suffolk University Law School "Eat What You Kill is gripping and well written.... It weaves in academic commentary and understanding of professional ethics issues in a way that makes it accessible to everyone." - Frank Partnoy, University of San Diego Law School"

About the Author
Milton C. Regan, Jr., is Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Customer Reviews

a patient reader reaps far more than an ethics case study
Read for: lessons in bankruptcy law and practice, junk bonds, vulture investment, corporate law generally, white collar crime and trial tactics, and a nuanced ethical exploration

Avoid if: seeking simple answers, easily bored by thorough and balanced legal arguments

"Eat What You Kill" explores in excruciating detail the rise and fall of John Gellene, bankruptcy attorney extraordinaire, who failed to disclose a conflict of interest which landed him in prison.

Yet Milton Regan's book offers more than an ethics case study. A blow-by-blow survey of corporate restructuring, bankruptcy litigation tactics, and white collar criminal prosecution, Regan's book overwhelms with useful instruction. Though focused upon Gellene's life at law, Regan uses it as a prism to explore the environment of many others swimming in the same waters.

Lay readers may find the professorial tone both vice and virtue, as the riches grow tiresome to anyone uninterested in following the pros, cons, counter-pros, and counter-cons of various litigation tactics and arguments. Within this web of contextual detail, the ethical story threads diverse legal doctrines.

Offering no simple denunciations or defenses, Regan sees Gellene as merely a lawyer who tends to lie to avoid the consequences of his own negligence. Flawed, perhaps, but hardly a gross flaw.

Refraining from potshots or praise permits Regan to hold Gellene accountable while looking more deeply into the practice of corporate law itself. Regan's conclusions seem to be that lawyers, preoccupied with the business of law, lose sight of its spirit.

terrific, gripping, insightful
A better read, simply as a page-turner, than many novels.

Gellene, the protagonist/anti-hero of this book, graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Georgetown with degrees in philosophy and economics. He graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, then clerked for Justice Morris Pashman of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Pretty impressive resume, eh? He had the "world at his feet," yet before much more time had passed he was in a prison cell.

This book should act as a warning on several levels. On one of them, it warns a certain type of investor about the nature of the chapter 11 process (in the course of which Gellene made the false statements that led to his downfall). Vulture investing in the instruments of distressed companies going through this process isn't an explicit theme of the book, one it ends up here nonetheless. There are traps for vultures, too.

Spellbinding and hugely educational
Hats off to Professor Regan for his prodigious research and painstaking, vivid recreation of the saga of a prominent lawyer's startling rise and fall --an all-the-more remarkable achievement given Gellene's refusal to cooperate in this project. This is an amazing look-behind-the-curtain as to: how large law partnerships reward and penalize their producers and non-producers; how complicated bankruptcy negotiations unfold; how investment bankers and vulture investors exploit weakened corporations; how a brilliant professional succumbed under pressure to career-ending ethical blunders; and much more. An extremely valuable reading experience for practioners and students of law and business that deserves to be a best-seller.