Self-Aggrandizement: Shyster

While I don't have a law degree, after eleven years of running contract-intensive companies, I do sort of feel like I've gone through law school from the other side.

And while I'm bad, my CFO is worse; he previously worked for a few years as a strategic consultant at a law firm, and he's taken to referring to his position at Cyan as 'war time consigliere'.

This week, however, as we've been neck-deep in finalizing the PPM (for those without even an imagined law degree, 'private placement memorandum') that serves as the next step in our MovieSTAR hedge fund fundraising, it's become readily apparent that we're not, actually, attorneys at all.

Because while real ones can somehow spend all day, every day, reading their way through page after page after page of exceedingly dense legalese, we can only make it about twenty minutes at a stretch before our eyes glaze over to the point of effective blindness.

Which is all to say, it's a damn good thing I didn't go to law school in a spurt of mercenary money-chasing; I'm pretty sure I'd have ended up offing myself years before I even made partner.

Shyster Filed Thursday, July 31 2008.

Shyster
Filed Thursday, July 31 2008.