"This went on for almost a year and then along came that whole spotted owl issue. I'm sure you've heard about that. The spotted owl is an endangered species and it just happens to live in some of the most productive timberland in the United States. Vast tracts of this timberland were placed off-limits to logging, thus ensuring that there was not as much timber available on the market. This, according to the law of supply and demand, drove up the price of timber, particularly the prime cuts our inventor needed, and it was now costing him almost twelve dollars to produce each wagon instead of six. This brought the inventor's profit margin down from $840 per week to $420. This was not enough for the inventor to live on. He asked the warehouse store to please increase his per-unit fee so he could offset the cost of timber but they refused, stating it was not in his contract to do so.
"So, since he could not live on $420 per week, he stopped making little brown gardening wagons for the warehouse store and went back to his old job. The warehouse store then claimed he was in breach of contract and activated another clause their shifty lawyers — of which I was one — had put into his contract. It was a clause that said if the inventor failed, for whatever reason, to live up to his end of the contract and give them sixty wagons per week, the warehouse store would then assume all patent and marketing rights to the little brown gardening wagon. With our blessing the warehouse store shipped the design for this wagon to Taiwan, where they were able to make cheap copies of it for three dollars a unit, including overseas shipping, and sell them in every warehouse store in the nation at the same forty-five dollars, which amounted to forty-two dollars of profit per unit nationwide. A pretty good coup for the warehouse store, isn't it?"
Nobody said anything. They just continued to stare at her.
"Sometimes," she said, "I'm not real proud of what I do for a living. This was one of those times. There is a reason why we lawyers are vilified in our society. There is a reason why my own brother wrote a song called Living By The Law — a song you folks put on the first Intemperance album — bashing everything lawyers stand for. You see, when we wrote that contract with that small-time inventor — someone who just wanted to sell one of his inventions, to get something he'd produced with his own hands and brain on the market — we put those clauses in there with the express hope and intention that something like rising timber costs or sickness or getting tired of working for 'The Man' would make him breach. We wanted him to breach so we could obtain the rights to his invention and market it to Taiwan and make millions from it instead of hundreds. That was why we wouldn't let him raise the price. We deliberately skewed this contract so it was outrageously in our favor and so the small-time inventor, not knowing better and with no other choice anyway, would sign off on it no matter what we put in there. Is any of this starting to sound familiar, gentlemen?"
"No," Frowley said. "You screwed a backwoods small-timer. Bravo for you. You are indeed a credit to the profession. Your brother and his band, however, signed a standard industry recording contract no different than that signed by first time acts for more than thirty years."
"Exactly," Pauline said. "You're making my point for me."
"Excuse me?" Frowley said, not getting her.
"We'll come back to that," Pauline said. "Let me finish my little story first. You see, this small-time inventor soon found out that the warehouse store in question had marketed his invention and was selling it nationwide. He protested. We told him that he was shit out of luck and pointed to the contract he had signed. So this inventor went and got himself one of those lawyers who advertise in the yellow pages of the Heritage phone book. Now you can joke all you want, Mr. Frowley, about my city, my firm, my education, but the fact is I went to a first rate law school, graduated at the top of my class, and I work for the most prestigious law firm in the northern Central Valley of California. We accept only the best of the best from our little neck of the woods and we bill hundreds of millions each year from some of the biggest corporations on the planet. We are the epitome of the corporate law firm and we are damn good at what we do. And do you know what happened? This shyster lawyer who graduated one hundred and twelfth in his class, a true ambulance chaser who had collected less than ten thousand in sleazy settlements the year before this case, he took us to court on the basis of unenforceable provisions claiming that it was outrageous for the warehouse store to not allow the inventor to increase price in response to increased materials cost and that it was especially outrageous for us to demand he sign over the rights to his invention if he failed to deliver."
"And what happened?" Casting asked.
"He lost like a motherfucker when it went to trial," Pauline said.
"Jesus Christ," Frowley said. "She's rambling."
"No I'm not," she said. "Because he then appealed the case and the appellate court ruled in his favor. That warehouse store was forced pay that inventor and his sleazy lawyer two hundred and twenty thousand dollars and to give him a rather large cut of any future sales."
"And you think that same thing will work here?" Frowley asked. "I think not. As I told you before, your brother and his band of degenerates signed a standard industry contract. We didn't just whip that thing out of thin air just for them."
"That is true," Pauline said. "But no one has ever challenged one of your standard industry contracts on grounds of unenforceable provisions before, have they?"
"No," Frowley said, "they haven't, and that's because the very idea is absurd."
"Is it?" she asked. "I would think that a contract which virtually guarantees that the band signing it goes into debt while the corporation sponsoring them makes outrageous profit, that a contract that makes the band pay for all of the costs of producing the album and marketing it, that a contract that allows the band's name to be exploited for merchandising purposes but shares none of the profit from such an endeavor, that such a contract would be prime fodder for an unenforceable provisions ruling if it were challenged."
"It would never fly," Frowley said. "Never. You would lose so badly you would never show your face in a courtroom again."
"I have no doubt that we would lose quite handily at the trial level," Pauline admitted. "I'm reasonably sure we would lose on first appeal as well. I've already researched the judges on the Court of Appeals for this district and they are a tight-assed, ultra-conservative bunch for sure. But what about the next appeal? That one goes straight to the California Supreme Court itself."
Frowley scoffed quite audibly at this suggestion. "They would never hear something like this."
"Are you sure about that?" Pauline asked him. "Remember who we're talking about here. The Supreme Court of this great state is headed by Rose Bird, perhaps the most liberal, anti-corporate judge to ever don a robe. Her cohorts are Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin, both of whom have been accused of being so far to the left they may be members of the communist party. I think a broad-reaching case dealing with gross exploitation of popular entertainers might be just up their alley, especially since we will be doing everything within our power to draw attention to this issue while we're waiting for it to make its way through the system."