Trying the case without a jury, we each made our opening statements. I argued that the defendant, a recidivist tree poacher, had knowingly entered my client's private property and destroyed nineteen trees. Furthermore, I claimed, these nineteen trees were priceless; given the timetables of nature, they were gone forever from my client's life. In taking them the defendant had maliciously invaded my client's property, land that had been in his family for generations. I asked the court for a huge judgment, which, I argued, still would not compensate the true loss to my client.
Opposing counsel admitted nothing and claimed that even if his client did cut down the trees, the act had been inadvertent. Furthermore, he held that the value of the trees was a mere twelve cents a foot or some such arcane measure, because that would be their value as lumber. Getting nowhere, the judge suggested we three retire to his chambers to discuss matters. The two old friends lit up cigars and swapped stories, hardly acknowledging my presence. Finally, the country lawyer turned toward me, “You made a good argument, kid. But I can't bring those trees back to life. My client made an honest mistake. The best calculation I've got leads me to a sum of three thousand dollars.”
I was outraged. “Three thousand dollars! For what your client did!”
Unfazed, he asked whether I had visited the property.
“Yes,” I said.
“A lot of trees out there, aren't there?”
“Not these nineteen any longer,” I shot back.
“Who's going to miss those trees in that forest?”
“My client will. It's not a forest. It's a question of trees, and those nineteen trees were his, and now they're gone.”
“Three thousand dollars is my best and final offer,” he said. “We can avoid wasting your time and the judge's if you can convince your client to be reasonable.”
But I'd already conferred with my client and knew he wouldn't entertain a nominal gesture. “No,” I said. “My client won't accept that. It's a question of principle.”
So we tried the case, and I went all out, falling over myself to right the grievous wrong done my client. The country lawyer, bemused at my performance, conducted himself like an old pro. He even helped me out a bit. When I was unsure how to introduce a piece of evidence, he was ready with advice. When I committed a procedural gaffe, he'd tell the judge he had no objection.
As the trial neared its end, I was pleased. I'd made my case and had even extracted what I thought was a vital piece of testimony from the defendant, who all but admitted on the stand that he had known where the property line was and had taken my client's trees nonetheless.
The judge retired to chambers to deliberate. I sat motionless, studiously feigning calm for my client's sake. My adversary across the aisle, meanwhile, joshed with the stenographer and inquired in concerned tones after the bailiff's family.
The judge soon reentered the courtroom and announced his verdict: “I find in favor of the plaintiff.”
I won! I smiled warmly at my client, who slapped my back approvingly.
The judge continued: “I hereby order the defendant to pay to the plaintiff damages in the amount of three thousand dollars.”
My smile froze. The wise, old counsel thanked the judge, shook my hand, put his arm around his client, and walked down the aisle in pleasant conversation. My heart and soul spent winning some meaningless altercation, I was left wondering whether the law was ever going to take me where I wanted to go.
IN 1983 I gravitated to a newly emerging specialty, technology law, after having transferred to my law firm's Palo Alto office. Technology law concentrates on identifying, protecting, and transacting in intellectual property—ideas. It is a product of the insuppressible inventiveness of Silicon Valley. It lacked the thrill of trial work, but it was far more stimulating than the tedious rounds of discovery that dominated litigation practice.
I traded the thrust and parry of litigation for ongoing relationships with byte-sized entrepreneurs, coders. They were creating the real value in the food chain of the PC revolution: software. I became engrossed in working with these inventors, who were assembling new businesses out of Silicon Valley garage shops. They turned out to be people I could easily relate to, more like the artists the Banzini Brothers had managed in the rock and roll promotion business than like my litigation colleagues and clients. They reminded me of my passionate, offbeat high school and college friends. They were talent. I understood them. I understood their art and their art's relationship to business. And I found myself able, by dint of both my eclectic experience and my training as a lawyer, to help them build viable enterprises around their brilliant ideas.
Perhaps, I thought, I could find genuine satisfaction, some meaning, in practicing law after all.
In 1985, I approached Lucasfilm, George Lucas's film studio and the home of Star Wars, for some work on the sale of Pixar, its animation division, to Steve Jobs. My firm ended up handling the technology side of that deal—the conveyance of the technology, the protection of intellectual property, and so on. At that time, Pixar was hardly the distinguished company Jobs later made of it, but the transaction was still fascinating: a project with two marquee names from two glamorous worlds, entertainment and technology. I tried to take as much shine from their limelight as I could.
With negotiations completed, I orchestrated the closing, a legal ritual to seal the deal. The key people from each side attended, smiling, shaking hands, and drinking champagne. It was a happy event for everyone, it turned out, except me. I watched all those people celebrate in the boardroom, while I checked signatures and filled up boxes with documents in some stuffy little closet across the hall. It struck me that no matter how interesting the clients or the case, my work as a lawyer was extremely narrow and routine. I decided at that point I wanted to do what they were doing—write the script, not collate the pages. I wanted to be in the other room. Practicing law wouldn't put me there.
Soon after that sale was completed, people at Apple approached me about taking a position with them. While the job was in the legal department, it turned out to be largely deal making. I told the partners at my law firm about the offer, and they were horrified. They tried to persuade me that I was about to make the biggest blunder of my life. They played on my Harvard, East Coast, big-law-firm prejudices. The high art of law, they contended, was in private practice; in-house practice was a dead end. I was on the path to partnership, so I needed only to continue doing what I was doing, and the future would be rosy. Plug away, they tried to convince me, and all of it would eventually come to me.
That was the rational, analytic side of the argument, and I took it seriously. I had bought the prejudice that company lawyers were people who couldn't hack it in a good law firm. Maybe Apple was a step backwards for me. If it didn't work out, would a good law firm still take me seriously?
Yet everything in my gut told me I should go to Apple.
Those were the mid-eighties, the glory days of the company Steve Jobs had energized with ideals and values. Though he had been forced out just before I arrived, his influence still bled in five colors throughout the organization. The Apple he created was about making the power of computing accessible to everyone, about freedom from the tyranny of technology and technologists, about changing education, about using technology to help the handicapped cope with the challenges of their disabilities. While Apple clearly had to be financially successful, its more fundamental purpose was to innovate, invent, and lead an entire cultural revolution that everyone there saw leaping from those keyboards and screens with silicon brains. Apple's 1984 Super Bowl commercial, where the free thinking individual charges through the faceless, gray crowd to shatter the tyranny of Big Brother, was gospel, not hype, throughout the Apple organization. All the people I met there, passionate young people, truly believed they were changing the world, not selling computers.