Small Law Firms

The Vanilla Ice Rule

Litigators must remember that 'anything less than the best is a felony.'

By Matthew W. Schmidt  
on

Vanilla Ice (Photo by Scott Harrison/Getty Images)

Anything less than the best is a felony. 

Twenty-seven years ago today, To The Extreme — Vanilla Ice’s second and most successful album — was enjoying its fourteenth week atop the Billboard 200. It lasted another two weeks before being unseated by Maria Carey’s self-titled debut, and ultimately went multi-platinum, selling more than seven million copies. “Ice Ice Baby,” its lead single, was the first hip hop track to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

I’ve always found “Ice Ice Baby” to be a deeply inspirational work. Not the whole song, just one line near the end of its first verse: “Anything less than the best is a felony.” In college, I would often listen to it over and over. I have no special insight into how much Rob Van Winkle, as he was born, put into this lyric. Maybe he agonized over it for months or years, then he waited for a beat worthy of it that would catapult him into fame. Maybe it just shot him one night as divine inspiration. Either way, it’s a masterful line. In twelve catchy syllables, it utterly rejects mediocracy and the entire idea that “good enough” is good enough. It sets its own standards, and pledges to live up to them. It condenses Whiplash into three seconds.

Too often as lawyers, we convince ourselves that imperfection is acceptable. We tolerate a “good enough” attitude in ourselves and others. It’s a vicious, petty tendency that does nothing so much as reduce humanity to something base and undeserving of the name.

As I sometimes explain to law students who ask me for advice, perfection is an asymptote. Perfection isn’t a single unachievably perfect work product, perfection is the ability to churn out unachievably perfect work product at an arbitrary rate. We are all sinners in the hands of an angry God, repulsed at our constant and pathetic failures. As it should be. If nothing else, as W. Somerset Maugham taught us, there’s nothing more bitter than an end achieved.

This is the mindset that all litigators, including my colleagues and I, must bring to their work if they aspire to anything beyond mediocrity. Put another way, too many in this profession are punch-clock litigators. You shouldn’t be one of them.

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DON’T BE A PUNCH-CLOCK LITIGATOR

One of the ways, I’ve always thought, that litigators fail to bring their full selves to their work is by shying away from its true nature. They come into law seeing it as an easy office job, or one where they show up in court and make well-thought-out arguments. They approach litigation like the tramps in “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” They play for the gate, not the house. Whatever metaphor you like.

Such an approach will always hold you back a litigator. As litigators, we are ethically required to hurt people for a living. We are the civilized world equivalent of mob enforcers. But instead of breaking someone’s kneecaps with a lead pipe if they don’t pay, we bring down the ineffable might of the most powerful country that has ever existed on earth. The end is the same, we just add some checks and balances to the process. But those checks and balances do not remove our individual agency from the process. The skills of the litigators involved greatly effect on whose side the might of government falls. We are, in a real sense, personally responsible for people losing millions of dollars, having their careers destroyed, or their personal lives ruined.

We hurt people because they either have hurt our client or are trying to hurt our client, and our job is to make them stop within the rules of the game. Like Cher Horowitz said, litigators are the scariest kinds of lawyers. Not looking this in the face doesn’t make you a better or more moral lawyer, it simply makes you a hypocrite, like someone who eats factory farmed beef but likes to talk about animal rights. Nor is there anything here for anyone to be ashamed of: As I’ve written before, this controlled violence is one of the primary things standing between the civilized world we enjoy, wealthy beyond any dream of our ancestors, and total societal collapse where disputes are again settled by open warfare. If all police officers were pacifists who refused to arrest anyone who didn’t agree to be arrested, the police officers wouldn’t be doing their jobs, and the world would be a lot bloodier.

Some lawyers shy away from this and don’t properly advocate for their clients because they don’t want to make waves with judges or adversaries. It’s an understandable instinct to want to avoid stepping on the toes of the people you deal with on a regular basis; humans evolved to be conformists. But it’s a bad instinct and should be resisted. Even putting aside the fact that your ethical duties are to your client and whether your opposing counsel will still be your friend if you’re too mean to him does not excuse you from your attorney oath, any good judge or adversary understands that you’re simply doing your job.

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Other lawyers are just uncomfortable with the inherent violence of their chosen profession. Like those in many other fields, we too often retreat from the truth and dress it up to serve our own cheap comfort. Jim “The Hammer” Shapiro made us uneasy in part because he showed us as we are, and starring into that mirror, we flinched at the reflection.

But make no mistake: Denying the truth may bring you comfort, but that comfort comes at the expense of your clients. Your clients don’t care that fighting for them may make you uneasy, risk annoying your judge, cause an awkward interaction next time you run into the opposing counsel at a bar event, or whatever other hang-up you have. Your clients care that someone else has done such horrible things to them that they’re willing to pay you hundreds of dollars an hour over the course of months or years to make it right. Your job is to help them, not to whine about how hard it is.

REMEMBER VANILLA ICE

Vanilla Ice did not, as we now know, succeed in living up to his high standards. After his miraculous year of 1990, it was all downhill, but of course it was. He’s now a target of easy ridicule by those who, like myself, have an incredibly small chance of having a top single and a multi-platinum album. Who am I to possibly sit in judgment over him?

And maybe it was all a tossed-off line or one he stole from Suge Knight’s friend. But when I watch that so very 1990 music video, with its joyously ridiculous dance moves, I like to think that I see a flash of revelation in Van Winkle’s eyes. I like to think he fully understood the enormity of that one great line, and appreciated both its significance and the gravity of what he had accomplished. May we all bring such clarity to our own work.

Matthew W Schmidt Balestriere FarielloMatthew W. Schmidt has represented and counseled clients at all stages of litigation and in numerous matters including insider trading, fiduciary duty, antitrust law, and civil RICO. He is of counsel at the trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at matthew.w.schmidt@balestrierefariello.com.

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