The new year had arrived and ski season was approaching, so on a rainy morning, I brought my graphically red Bogner ski pants to Jeeves (the dry cleaner, not the P. G. Wodehouse character) for cleaning and repair. Carrying, as I nearly always do, a Leica film camera under my suit jacket, I stopped on Madison Avenue to take a photo when my Noctilux lens slipped free from its bayonet mount (a first for me), and tumbled toward the sidewalk of East 65th Street. It gained momentum, plunging downward until it landed safely atop a damp Hefty bag full fluffy, uncollected New York trash. That was a good omen for the start of the year.
Back to Jeeves: those ski pants, too Euro for Vermont but spot on for Courchevel 1850, where I had last been, and St. Moritz, where I was next heading, had been soiled due to the consequences of poor form (crash!) and, for good measure, had been sliced just above the ankles like red apples for my son’s school lunch box (due to over-zealous ski edge sharpening). The solution of Jeeves, following the cleaning, was to armor plate the inside bottom part of the legs with leather overlays that coordinated with the pants. The next time a sharp edge hit them, little or no damage should be done, all without loss to Euro styling.
The moral of the story, and not just for photographers and skiers, is that you need to be ready for when things go wrong. Sometimes, good luck will deliver a solution (a beneficent pile of garbage) and sometimes, you will just have to absorb what happens and make the best of it later (with a little bit of leatherwork). In law, luck can happen as well. The adversary who has a winnable case against you decides, just the same, that it is not worth the trouble to sue you back to the stone age. The respectable couple who own the classic six coop within the best school district falls behind on payments and is obliged to sell under market to a family sure to pass muster with the socially and financially conservative board. (Just trust me on that one.)
Good luck is lovely. It cannot, however, take the place of sound legal and business planning. Transactional lawyers, the ones who draft contracts, are the bringers of good luck. If they do what they should, you might well not need litigators, who, as was Jeeves for a pair of ski pants, are there to try to make things right when contracts go wrong. The problem is that, all too often in the fashion business, people think that luck will come without the help of lawyers and so they simply sign a long, attorney-drafted agreement handed to them by the other party, hoping everything in it really says what it is expected to say. Sometimes it does, just as it is theoretically possible that, the next time you drop something quite valuable, it will fall safely onto a stuffed Hefty bag. For small matters, going without an attorney often carries a low enough risk to be worthwhile, but when the stakes increase, so does the risk and so does the likelihood that bad luck will have bad consequences. So here is a refreshed old tip for a nice new year: feel lucky, but when the stakes in a deal are high, lawyer up. Good luck comes most often to those who plan ahead.
Credit: Alan Behr
