Thursday, March 25, 2010

Lehman Brothers and a Favorite Sin

In 2008, Anton R. Valukas, a trial attorney in Chicago, published a four-page stiletto thrust of an essay entitled "Arrogance: My Favorite Sin." The piece, included in a lawyers' guide to cross-examination, recounted Valukas' delight in using understated questioning to tempt executives into making implausible statements of the sort that reliably alienate jurors. "Frequently, the smartest witnesses—the most sophisticated and the most arrogant—are most susceptible to this type of examination," he wrote.

The piece reads today like a preamble to Valukas' voluminous autopsy of Lehman Brothers, which he performed as the court-approved bankruptcy examiner in the investment bank's formal unwinding.

Read the rest of the Business Week article .

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