Murray (M) at my first rodeo:
Client (C): We need to close this transaction in two weeks.
M: That is impossible.
C: The Vendor said that his lawyer told him that deadline is perfectly reasonable. Why are you creating roadblocks? If you cannot get it done, I will find someone else who is willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done.
In law firms, more zeros are better than fewer zeros. For example, announcing, “look at me! I just closed a $100,000,000 acquisition” impresses your colleagues more than saying, “I just did a deal worth $10,000,000.” A deal that was only worth $965,000 is not even worth mentioning. There just are not enough zeros. Frankly, it is almost embarrassing to have been involved with it.
People of my vintage remember playing musical chairs at birthday parties, back before the days when money was so plentiful that it seemed to be important to impress the neighbours by hiring clowns and musicians or renting bouncy castles to entertain five-year-olds.
For those of you who did not have the pleasure of being pushed off of a chair by some mean kid who had fifty pounds on you, the idea was that music would be played while the children would circle a number of chairs that was always one fewer than the number of kids marching around them.
My many years of practice taught me that clients usually want to close their transactions quickly.
You would think that they would want to close when everyone involved has had the time to do the job properly, but that does not seem to be the case. Apparently, ‘quickly’ is when deals have to close. Now, in fairness, there is often a good reason to close a deal quickly. A business reason, or a tax reason, perhaps. But, more often than not, the desire to close the deal quickly seems to constitute an independent, over-reaching, crucial goal.