[Midtown restaurant — July 11, 2013, 12:23 PM]
Trask had ordered the wine.
Again. Same bottle, same early pour, same precise table-geometry indicating he had arrived at least fifteen minutes early. The Pomerol was decanted. This was either habit or message.
Don sat down.
"The situation has changed," Trask said, without preamble.
"I know."
"Good." He poured. "Then I'll be direct."
The original offer from May 2012 had been $163,000 in operating capital, eighteen months, settlement floor $300K, 18% net recovery, standard case-control provision. Don had held it at the brittle-point analysis for nine months — the Rule 1.2 conflict risk, the disclosure language — and then the London bottle arc had produced sufficient revenue to make the offer unnecessary.
The London arc was over. The Mike-LP stream was closed. The Darby arbitration was active. The LP reserve was running at 3.2 and declining.
Trask knew this the way people who tracked boutique billing volumes knew it: not precisely, not supernaturally, but from the visible output — the rate at which Klein Legal's cases appeared in public filings, the absence of new high-fee engagements in the matter database, the specific gap where a profitable firm's billable hours would show up in the court record.
"New terms," Trask said. "Two hundred and twenty-five thousand in operating capital. Twelve months, not eighteen. Settlement floor: three-fifty. Recovery rate is the same — eighteen percent." He picked up his glass. "The case-control provision is tighter than last year."
"How tight."
"Floor at two hundred thousand. Any settlement on a funded matter below that threshold requires my sign-off. The mechanism is the same as the original offer — written request, ten-day response window — but the dollar floor is lower and the window matters more at your current case size."
The Library was running on the last of the 3.2 LP reserve, a light monitoring overlay for Detection support and basic pattern analysis: Case-control clause assessment. Settlement floor $200K — lower than previous offer ($250K original, $300K revised). Probability of triggering per current Klein Legal case volume: elevated (average case value currently $60-120K; majority of matters below $200K. Assessment: provision primarily affects larger cases, not small-practice bread-and-butter.
The clause's practical bite had shifted. At Klein Legal's 2012 case volume, the $300K floor had been unlikely to trigger frequently. At Klein Legal's 2013 case volume — with the Mike-LP stream gone and the practice running leaner — the $200K floor covered a higher percentage of active matters.
But the specific harm was the same: on the matters that did cross the floor, Trask's settlement sign-off was a second voice in the room that was not the client's and was not Klein Legal's. It was the voice of someone whose return depended on the case running long and closing at a specific number.
"The threshold's lower," Don said.
"The capital's higher and the window's shorter. The math changes."
"The autonomy math doesn't."
Trask looked at Don with the patient attention of a man who has made this offer twice and believes he will not need to make it three times.
"What would change the autonomy math," he said.
Don's phone vibrated on the table.
He looked at it. Nora.
"I need thirty seconds," he said.
He stepped away from the table. The restaurant was doing its midday thing — full but not loud, the specific ambient noise of a room where people were having professional conversations they were trying not to let be overheard.
"The Darby arbitration," Nora said, without greeting. "Their counsel filed a motion for expedited arbitration this morning. They're requesting a fifteen-day response window instead of thirty. I have the response brief ready to file but it requires your approval on the LP analysis for the third-layer counterclaim." A pause. "I need your sign-off in the next two hours."
The third-layer counterclaim was Nora's find — PD's billing records showing charges attributable to PD's own work on the Greystone matter being allocated to Klein Legal's client. Running the Library analysis on that counterclaim required LP Don did not currently have at full quality.
"Approve the filing with the counterclaim analysis at sixty-five percent confidence," Don said. "Flag the confidence level in a footnote. We are not hiding the analysis quality."
"Understood." She rang off.
Don went back to the table.
"The case-control clause," he said. "The autonomy issue isn't the floor — it's the mechanism. I need a variance procedure that's weighted toward the client's circumstances rather than the funder's return assumptions. Right now, if a client needs to settle at one-eighty for reasons that have nothing to do with case value — liquidity crisis, health situation, time pressure — you can block it because it's under floor."
"I've approved variances before."
"Once in seven years." Don had filed that number from their first lunch.
A beat. Trask drank his wine.
"What mechanism would you accept."
"Automatic approval on written certification from the client that the settlement is in the client's specific interest for documented non-legal reasons. Your review right is preserved for any matter where the settlement decision is based on case-value analysis rather than client circumstances."
Trask looked at the table. He was running the math — not financial math, the autonomy math Don had named. This was not how he had structured this clause in the twenty-something offers he had made to boutiques in the last decade. It was a workable variation.
"That creates documentation risk," he said.
"It creates client-protection documentation. Which is the right documentation."
He looked at Don for a long moment.
"Three weeks," he said. "Modified terms or the offer lapses."
"Three weeks," Don said.
They ate the rest of the meal in the specific comfortable silence of two professionals who had done exactly as much of the deal as was available to do today and had agreed to the rest of the timeline.
The Pomerol was still good.
Don ate what was in front of him and thought about the variance mechanism and whether it could be negotiated to something that wasn't just a paper protection and didn't expose the clients to a funder with access to their personal financial circumstances.
Three weeks. He had them.
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