Even Overeducated Fleas Postpone It

Preston in the Financial Times, Nov. 30: The strategic value of delay is widely underappreciated.

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JM: You wrote the book on procrastination!
WB: Actually, I didn't, but I've been meaning to.

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Jacob Stein in the Washington Lawyer, January 2006: I learned the art of procrastination in the best school there is—practicing law. There is no better place.… When you realize you are getting caught in a procrastination mental block, you must immediately turn the assignment over to someone else. The person you give the assignment to will do it right away. He has his own mental blocks, and he will welcome an assignment that distracts him from what he should be doing, which for some reason he cannot do. Give me a call and we will work a trade.

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Bruce Bromley of Cravath, Swain & Moore: I was born, I think, to be a protractor… I could take the simplest antitrust case and protract for the defense almost to infinity… [One case] lasted 14 years… Despite 50,000 pages of testimony, there really wasn't any dispute about the facts… We won that case, and, as you know, my firm's meter was running all the time—every month for 14 years.

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And, finally, Harvard's Bromley Professor of Law, Arthur Miller: In many ways, contemporary federal litigation is analogous to the dance marathon contests of yesteryear. The object of the exercise is to … hang onto one's client, and then drfit aimlessly and endlessly to the litigation music for as long as possible, hoping that everyone else will collapse from exhaustion.