Leadership Spotlight

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Another key to Shell's approach to legal strategy is his focus on playing a skilled defense when a competitor breaks the rules. He acknowledges that there will always be businesses that deftly abuse the law to advance their own agenda but says that one firm's illegal act never justifies another lowering its standards. Nonetheless, businesses need not be passive in the face of bullying adversaries.

Antitrust claims, for instance, can be brought against sizeable bullies. "These are some of the claims that companies like Sun Microsystems and Netscape are now bringing against Microsoft in the wake of the Microsoft verdict," Shell says. "The private firms get to benefit from that verdict and can sue without having to prove an antitrust violation because the government did that already."

These rivals, of course, were instrumental in the government's decision to bring its massive antitrust case against Microsoft in the first place. They lobbied heavily at the Justice Department and in Congress precisely for this reason, says Shell – so that they wouldn't be forced to shoulder the burden of a costly antitrust case against a wealthy and resource-rich opponent. The Microsoft case, thus, is an example of less-powerful firms using both regulatory and lobbying avenues to help them reclaim their competitive advantage and then using litigation to collect money based on their regulatory success.

"Abuse of process" is another way organizations can fire back at companies that have brought frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to delay a product launch or impose crippling costs, says Shell. Suppose that a young company is days away from launching an IPO when a powerful rival files a lawsuit claiming intellectual property infringement.

"The claim is bogus, but all that hits the street is that a little firm is sued by a big gorilla, the investors become worried about the IPO, and the little firm loses funding. What can the firm do? They can sue for abuse of process, claiming that the litigation was like a physical assault and caused damage – lost opportunity to go to market, lost profits from sales that could have taken place had they gotten the financing."

From Meditation to Corporate Law

Richard Shell brought a rich set of experiences with him when he came to Wharton. He counseled poor families as a social worker in the ghettos of Washington, D.C., studied meditation in Buddhist monasteries in Sri Lanka and South Korea, sold insulation door to door in his home town of Lexington, Virginia, and worked as a corporate attorney in Boston.

His 16 years at Wharton are the longest he has ever stayed in one place. He was raised in a military family and describes his childhood as peripatetic, having moved every year his first six years in school. "The good part of it was that I got to meet a lot of new people and see a lot of different parts of the world," he says. "The bad part was that I was moving around all the time, so I suffered from a certain rootlessness. But I have come to think of my early life as a source of strength. I've always found it easy to get along with people and get to know them quickly. I never felt overly rooted in one place or another, so I was able to move with my career."

By the time he was ten, Shell's father, a general in the Marine Corps, was running major Marine bases, a legacy that Shell says is not unlike being the son of a CEO. "You get introduced in public a lot as this person's son. That has its pluses and minuses – the plus is you feel important, but the minus is that it's hard to get out from under the shadow of someone who is a great deal more important. In the end, my father and I had a falling out over the Vietnam War when I became a Conscientious Objector. But we made up later and became very close."