"I am not a child, nor am I a fool, nor am I a sucker. I'm also not a hothead. You can't goad me into saying something. You can't trick me into saying something. I haven't hung up on you yet, but I will unless you can give me a single good reason to believe that any good could possibly come out of talking to you." "I'm going to write this story and publish it today. I can either write that you declined to comment or I can write down whatever comment you might have on the matter. You tell me which is fairer?" "Goodbye, Freddy." "Wait, wait! Just wait." Kettlewell liked the pleading note in Freddy's voice. "What is it, Freddy?" "Can I get you to comment on the general idea of litigation investment? A lot of people followed your lead in seeking out litigation investment opportunities. There's lots of money tied up in it these days. Do incidents like the one in Florida mean that litigation investment is a dead strategy?" "Of course not," Kettlewell snapped. He shouldn't be talking to this man, but the question drove him bonkers. He'd invented litigation investment. "Those big old companies have two common characteristics: they've accumulated more assets than they know what to do with, and they've got poisonous, monopolistic cultures that reward executives who break the law to help the company turn a buck. None of that's changed, and so long as that's all true, there will be little companies with legit gripes against big companies that can be used as investment vehicles for unlocking all that dead Fortune 100 capital and putting it to work." "But aren't Fortune 100 companies investing in litigation funds?" Kettlewell suppressed a nasty laugh. "Yeah, so what?" "Well, if this is about destroying Fortune 100 companies --" "It's about wringing positive social value out of the courts and out of investment. The way it used to work, there were only two possible outcomes when a big company did something rotten: either they'd get away scot-free or they'd make some lawyers very, very rich. Litigation funds fix that. They socialize the cost of bringing big companies to heel, and they free up the capital that these big companies have accumulated." "But when a big company invests in destroying another big company --" "Sometimes you get a forest where a few trees end up winning, they form a canopy that keeps all the sunlight from reaching the floor. Now, this is stable for forests, but stability is the *last* thing you want in a market. Just look at what happens when one of those big trees falls over: whoosh! A million kinds of life are spawned on the floor, fighting for the light that tree had hogged for itself. In a market, when you topple a company that's come to complacently control some part of the ecosystem, you free up that niche for new innovators." "And why is that better than stability? Don't the workers at these companies deserve the security that comes from their employers' survival?"