D&B: What's the solution for this situation?

Wriston: Everyone agrees that if the loser had to pay the winner's legal fees, the amount of litigation in this country would drop like a rock. Unless there is some kind of an economic penalty put on what businessmen would regard as frivolous suits, there's a danger of losing directors.

D&B: Will there be anything positive coming out of this in the sense of directors taking their responsibilities more seriously?

Wriston: I don't know of any directors who don't take their responsibilities seriously. I think what has happened is that a lot of people have forgotten what the object of a business is. As Peter Drucker taught us years ago, the object of a business is to create a customer. If you haven't got a customer you don't have any business, and if you don't have any business then you don't have any employees or social responsibility or anything else. You've got nothing. The way you create a customer is you put managements in place who understand that. There's a danger in making directorship an adversarial pursuit. That is a lawyer's view of business. We have to fight this insidious idea that a paper trail is more important than judgment. All good business decisions are made on no information. Probably the worst business decision made in my lifetime was to build the Edsel. That had more documentation than anything in the history of business - market surveys, engineering reports, everything was taken into account It was a disaster, but it was a documented disaster. That would have made the lawyers extremely happy.