He Roy family is layering up the Season 3 premiere of Succession, which aired Sunday night on HBO, picks up in the aftermath of Kendall alleging publicly that his father Logan personally oversaw the decades-long cover-up of exploitation and intimidation at Way star Roy co As Kendall and Logan organize their own defenses, the rest of the family is sent scrambling to figure out how legally vulnerable they each might be in the impending war
And in the final 10 minutes of the episode, a new character, the high-powered attorney Lisa Arthur, is introduced, indicating that this season is headed toward the legal drama genre
To analyze the ongoing action and offer legal advice to the characters, TIME interviewed three corporate lawyers and Succession fans: Holly J Gregory, the co-chair of Sidles Austin LLP’s global Corporate Governance and Executive Compensation Practice; Kai Harden, the partner and co-chair of Sidles Shareholder Activism Practice; and Louis Pierre, a founding partner of Pierre, Connor & Strauss Here are excerpts from those conversations
I watched each season twice because I loved it so much
It’s literally what I do for a living: I’ve represented public companies like AT&T, Box and Fuji film in proxy battles and similar matters
Gregory: It’s a wonderful show, They’ve done a great job of drawing this dysfunctional family and dysfunctional company just brilliantly
It depicts some real-life situations that happen on real boards, although in the extreme I’m getting ready to teach an ethics class, and I’m going to base hypotheticals on the show to teach lawyer ethics It’ll be fun
Pierre: When I saw the first episode, I said, ‘Goodness gracious, there’s our lives
Many companies that are dominated by a character like Logan Roy end up with a number of dysfunctional people around them, because that person has 100% of the power in the company and no one else really has empowerment, So they tend to be a bit misfit in their roles as CFO or COO That is extremely accurate to this type of company
I was a part of a board meeting yesterday where the dad owned the company and died
Mom now owns the company, there’s a buyout agreement for mom—and it was just a hornets nest among the widow and the four children, each of which had their own lawyer there at the table So those dynamics are real, but I think the characters are just a bit embellished
They have both undertaken actions that are more than dodgy They have both engaged in a cover-up: Tom, being the driver of the cover-up and Greg, helping him while also trying to protect his own backside by retaining documents They’ve both taken actions that violate the company’s code of conduct and also likely violate law They can’t be advised by the company’s counsel at this point, because they have interests that conflict with the company’s interests, with respect to their unethical and potentially unlawful conduct They need their own counsel, and they need separate counsel from one another
One of the highlights of the show for me was the testimony in the senate And I don’t think any lawyer would have allowed these two to be in front of congress so unprepared It becomes abundantly clear these guys have a huge legal problem that is separate and distinct from the company’s legal issues
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