Opening Statements
Golf-loving lawyer creates a blog on disputes over the business of the game
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Harris, an avid golfer and general counsel at Shelton, Connecticut-based Clayton Holdings, blogs on legal disputes involving golf.
But don't expect to read about lawyers fudging their scorecards on this blog. Instead, Golf Dispute Resolution is where you can read about the three kinds of water and whether a Texas golf club has to pay $777,000 in unpaid water bills, or about Jack Nicklaus being accused in a lawsuit of hoodwinking a couple into spending $1.5 million to become charter members of a golf course development that went bankrupt.
Harris originally planned to write a book about cases related to golf, but someone has beaten him to the punch. So he decided to turn his research into a blog.
Asked why golf seems so litigious, Harris says it's not the game that spawns litigation, but the business arrangements around it. In fact, Harris says he could envision a dispute resolution program that has litigants "tee it up and play 18 holes and not talk about the dispute at all. After they play, those kinds of cases would be more open to settlement."
This article originally appeared in the June 2015 issue of the ABA Journal with this headline: “The 18 Holes War: Golf-loving lawyer creates a blog on disputes over the business of the game.”
