Yes but Ford and Harrison takes the ASA managers out to expensive lunches.
This is not about pragmatically doing what is best for the airline. This is about getting to hang out with fancy lawyers who feed your ego and make you feel smart while eating meals on an expense account. All the while you get to engage in conversation about how greedy, evil and stupid pilots are. This is fun!
Lawyers are tools. You use them to fix a problem. The best lawyers fix the problem and go on to the next matter. But, if you fail to manage your lawyers, they are happy to hang around and gossip while billing as much as $400 an hour. Figure on an hour to review a matter before a lunch meeting, an hour of travel, two hours of meeting with a clients and another hour to make notes and research. A "lunch" can equate to $2,000 in billing and you can still make your kid's baseball game at 4:30. Not bad work and it sure beats the hard work of actually preparing cases for trial and litigation.
Lawyers thrive on disputes. These disputes have turned ASA into a place where no one can be trusted and where the airline's performance lingers in last place while everyone shifts blame and accusations. SkyWest will need to get a handle on this and will hopefully make this airline a place where people can work together - where mistakes are learned from and the operation improved - all in an environment of mutual trust.
It is not that Ford and Harrison are a bad group of lawyers. It simply appears their client has failed to manage them. Skywest probably will not tolerate this for long, in fact, I would guess that the recent list of departures from the G.O. have at least a tangential relationship to the rancorous relations which have been facilitated by the lawyers.
