“Yes, of course. Like flow charts.” Her dating experience was proving to be of some benefit for litigation strategizing. But she wasn’t going to share that thought with Hunter—especially at this moment. He’d hand the whole case to Colette.

She pulled out her huge charts and tacked them to her bulletin board on the side wall. She had thought this through, and she could prove it. Hunter swung around his chair to view them.

She took a sip of water and then faced Hunter. “Here, this red line shows our starting with Rothman first. First, let’s ask the million-dollar question: how strong is that case? My answer: not a slam-dunk, although the recordings are really helpful.”

Hunter pulled back, surprised. “John didn’t do it. And you found that case with the facts directly on point supporting our legal argument, countering Colette’s New Jersey opinion.”

“Hopefully we can rely on that case and get it dismissed on legal grounds. This arrow shows that winning outcome. But we have to consider all the options. Let’s say we lose the motion to dismiss.” She traced the alternate arrow. “We continue with discovery of the facts. If Pierre didn’t authorize John to trade on his behalf, it’s John’s word against Pierre’s. We know John, so we think he’d be a good witness, but Pierre sounds pretty charming too.”

“What?”

She opened up her file drawer and pulled some magazine clippings out of a folder. “Look at him. He’s frequently in French society magazine pages: he’s good looking, charming—the jury could go for him in a ‘he said, she said’ case.”

“I can’t believe you researched French society magazines,” he said.

She couldn’t tell if he was being derisive or thinking she’d been very thorough. She suspected the former.

“It’s important to know about Pierre, especially if it comes down to personality and jury appeal. I hope we can get the case dismissed on the law. But it seems pretty factual at this point, unless Pierre executed a letter authorizing discretionary trading. We didn’t find that in the first document pull. Colette’s now in charge of finding the rest of the documents in the archives,” Audrey said. “Given that we need to complete discovery, it makes sense to delay the Rothman case. If we follow Colette’s suggestion to litigate the Rothman case first, and Hen Bank’s internal investigation of James concludes that James violated Hen anti-fraud policy, that’s going to create a negative inference for John that his report committed fraud.”

“Won’t that inference remain even if we proceed with the Rothman case after settling James? Plaintiffs can still say your employee committed fraud on your watch.”