Litigation Finance

A common tactic of university administrations is to unlawfully fire a tenured professor, knowing that he would win if he sued them in court for breach of contract, but then to settle out of court by paying him a lump sum of money. Looking at it this way, a lot of apparently senseless university behavior makes sense. Why do they fire the professor when they know they'd lose in court? ---because they've done the calculation, and they've decided it's worth paying $100,000 to get rid of him.

The question for a university president is thus how much firing the professor will cost, not whether it is legal or not. A big part of how much it costs is the university's use of three sub-tactics: 1. Professors' impracticality, 2. The conflict of interest of the professor's lawyers, and 3. Starving him out.