27 - Lawyers And Dinosaurs

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Of course it's the lawyer that dies first.

John Hammond once famously said that lawyers and dinosaurs don't mix. (1)

The quote, of course, should not be interpreted as anything other than self-serving. Like all billionaires involved in highly controversial fields, Hammond was no stranger to legal problems.

With Morales' family filing a multi-million lawsuit against InGen, Hammond's issues were of a different nature: retaining investor confidence, and getting Jurassic Park to the finish line.

Here, his erratic and emotional temperament shone through. To Hammond, it was a cruel twist that the mere existence of Jurassic Park was under threat now that everything was so close to being ready.

Pontificating to anyone who would listen about lawyers supposedly lacking the "vision" to understand the true nature of Jurassic Park, Hammond effectively crafted his own personal narrative.

In this version of the story, he was, of course, the archetypal visionary, able to fully grasp the wonder and miraculous nature of his dinosaur theme park. But in his (of course, entirely selfless) effort to "give the dinosaurs back to the world and the people," he was invariably hampered by lawyers and bureaucrats.

This version has proved surprisingly popular, and endures to this day in the vernacular memory of the origins of Jurassic Park. (2)

At the heart of these complaints was the inevitable consequence of Jurassic Park's first fatality.

The lawyers representing InGen's investors had at last delivered a list of demands that would have to be met to ensure continued support for the project.

In their general thrust, the demands were entirely predictable: investors wanted, above all, insurance that their assets were safe. This meant, in practice, that they needed convincing of the purely incidental nature of the fatality: a freak set of circumstances that would never occur again.

But to Hammond, who was used to informally wooing investors with grand speeches, tailored presentations, and hormonally-altered elephants, the mere reception of a legally formulated demands package was anathema.

This wasn't a terrain where he could play to his strengths, and he knew it.

To ensure the stability of the islands, investors ultimately demanded outside opinion - protected by utmost confidentiality, of course - from a panel of independent experts.

To be fair to John Hammond, however, his anxiety about his request was not entirely unmotivated. After all, what professional in the world held the right credentials to be able to correctly evaluate the security, animal well-being, and stability of Jurassic Park?

With all their hands-on experience, accrued the hard way, Muldoon and Harding had gotten it wrong, after all. Hammond worried that the "wrong" expert might refuse to endorse the park, thus dooming it before it could even open.

What started out as a fairly straightforward request for external evaluation, soon clashed against the practical obstacles involved with the peculiarity of Jurassic Park.

In most legislations, zoos receive accreditations from qualified inspectors. These inspectors will typically hold membership of a legally recognised accreditation organisation. To qualify, inspectors need - besides the obvious integrity and ability to maintain confidentiality - profound multidisciplinary knowledge. (3)

While they might be able to weigh in on the enclosures in isolation, their knowledge of extant animals and the best practices required for their husbandry was not easily transferable to Mesozoic dinosaurs. They would simply be unable to form a complete opinion.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

To make matters worse, inspectors didn't make these decisions - they submitted their reports to a commission belonging to the accrediting institution.

Such a commission would have to decide about the viability of Jurassic Park, without having ever seen a dinosaur in the flesh - lacking all kinds of experience and therefore having to trust blindly in the report they received.

Hammond also wasn't willing to trust that confidentiality would be preserved at all steps through the process.

Legal questions also played into this. Was Jurassic Park a zoo? So far, InGen had done its best to manoeuvre away from the definition, so as to give itself more leeway. While it couldn't deny the zoological nature of the theme park to Costa Rican authorities eventually, for now it could enjoy its legal grey area.

Seeking accreditation from an institution dealing with zoological collections might well compromise that stance in the future. (4)

Here, Hammond saw an opportunity to strike. His counter-proposal was designed to look like he was acceding to the lawyers' demands, and was merely debating the details of implementation. But in reality, he was jealously defending his creation.

He proposed that the park's endorsement team should include, not a regular zoo inspector, but a palaeontologist. On the surface of it, this was a perfectly reasonable request - a dinosaur expert being called to evaluate a dinosaur park.

Reality was not so simple, of course. While a palaeontologist would undoubtedly be useful as part of a wider endorsement team, ultimately said team would need to evaluate the park based on metrics that either fossilise rarely (animal behaviour) or have nothing to do with the field at all (enclosure security). (5)

Hammond, for his own, believed he could greatly increase the park's odds of getting an endorsement. After all, InGen already financed multiple digs around the world. This, of course, completely undermined the condition that the endorsement team be independent: at least one of its members would be dependent on InGen funding.

But to Hammond's good luck - and perhaps speaking to his instincts - the superficially reasonable nature of the proposal outweighed the worry about the verdict being manipulated. InGen's investors agreed.

Who else would be a part of the endorsement team was yet to be determined. But for the time being, Hammond was free to look for a palaeontologist he believed could be either compliant, or easily dazzled into endorsing Jurassic Park.

Footnotes:

(1) This may or may not be a joke about how gruesomely Donald Gennaro dies in Jurassic Park.

(2) This may or may not be a quip as to how willing the audience is at taking movie-Hammond at face value, and thinking that the park was deterministically doomed to fail because "dinosaurs, man", rather than as a result of its frankly bizarre management practices.

(3) I couldn't find much online about Costa Rican legislation on zoos prior to their famous 1998 wildlife law. Certainly, Costa Rican political changes in this respect will be something for InGen to deal with in the future. For now, in the absence of more information, I've gone with how the system broadly looks like today in many countries - although it is fair to assume that the process was a bit more rudimentary in the 1980s.

(4) I really do enjoy taking these technicalities seriously, even though they play next to no role in the original story. I find them endlessly fascinating, and I think they ground the story a lot more.

(5) The selection of the endorsement team is effectively the consequence of the inciting incident in both the book and the movie: following a dromaeosaurid-related fatality, Hammond selects a team to endorse his park. I always thought the specific selection didn't make a lot of sense, but in both book and movie, it is clearly implied that Hammond selects Grant and Sattler because he believes he'll get a guaranteed endorsement out of them. As you know, none of these characters have a big role to play in Bone And Amber, and ultimately this is a story about dinosaurs - human characters are only the facilitators. Even so, I think it's worth looking at Grant, because in both the book and the movie, his portrayal reflects a very particular view of the field, and not a very accurate one. But I won't jump the gun - we'll get into this next week!