With Goldman Sachs on the job, the corporate takeover of Dragon Systems
in an all-stock deal went terribly wrong. Goldman collected millions of
dollars in fees and the Bakers lost everything when Lernout &
Hauspie was revealed to be a spectacular fraud. L.& H. had been
founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, who had once been hailed as stars
of the 1990s tech boom. Only later did the Bakers learn that Goldman
Sachs itself had at one point considered investing in L.& H. but had
walked away after some digging into the company.