Relevant: The funniest lawyer cartoon ever, at http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-08-28/
Fucking Sue Me (2011)
121–130 of 200 posts
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jesus Christ, $50k to pick the company name?? You could launch a whole new product for that much.
Maybe it was worth it. I once worked for a company that wanted to launch a new product called whose initials were A.I.D.S. I was lead dev of the Technical Information Team System too.
A lawyer friend of mine worked with a French firm that imported a lot of chicken (in culinary usage, commonly known as "coq" in France, translating accordingly as "cock" in English). She swears she got an email once with the subject "Concerned about Chinese cock."
(Note, as well, that one of the French words for hen is "poule," which is also an old slang term for "slut." The French just can't catch a break in the chicken business).
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#123Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#124The lesson, or at least the lesson I've learned from dealing with lawyers at companies big and small, is that lawyering is a practice in making sure nothing can possibly go wrong. In a way, lawyers are the QA team for the legal world. They know that the shit hitting the fan can potentially be very expensive, so they will go to extreme lengths to prevent any possibility of that happening. But just like you cannot rely…
Yes - lawyers have just the downside. If something gets missed, blame the lawyer. As a result they get very aggressive on protection, and nitpicking. This behavior gets worse because they're incented on billable hours. They also don't share any upside. If a deal gets delayed by 2 months, they don't get hurt.
The willingness to skip the lawyer is a set of risk taking that separates entrepreneurs. If there's a 1 in 100 chance that there will be a problem, then it's better to worry about all the 1 in 3 problems that can bring down the company. Now if you have 1000 projects going on, then you have to worry about the 1 in 100s...
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
But from the other side, the perspective is probably: - legal fees are going to be in the $100k's - he clearly has little money, so even if we win, we'll end up garnishing his wages for 40 years to get a fraction of what we sued for. - we might not win, then we're further in the hole So take the loss and move on. Thus from pud's side it's not an insane risk, but a calculated one.
That assumes the other side is rational and motivated only by profit. Which is not always a given (or possible to tell in advance).
I imagine there are cases where companies have to go after bad contracts even when they know they won't get their money. Whether it's a duty to their shareholders, sending a message to future contractors, what-have-you. And depending on the size of the company, their lawyers may be getting paid regardless of whether they are doing this case or not (not really sure how legal departments work).
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
He knows more about court expenses, than you know about what he knows. Just say "It's expensive to go to court", or better, just don't comment.
Completely off-topic, but your comment made me wonder: Is there any way to formalize expressions like "he knows more about X than you know about Y", where X and Y are different domains? Is there a way to quantify it, to answer questions like "how much more"? Do we have any kind of well-defined "unit of knowledge"? Does anyone here knows of relevant math branch that talks about these questions?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_(mathematics)
A measure is a function on the subsets of a space which yields a non-negative real number. For example, a measure of the triangle with vertices (0,0), (2,0), and (6,0), is 6, the area of that triangle. Measure satisfies certain nice properties, such as if A is a subset of B, then the measure of A is no more than the measure of B.
So, I guess if you can define a reasonable measure on the spaces X and Y, you can measure collections of X and collections of Y, and use the real numbers to determine which is "more".
But this doesn't strike me as useful in any way other than the fun of abstract mathematics. :-)
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I downvoted your post because it only contained a link to a web comic. If you had provided some of your own opinions on the blog post or why the comic was relevant to the blog post, I would have refrained. I like to explain my downvotes when the downvoted post is not an obvious troll.
Do you also like to deliberately explain (at least to yourself) your upvotes and all the cases when you didn't make your mind or mindfully decided not to upvote or downvote? Not trolling you, I just have really hard time trying to give my vote either way, and usually just move on to next comment or submission.
Although I plan to upvote your comment I'm waiting to hear back from my attorney first.
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#128Relevant Hark! A Vagrant: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=206
I downvoted your post because it only contained a link to a web comic. If you had provided some of your own opinions on the blog post or why the comic was relevant to the blog post, I would have refrained. I like to explain my downvotes when the downvoted post is not an obvious troll.
Have you considered a law career?
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#129The obvious lesson here is: listen to dad. If you are starting out, have a mentor.
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#130The lesson, or at least the lesson I've learned from dealing with lawyers at companies big and small, is that lawyering is a practice in making sure nothing can possibly go wrong. In a way, lawyers are the QA team for the legal world. They know that the shit hitting the fan can potentially be very expensive, so they will go to extreme lengths to prevent any possibility of that happening. But just like you cannot rely…
>The job of an engineer is to take the cost of materials, the budget, the expected longevity of the bridge, the project schedule, the prevailing environmental and geological conditions of the siting, etc. and balance all of these different variable against each other to arrive at a solution I'm not a lawyer, but I would assume that a good lawyer adopts an analogous process: they take the value of the contract, the pr…
But lawyers working in private practice, or partners in firms with a lot of power, will presumably be willing to balance risk against reward, and try to optimize accordingly.
Lawyers: please correct me if I'm assuming incorrectly here.
I am not a lawyer, but you are certainly assuming incorrectly.
It is a lawyer's job to not only get you a good contract, but also to maximize their billable hours. They do not gouge too aggressively - after all they want future billable hours as well. But the risks and rewards that the lawyer is balancing are their risks and rewards, which are not the same as yours.