"It works for me.
I’m not sure what the lesson is here."
The lesson is: he needs to get sued. :-)
Fucking Sue Me (2011)
191–200 of 200 posts
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 chi…
Just a quibble: chicken ("poulet" in French) that you buy in the supermarket is the female chicken, the hen. The male chicken, the cock ("coq" in French) is generally not eaten as the meat is leaner and tougher. The French, however, do eat them sometimes. The famous French recipe "Coq au vin" is for cooking cock for a long time in wine to break down the tough meat.
The French word for slut is "salope" and is also synonymous with the english word "bitch". The french word "poule" does mean hen, but is used more like the American slang word for a single woman: "chick".
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#193The 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…
"I think the problem with many corporate lawyers is the same as with many corporate programmers working at large, traditional corporations: risk takers are heavily penalized, and those who make traditional, low-risk decisions are rewarded. You know, the whole "nobody ever got fired for using Java" bit.
"
Depends entirely on the corporate culture. Where I work, this would be very wrong. As for private lawyers, i think you have it very backwards in practice.
Corporate lawyers, in a culture where lawyers are doing what they should be (assessing risks and informing clients about them, in priority order and explaining tradeoffs and possible workarounds), are risk takers. They don't make business decisions, they essentially try to solve legal problems creatively. In these cultures, ineffective lawyers who don't understand what matters get fired.
Corporate lawyers, in a culture where lawyers have say over products or business decisions, go very badly, for the reasons you mentioned. It is seriously inept management that puts lawyers in a go/no-go position over business decisions (not "this is illegal we will get arrested decisions"), and even more inept when they don't hold them accountable for whatever time they waste.
Most private lawyers are not held accountable for wasting everyone's time. They are still paid. They still get used. People just suck it up. So they actually are almost exactly like what you have described to the corporate lawyers.
Very good private lawyers are more like the corporate lawyers in a good culture.
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
With lawyers, if everything goes perfectly then they just did their job. If anything goes wrong they're entirely blamed for it. Since they are paid by the hour, there is an explicit incentive to spend as much time as possible to make sure everything goes perfectly. Typical agency problem. It's up to the client to tell the lawyers when they are done. Now, the very very best lawyers, the ones who have a waiting list of…
If you don't tell your lawyers what you want, they will try to remove every problem. Tell your lawyers you want decent terms, and you don't want to spend forever working on contracts, and have them explain the risks you face from the contract the other party proposed. Failing to engage with lawyers and then not liking their results is like managers who fail to engage with software developers and then don't like the r…
"If you don't tell your lawyers what you want, they will try to remove every problem."
You have crappy lawyers ;)
Of course, crappy lawyers are an epidemic, but that doesn't make them less crappy.
(your advice is completely correct in regards to dealing with such lawyers, but you are better off not hiring them in the first place)
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
With lawyers, if everything goes perfectly then they just did their job. If anything goes wrong they're entirely blamed for it. Since they are paid by the hour, there is an explicit incentive to spend as much time as possible to make sure everything goes perfectly. Typical agency problem. It's up to the client to tell the lawyers when they are done. Now, the very very best lawyers, the ones who have a waiting list of…
If you don't tell your lawyers what you want, they will try to remove every problem. Tell your lawyers you want decent terms, and you don't want to spend forever working on contracts, and have them explain the risks you face from the contract the other party proposed. Failing to engage with lawyers and then not liking their results is like managers who fail to engage with software developers and then don't like the r…
My approach:
I take the contract to the lawyer, discuss it with them, decide what is worth negotiating on and not. I do the negotiations. The lawyer advises.
Most contracts don't require me taking them to a lawyer. I read them 4-5 times over, annotate them with questions, talk with the client, see what we need to clarify, and go for it. Those that do involve questions I want to clarify with a lawyer before clarifying with the client (where raising a question may make me sound greedy or dramatic, etc).
Most contracts are designed to cover one or both sides in the event that something goes wrong. The boilerplate can usually be quickly identified once you have some practice. The rest is going to be operational stuff and you don't want to sign the contract to find out what is in it. These sections establish expectations on what is done and how you interact.
But whatever you do, don't have your lawyer do the negotiation for you. Madness lies that way. Business negotiations are not the same.
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#196I think that there is inherently some risk taken in any endeavour. I think the biggest risk is not doing anything. I agree on that.
Signing contracts without legal counsel might turn out okay, but legal counsel is like insurance or a seat belt: You don't need it until you have an accident.
It is dissuasive, and it is mitigating. i.e: Those who want to screw you will think twice when you have an attorney, and if they wish to screw you, you have a better chance to get screwed less if you have an attorney than if you haven't.
On the other hand, it depends. Just as some seat belts and air-bags were actually the cause of death of the car driver, it depends on your lawyers. It's not a generic term. One needs to find people who are well versed in the matters, and the body of law is large, so one needs specialists in a field. You can't get the best advice on start-ups from a lawyer who specializes in divorces.
Again, on the other hand, Elon Musk once affirmed that they didn't have lawyers because things were too complicated and it wouldn't make any sense to them. That was back in 2003, I doubt things stayed the same. The stakes are high, and a company like SpaceX ? I don't think they don't have lawyers.
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#197Lawyering in general, and business lawyering in particular, is an art in which good judgment counts a lot more than mere technical precision. From a lawyer perspective, a written contract may have all sorts of areas in which it falls short of an ideal in capturing all key issues potentially affecting a client. There are recitals (defining factual context), covenants (setting forth promises), conditions (defining when…
You topped the comments in previous discussion too. (Hope you are the same guy)
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#198Well put.
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#199Well put.
Re: Fucking Sue Me (2011)
#200I never heard Robert Young say "fucking sue me" in Father Knows Best. But then fathers don't wear fucking fedoras these days either.