How to Save Money on Legal Work
On today's edition of "How to Save Money on Legal Work" we examine the recalcitrant client . The recalcitrant client relies on information garnered from such important professionals as the employee whose husband's sister's cousin is a lawyer and he says ______, the sales person who almost went to law school, contracts from other companies (well if it works for them, it MUST work for us if we just change the names around), or by digging through a law firm dumpster. But perhaps the worst form of recalcitrant client is the one who says, "I know what I'm doing, I've done this before and everything turned out ok."
Recalcitrant client then has a difficulty, most often of the form where a customer hasn't paid, or a customer has breached the terms of the "agreement." Enter the lawyer.
The most often provided legal opinion in this case consists of, "I do not think this means what you think it means." In other words, your contract sucks, is totally unenforceable, and now you get to eat whatever losses you have incurred. If you were stupid enough to turn over source code, trade secret information, or anything else of significant value, not only do you lose money, but you may lose your entire company. Then you can try suing your employee's husband's sister's cousin, the sales person, and the janitor. Good luck with that.
So, want to save money? Pay the damn lawyer to write your agreements. Thus sayeth the Psycho Sensei who is even now attempting to find some possible way of bailing out a Recalcitrant Client [tm].
Billable hours are good. Shooting ducks in a barrel provides no enjoyment and a little bit of "told ya so." Time to do the "told ya so" dance in slow motion.