6 ms·

Things your lawyer won't tell you

50 points by y2002 17y ago

y2002 17y ago
"While 45,000 law students graduate from law school each year, fewer than 30,000 attorney positions are available for these graduates." What a wasteful brain drain. How much better off would our country be if more of those students went into engineering or became entrepreneurs?
- jrockway 17y ago
  Depends on the area of law. Divorce lawyers and corporate lawyers may be a waste, but what about prosecutors and defense lawyers? And, if engineering is so much more important than law, why not pay engineers more than lawyers?
  - WarDekar 17y ago
    Because engineers don't go to an extra 3-4 years of school and go into 200k of debt to get there. Someone has to prop up the "higher" education system.
    - idoh 17y ago
      Law School programs are all 3 years. Graduating with 200K of debt is really unusual.
      - ibsulon 17y ago
        Count the undergraduate costs as well. It's certainly possible to do it on the cheap, but those eight clubs, 4.0, and volunteer work that help you make it into a top 10 school likely means you're not working with the lowly peons, especially if you're a product of the Ivy system.
        WarDekar 17y ago
        Not to mention the cost of living in addition to law school itself. And don't forget a lot of the top law schools (you did go to a top law school to "guarantee" a top salary (or you know, a job) when you got out, right?) aren't exactly in the boondocks.
        idoh 17y ago
        I don't want to belabor the point but it goes against evidence. For what it's worth I went to law school and graduated with less than 100K in debt, as did most of my peers. And this number is also in line with national averages if you cared to look it up.
    - dschobel 17y ago
      No, we just prop up the conference and technical publication markets. A conspiracy of some sort, no doubt.
  - tel 17y ago
    The value of money is at least in some ways derived from laws.
- jesselamb 17y ago
  Law school and entrepreneurship aren't mutually exclusive. You learn transferable skills and knowledge. Beyond a gaining a familiarity with the basic legal landscape, in law school you hone your skills in dealing with big abstract frameworks. You also improve your writing and communication skills. With the right mindset a law degree can be great prep to tackle a startup. At least that's what I'm hoping. :) -a non-practicing attorney, soon-to-be entrepreneur
  - y2002 17y ago
    You definitely pick up some nice skill sets in law school. If you managed to get out without crushing student loans that forces you to work for BigLaw, you can definitely use your legal skills in many exciting fields. Congrats and good luck Jesse. :)
    - jesselamb 17y ago
      Thanks! My loans aren't too bad, [just] under $100K, all federal. I'll be out of debt in 5 or 6 years while maintaining a good standard of living.
  - idoh 17y ago
    Jesse, I'm curious as to what you're up to. Ping me at idoh@idoh.com. I'm also a non-practicing lawyer in tech.
    - jesselamb 17y ago
      Just followed you on twitter. I'm @jesselamb. :)
fatdog789 17y ago
1. I use forms but charge you as if I did it from scratch. BULLSHIT. You pay for a lawyer's time and talents. Using a form means less time, which means you pay less. It also means that you're using a document which was successful in the past. Let's put it this way: do you want your lawyer to try a novel legal document just for you, or do you want him to use the one that has survived the fires of litigation? 2. I hand off work to peons but charge you a lawyer’s rate. That's illegal in every state. A lawyer cannot pass off non-lawyer's work as the product of lawyers. They can charge you a lawyer's rate for that work though, iff you agree to something that stupid. 3. My Ivy League education doesn’t make me a better lawyer. True. Look at Bush. 4. I hope you don’t look too closely at the expense report. Firms don't charge their clients for fixed overhead in expense reports. It comes out of the exorbitant hourly rates they charge (at large firms) or is swallowed by the firm as the cost of doing business (small-mid firms). Here's a hint for your bullshit meter: the "source" doesn't work for a law firm. 5. You don’t really need me. For any situation where you wouldn't normally need a lawyer, this is true. For any other situation, you can bet your ass that as soon as the shit hits the fan, the other side will have a lawyer. 6. My fee is negotiable. Lawyers are required by ethical regulations to disclose their fees (and the negotiability) of those fees. At least they are in CA, OH, PA, NY, NJ, and TX. 7. You’re always on the clock. You're only on the clock if you're discussing legal representation (advice, case status, etc). If your lawyer is billing you for chit chat, find another lawyer, and file a complaint with the bar. Lawyers are only allowed to charge you for actual work, and that's true in every state. Lawyers are also only allowed to bill you for actual time put in to your case. 8. I don’t know much about the law. A lawyer is required to disclose this to you. If he didn't, file an ethical complaint. If the violation (lack of knowledge is serious enough), he will get suspended or disbarred. 9. I don’t refer you to the best lawyers. Bullshit. Lawyers depend on clients for referrals more than on referrals from other lawyers. If they refer you to a bad lawyer, they won't get your repeat business. 11. I don’t have to tell you how I screwed up in the past. They do if you ask them. 12. I put on a tough act but that won’t actually help your case. Depends on the situation on whether this is desired. You don't want a tough act for contract negotiations, but you do want a tough act for settlement negotiations. 13. Mediation might be the better choice. This should be obvious. Your lawyer shouldn't need to tell you this. Getting along is always better than fighting. 15. I’m training junior attorneys on your dime. This is true in a "biglaw" firm, and only in a biglaw firm. Its also true that firms discount the time charged by lawyers in training. 16. I’m a dime a dozen. Most law school graduates drop out of the field by the 3rd year after graduation.
gamble 17y ago
#17 - "There's no legal risk in doing XYZ"
- noonespecial 17y ago
  Sure there is. There's also plenty of risk for not doing XYZ. In America, anyone can sue at any time for any reason. You are always at legal risk. So the advice that lawyers give "always talk to your attorney before..." is technically correct no matter what. It just happens to be self-serving (for the lawyer), impractical and needlessly expensive. Kind of like "you are always at risk of a head injury, never leave the house without wearing a kevlar helmet".
  - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
    Gamble was suggesting that is something that a lawyer would not say. so you are in agreement.
    - noonespecial 17y ago
      A lawyer wouldn't say ostriches can fly either. It goes further than that. The article was things a lawyer won't tell you but are true nonetheless. From a lawyer's standpoint, everything is a legal risk of some form or another, so I'd argue that this fits in the ostrich category, not the article's category.
abalashov 17y ago
While certainly interesting, not all the things the author paints here as sordid, unethical business practices actually are, at least to the extent that's intersubjective. If you're doing a startup, you may want to take some lessons from the eons of microeconomics and management wisdom condensed into some of these things instead of cheering at the burning effigy of the man with the briefcase. It's a much more pithy, intuitive introduction to concepts like economies of scale and capital investment than a theoretical overview: 1. Charging for modifications to document templates instead of original forms as though original -- It is common to leverage technologies, procedures and and/or existing assets as part of a service offering. Who does anything from scratch more than 5 times before they get tired of it? This is no different than one of us building an API or a framework so that programming tasks that used to take 20 hours can now be done in 5 hours. In our world, that does _not_ mean you should now be billing the customer 5 hours for the same task, at least, not if you have any business sense. If you do that, you derive no economic advantage from the up-front work you put into building that framework, nor do you even make back the time (money) you spent building it. There's no incentive to do that; in that case, you're better off doing everything from scratch and billing for it. The proper thing to do is to transmit some of the advantage of your lever into the price. If the task used to take 20 hours, now takes 5, bill the customer 15. It's cheaper for the customer and improves your competitive position while allowing you to earn a return on the up-front investment you made in developing your efficiency-enhancing technology, which can sometimes be hundreds or thousands of man-hours. This is a form of amortisation; a fraction of the cost of the capital outlay in producing the technology is distributed into the cost basis of every application, deployment or instance. Big companies do this all the time; it's one of the key points that guides their pricing decisions on services that capitalise on internal tool chains, utilities, etc. For example, if the IT department at Nortel spent $1m building a new CRM and case management system for all the support people to use, you bet the cost of that $1m is going to be distributed into the cost of support contracts by people figuring out the bottom line. This is not only normal, but prudent. So, while it may be deceptive to _claim_ that a document was literally prepared from scratch and bill as if it were, charging money corresponding to the literal amount of time spent on something even with the efficiency advantage of a lever you had to build is dumb. The lawyer did, at some point, have to actually build those documents; they're entitled to recoup their investment and build fat margins into it on top. How much is a question for price competition; the market-affirming answer is, "as high as they can get away with." 2. I hand off work to peons but charge you a lawyer’s rate -- Mostly, clients do business with a law _firm_ and pay for the services of that firm as a whole, in the aggregate. This includes a cost basis consisting of overhead. Again, to bring this back to our industry, this is no different than charging the customer $100/hr as a web design/development company, despite the fact that parts of the project might pass through a range of people with widely varying skill, credential and compensation levels. Some of these people may be internal, others outsourced, etc. Hourly billing is not a continuously variable transmission; it doesn't jump up and down depending on whose exact eyeballs are on your project at this exact moment. Compensation is for the company as a whole. Besides, it requires up-front and residual investment to find, qualify, hire, train, and continuously employ a paralegal, assistant, clerk, etc., and there is no reason why their work on your behalf as a lawyer can't fetch much higher hourly rates than what you pay them. This is no different than the reason why project-based contractors earn more hourly than permanent employees. You want to pay $50/hr for the services of a paralegal instead of $300? Fine, then hire them on full-time at $60k (~$30/hr) + benefits yourself, and figure out how to direct their efforts and utilise their capabilities yourself. It's $1 for the nail, $199 for knowing where to put it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with billing a composite rate in consideration of all the time, money and expertise put into creating a firm - together with the right people, management, process and assets - that produces useful results as a cohesive whole. Why would we hold law firms to different standards than we hold technology consultancies and service firms? 3. I hope you don’t look too closely at the expense report -- Making margin on expenses is a normal and accepted practice in many other industries; it offsets the overhead of procuring them and dealing with them, as well as a certain amount of small, but calculated risk that you won't be remunerated for expenses incurred on the client's behalf. 4. You’re always on the clock -- That's also normal across the board in professional services. 5. Your bill is only a guesstimate -- Also normal, within a reasonable margin of error. 6. I’m training junior attorneys on your dime -- How is this different from, "I'm training junior software engineers on your dime?" Normal. ... I'm not saying lawyers don't do seedy stuff; you'll find no disagreement from me. But let's be realistic here; law firms are businesses -- it's not fair to praise everyone else's fiduciary astuteness when they do these things and vilify lawyers for them just because we all love to hate lawyers. The presence of the particular points I mentioned above in the article basically says to me, "Law firms are so evil, look at all the business-savvy and commercially normative things they do!" This is stupid.
radley 17y ago
We had a very good attorney who not only told us when he was "talking shortcuts" (forms, paralegals), he actually advised such methods to save costs when appropriate.
wglb 17y ago
This is really not a useful article. All of my experience with lawyers has been contrary to what is shown here.
- dschobel 17y ago
  The article was completely worthless. It's a revelation tantamount to "unethical experts have the ability to abuse their clients' trust".
  - argv_empty 17y ago
    I would say it's more like "unethical experts have the ability to abuse their clients' trust in the following ways: _____."
- yason 17y ago
  Well, the world is different for everyone. It might be that the author has too consistently had experiences like those described in the article, and is therefore propelled to dissect the "tricks" and jot them down into an article.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
andrewljohnson 17y ago
If you are looking for a start-up lawyer, I would highly recommend my lawyer - George Grellas: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas I have had none of the problems listed on this form. I don't get sneakily billed or over-billed, I get personal attention from two lawyers (including George whose name is on the door), and I get what appears to be very sound legal advice. I have had two friends hire lawyers to set up their companies, and Grellas's hourly rate was much lower, and the final cost overall was half of what one friend paid and less than half of what the other paid. Moreover, unlike a lot of Valley lawyers, Grellas's firm only represents start-ups - they have no VC clients. This means they know about the issues I face, and I can be comfortable there are no conflicts of interest when I look for VC money.
- joshu 17y ago
  I've been thinking about talking to him about backup counsel (my current lawyer, whom I love, is sometimes on the other side of deals from me) mostly on the strength of his commentary here. Good marketing!
  - andrewljohnson 17y ago
    Talk to him for sure! He'll certainly meet with you for free, and he's just down the road from MV (in Cupertino).
Confusion 17y ago
It's the same problem that haunts the software industry. It's hard for people outside the industry to judge the quality of people in the industry and as a result, they choose their partners based on everything but the thing that matters: the quality of their work. As a result, they pay $200 an hour for 'software consultants' that wouldn't recognize a memory leak if their life dependended on it. As a further result, the industry doesn't even try to compete based on quality.

50 points by y2002 17y ago

y2002 17y ago

"While 45,000 law students graduate from law school each year, fewer than 30,000 attorney positions are available for these graduates." What a wasteful brain drain. How much better off would our country be if more of those students went into engineering or became entrepreneurs?

jrockway 17y ago
Depends on the area of law. Divorce lawyers and corporate lawyers may be a waste, but what about prosecutors and defense lawyers? And, if engineering is so much more important than law, why not pay engineers more than lawyers?
- WarDekar 17y ago
  Because engineers don't go to an extra 3-4 years of school and go into 200k of debt to get there. Someone has to prop up the "higher" education system.
  - idoh 17y ago
    Law School programs are all 3 years. Graduating with 200K of debt is really unusual.
    - ibsulon 17y ago
      Count the undergraduate costs as well. It's certainly possible to do it on the cheap, but those eight clubs, 4.0, and volunteer work that help you make it into a top 10 school likely means you're not working with the lowly peons, especially if you're a product of the Ivy system.
      - WarDekar 17y ago
        Not to mention the cost of living in addition to law school itself. And don't forget a lot of the top law schools (you did go to a top law school to "guarantee" a top salary (or you know, a job) when you got out, right?) aren't exactly in the boondocks.
        idoh 17y ago
        I don't want to belabor the point but it goes against evidence. For what it's worth I went to law school and graduated with less than 100K in debt, as did most of my peers. And this number is also in line with national averages if you cared to look it up.
  - dschobel 17y ago
    No, we just prop up the conference and technical publication markets. A conspiracy of some sort, no doubt.
- tel 17y ago
  The value of money is at least in some ways derived from laws.
jesselamb 17y ago
Law school and entrepreneurship aren't mutually exclusive. You learn transferable skills and knowledge. Beyond a gaining a familiarity with the basic legal landscape, in law school you hone your skills in dealing with big abstract frameworks. You also improve your writing and communication skills. With the right mindset a law degree can be great prep to tackle a startup. At least that's what I'm hoping. :) -a non-practicing attorney, soon-to-be entrepreneur
- y2002 17y ago
  You definitely pick up some nice skill sets in law school. If you managed to get out without crushing student loans that forces you to work for BigLaw, you can definitely use your legal skills in many exciting fields. Congrats and good luck Jesse. :)
  - jesselamb 17y ago
    Thanks! My loans aren't too bad, [just] under $100K, all federal. I'll be out of debt in 5 or 6 years while maintaining a good standard of living.
- idoh 17y ago
  Jesse, I'm curious as to what you're up to. Ping me at idoh@idoh.com. I'm also a non-practicing lawyer in tech.
  - jesselamb 17y ago
    Just followed you on twitter. I'm @jesselamb. :)

fatdog789 17y ago

1. I use forms but charge you as if I did it from scratch. BULLSHIT. You pay for a lawyer's time and talents. Using a form means less time, which means you pay less. It also means that you're using a document which was successful in the past. Let's put it this way: do you want your lawyer to try a novel legal document just for you, or do you want him to use the one that has survived the fires of litigation? 2. I hand off work to peons but charge you a lawyer’s rate. That's illegal in every state. A lawyer cannot pass off non-lawyer's work as the product of lawyers. They can charge you a lawyer's rate for that work though, iff you agree to something that stupid. 3. My Ivy League education doesn’t make me a better lawyer. True. Look at Bush. 4. I hope you don’t look too closely at the expense report. Firms don't charge their clients for fixed overhead in expense reports. It comes out of the exorbitant hourly rates they charge (at large firms) or is swallowed by the firm as the cost of doing business (small-mid firms). Here's a hint for your bullshit meter: the "source" doesn't work for a law firm. 5. You don’t really need me. For any situation where you wouldn't normally need a lawyer, this is true. For any other situation, you can bet your ass that as soon as the shit hits the fan, the other side will have a lawyer. 6. My fee is negotiable. Lawyers are required by ethical regulations to disclose their fees (and the negotiability) of those fees. At least they are in CA, OH, PA, NY, NJ, and TX. 7. You’re always on the clock. You're only on the clock if you're discussing legal representation (advice, case status, etc). If your lawyer is billing you for chit chat, find another lawyer, and file a complaint with the bar. Lawyers are only allowed to charge you for actual work, and that's true in every state. Lawyers are also only allowed to bill you for actual time put in to your case. 8. I don’t know much about the law. A lawyer is required to disclose this to you. If he didn't, file an ethical complaint. If the violation (lack of knowledge is serious enough), he will get suspended or disbarred. 9. I don’t refer you to the best lawyers. Bullshit. Lawyers depend on clients for referrals more than on referrals from other lawyers. If they refer you to a bad lawyer, they won't get your repeat business. 11. I don’t have to tell you how I screwed up in the past. They do if you ask them. 12. I put on a tough act but that won’t actually help your case. Depends on the situation on whether this is desired. You don't want a tough act for contract negotiations, but you do want a tough act for settlement negotiations. 13. Mediation might be the better choice. This should be obvious. Your lawyer shouldn't need to tell you this. Getting along is always better than fighting. 15. I’m training junior attorneys on your dime. This is true in a "biglaw" firm, and only in a biglaw firm. Its also true that firms discount the time charged by lawyers in training. 16. I’m a dime a dozen. Most law school graduates drop out of the field by the 3rd year after graduation.

gamble 17y ago

#17 - "There's no legal risk in doing XYZ"

noonespecial 17y ago
Sure there is. There's also plenty of risk for not doing XYZ. In America, anyone can sue at any time for any reason. You are always at legal risk. So the advice that lawyers give "always talk to your attorney before..." is technically correct no matter what. It just happens to be self-serving (for the lawyer), impractical and needlessly expensive. Kind of like "you are always at risk of a head injury, never leave the house without wearing a kevlar helmet".
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  Gamble was suggesting that is something that a lawyer would not say. so you are in agreement.
  - noonespecial 17y ago
    A lawyer wouldn't say ostriches can fly either. It goes further than that. The article was things a lawyer won't tell you but are true nonetheless. From a lawyer's standpoint, everything is a legal risk of some form or another, so I'd argue that this fits in the ostrich category, not the article's category.

abalashov 17y ago

While certainly interesting, not all the things the author paints here as sordid, unethical business practices actually are, at least to the extent that's intersubjective. If you're doing a startup, you may want to take some lessons from the eons of microeconomics and management wisdom condensed into some of these things instead of cheering at the burning effigy of the man with the briefcase. It's a much more pithy, intuitive introduction to concepts like economies of scale and capital investment than a theoretical overview: 1. Charging for modifications to document templates instead of original forms as though original -- It is common to leverage technologies, procedures and and/or existing assets as part of a service offering. Who does anything from scratch more than 5 times before they get tired of it? This is no different than one of us building an API or a framework so that programming tasks that used to take 20 hours can now be done in 5 hours. In our world, that does _not_ mean you should now be billing the customer 5 hours for the same task, at least, not if you have any business sense. If you do that, you derive no economic advantage from the up-front work you put into building that framework, nor do you even make back the time (money) you spent building it. There's no incentive to do that; in that case, you're better off doing everything from scratch and billing for it. The proper thing to do is to transmit some of the advantage of your lever into the price. If the task used to take 20 hours, now takes 5, bill the customer 15. It's cheaper for the customer and improves your competitive position while allowing you to earn a return on the up-front investment you made in developing your efficiency-enhancing technology, which can sometimes be hundreds or thousands of man-hours. This is a form of amortisation; a fraction of the cost of the capital outlay in producing the technology is distributed into the cost basis of every application, deployment or instance. Big companies do this all the time; it's one of the key points that guides their pricing decisions on services that capitalise on internal tool chains, utilities, etc. For example, if the IT department at Nortel spent $1m building a new CRM and case management system for all the support people to use, you bet the cost of that $1m is going to be distributed into the cost of support contracts by people figuring out the bottom line. This is not only normal, but prudent. So, while it may be deceptive to _claim_ that a document was literally prepared from scratch and bill as if it were, charging money corresponding to the literal amount of time spent on something even with the efficiency advantage of a lever you had to build is dumb. The lawyer did, at some point, have to actually build those documents; they're entitled to recoup their investment and build fat margins into it on top. How much is a question for price competition; the market-affirming answer is, "as high as they can get away with." 2. I hand off work to peons but charge you a lawyer’s rate -- Mostly, clients do business with a law _firm_ and pay for the services of that firm as a whole, in the aggregate. This includes a cost basis consisting of overhead. Again, to bring this back to our industry, this is no different than charging the customer $100/hr as a web design/development company, despite the fact that parts of the project might pass through a range of people with widely varying skill, credential and compensation levels. Some of these people may be internal, others outsourced, etc. Hourly billing is not a continuously variable transmission; it doesn't jump up and down depending on whose exact eyeballs are on your project at this exact moment. Compensation is for the company as a whole. Besides, it requires up-front and residual investment to find, qualify, hire, train, and continuously employ a paralegal, assistant, clerk, etc., and there is no reason why their work on your behalf as a lawyer can't fetch much higher hourly rates than what you pay them. This is no different than the reason why project-based contractors earn more hourly than permanent employees. You want to pay $50/hr for the services of a paralegal instead of $300? Fine, then hire them on full-time at $60k (~$30/hr) + benefits yourself, and figure out how to direct their efforts and utilise their capabilities yourself. It's $1 for the nail, $199 for knowing where to put it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with billing a composite rate in consideration of all the time, money and expertise put into creating a firm - together with the right people, management, process and assets - that produces useful results as a cohesive whole. Why would we hold law firms to different standards than we hold technology consultancies and service firms? 3. I hope you don’t look too closely at the expense report -- Making margin on expenses is a normal and accepted practice in many other industries; it offsets the overhead of procuring them and dealing with them, as well as a certain amount of small, but calculated risk that you won't be remunerated for expenses incurred on the client's behalf. 4. You’re always on the clock -- That's also normal across the board in professional services. 5. Your bill is only a guesstimate -- Also normal, within a reasonable margin of error. 6. I’m training junior attorneys on your dime -- How is this different from, "I'm training junior software engineers on your dime?" Normal. ... I'm not saying lawyers don't do seedy stuff; you'll find no disagreement from me. But let's be realistic here; law firms are businesses -- it's not fair to praise everyone else's fiduciary astuteness when they do these things and vilify lawyers for them just because we all love to hate lawyers. The presence of the particular points I mentioned above in the article basically says to me, "Law firms are so evil, look at all the business-savvy and commercially normative things they do!" This is stupid.

radley 17y ago

We had a very good attorney who not only told us when he was "talking shortcuts" (forms, paralegals), he actually advised such methods to save costs when appropriate.

wglb 17y ago

This is really not a useful article. All of my experience with lawyers has been contrary to what is shown here.

dschobel 17y ago
The article was completely worthless. It's a revelation tantamount to "unethical experts have the ability to abuse their clients' trust".
- argv_empty 17y ago
  I would say it's more like "unethical experts have the ability to abuse their clients' trust in the following ways: _____."
yason 17y ago
Well, the world is different for everyone. It might be that the author has too consistently had experiences like those described in the article, and is therefore propelled to dissect the "tricks" and jot them down into an article.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

andrewljohnson 17y ago

If you are looking for a start-up lawyer, I would highly recommend my lawyer - George Grellas: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas I have had none of the problems listed on this form. I don't get sneakily billed or over-billed, I get personal attention from two lawyers (including George whose name is on the door), and I get what appears to be very sound legal advice. I have had two friends hire lawyers to set up their companies, and Grellas's hourly rate was much lower, and the final cost overall was half of what one friend paid and less than half of what the other paid. Moreover, unlike a lot of Valley lawyers, Grellas's firm only represents start-ups - they have no VC clients. This means they know about the issues I face, and I can be comfortable there are no conflicts of interest when I look for VC money.

joshu 17y ago
I've been thinking about talking to him about backup counsel (my current lawyer, whom I love, is sometimes on the other side of deals from me) mostly on the strength of his commentary here. Good marketing!
- andrewljohnson 17y ago
  Talk to him for sure! He'll certainly meet with you for free, and he's just down the road from MV (in Cupertino).

Confusion 17y ago

It's the same problem that haunts the software industry. It's hard for people outside the industry to judge the quality of people in the industry and as a result, they choose their partners based on everything but the thing that matters: the quality of their work. As a result, they pay $200 an hour for 'software consultants' that wouldn't recognize a memory leak if their life dependended on it. As a further result, the industry doesn't even try to compete based on quality.