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Cool, thanks!!

gburt 15y ago
Remember that the lawyer in question is not your lawyer. You probably shouldn't take the above (or, in fact, the below - nothing I say is legal advice, nothing in this thread is legal advice) as legal advice. I am definitely not a lawyer, but that lawyer's response sounds reasonable, but it sounds like it was also likely under a range of conditions -- in particular, I think if you ever get in a position where you have a bit of a "special" contract (i.e., anything unusual in the broad sense of the term) copyright could very well apply.
- ScottBurson 15y ago
  Oh, I understand. I'm not duplicating large swaths of text wholesale. Most of it I'm writing fresh -- so given the above, it really sounds like I don't have to worry about borrowing a few phrases here and there.
Silhouette 15y ago
FWIW, we're in the middle of dealing with this right now in the UK, and the legal advice we have received is significantly different to that above. Caveat entrepreneur. My answer to the poll (for these and most other legal documents) is that we produce a serious draft ourselves first, and then take it to a decent lawyer for review. Our experience has been that asking lawyers (and accountants) to draft documentation from scratch is rarely cost-effective. If they aren't already very familiar with your business, you're just going to get whatever they can throw together in a couple of hours based on a loose understanding of what you do, partly because you're probably not paying for any more than that, and partly because they probably don't have enough detail from your preliminary discussions to produce something better anyway. Then you're effectively going to rewrite much of it yourself just to explain to them how things really work in enough detail to work with, and you're still going to go and see them again afterwards for fine-tuning. Edit: We do, however, sometimes have a preliminary call/meeting with a lawyer to find out what sorts of headings we ought to be filling out and ask about any tricky areas so we have some understanding before we try to draft anything. But we still do the drafting ourselves, even if it's just a plain English but detailed description of what we want to say that the lawyers can work on later.

Cool, thanks!!

gburt 15y ago

Remember that the lawyer in question is not your lawyer. You probably shouldn't take the above (or, in fact, the below - nothing I say is legal advice, nothing in this thread is legal advice) as legal advice. I am definitely not a lawyer, but that lawyer's response sounds reasonable, but it sounds like it was also likely under a range of conditions -- in particular, I think if you ever get in a position where you have a bit of a "special" contract (i.e., anything unusual in the broad sense of the term) copyright could very well apply.

ScottBurson 15y ago
Oh, I understand. I'm not duplicating large swaths of text wholesale. Most of it I'm writing fresh -- so given the above, it really sounds like I don't have to worry about borrowing a few phrases here and there.

Silhouette 15y ago

FWIW, we're in the middle of dealing with this right now in the UK, and the legal advice we have received is significantly different to that above. Caveat entrepreneur. My answer to the poll (for these and most other legal documents) is that we produce a serious draft ourselves first, and then take it to a decent lawyer for review. Our experience has been that asking lawyers (and accountants) to draft documentation from scratch is rarely cost-effective. If they aren't already very familiar with your business, you're just going to get whatever they can throw together in a couple of hours based on a loose understanding of what you do, partly because you're probably not paying for any more than that, and partly because they probably don't have enough detail from your preliminary discussions to produce something better anyway. Then you're effectively going to rewrite much of it yourself just to explain to them how things really work in enough detail to work with, and you're still going to go and see them again afterwards for fine-tuning. Edit: We do, however, sometimes have a preliminary call/meeting with a lawyer to find out what sorts of headings we ought to be filling out and ask about any tricky areas so we have some understanding before we try to draft anything. But we still do the drafting ourselves, even if it's just a plain English but detailed description of what we want to say that the lawyers can work on later.