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Another pattern I found is that CEOs with legal background tend to see contact negociations as an exercise in writing legally correct text (down to writing it t
by Argorak 12y ago
Another pattern I found is that CEOs with legal background tend to see contact negociations as an exercise in writing legally correct text (down to writing it themselves, even if they are not expert in that part of the law), which ends up taking far more time than negociating on the important facts and then having external lawyers formulate that out.
- larrys 12y ago"even if they are not expert in that part of the law" Agree. And what's even more dangerous is someone with legal background but not years of experience that is able to weigh, on gut, the pros and the cons of adding that legally correct text. [1] It's like the paradox of system security. A trade off between being, say 100% secure but then either opening up other potential security issues or having usability problems caused by something with a extremely small chance of happening. [1] Here's an example. You have a tenant. You want to be able to charge them for a certain thing upon move out. You can add the exact item or you can be vague. Both come with risks. The risk of adding the text is that you bring it to their attention and they nix it. The risk of not adding it is that you may not be able to charge for it upon move out. What do you do? It's not a legal question (legal wise you would add it) it's a strategy question.
- Argorak 12y agoThat's an interesting one. I have a another example: trying to put codify in a contract. For example, I recently had a client asking me for on-call duty on a weekend. So I quoted that and put it in the offer. (fixed fee for being on call, + a bonus for every hour worked) Now, they were asking me whether it shouldn't be included that if I build the stuff, I would feel obliged to make sure it runs well. Sure, I do, and if the team I am working with is firefighting, I will be a good colleague. But if someone wants the right to call me at any time, they shouldn't be surprised that this has a price.
- ThrustVectoring 12y agoWhat you're selling by codifying it is the choice. You can choose, at the cost of alienating the team, to take off of any weekend firefighting. This is a valuable choice if you do something like make plans that are expensive to cancel. If you don't have the choice, you can't make plans that are expensive to cancel, which is a real economic loss.
- Argorak 12y agoSure. But the problem in that case is that the client wanted the goodwill route and wanted it codified, which doesn't work ;).
- ThrustVectoring 12y agoYeah, you can either negotiate/decide on it on a vague, case-by-case basis - or you can negotiate beforehand.
- Argorak 12y agoI just found I destroyed the post with an edit: it should read "trying to codify good conduct".
- sliverstorm 12y agodown to writing it themselves, even if they are not expert in that part of the law Wow, that sounds just like engineers.