{"id":535,"date":"2010-08-09T15:45:04","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T22:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/?p=535"},"modified":"2010-08-09T15:45:04","modified_gmt":"2010-08-09T22:45:04","slug":"the-value-of-legal-advice-isnt-measured-by-a-law-degree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/?p=535","title":{"rendered":"The value of legal advice isn’t measured by a law degree."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>Over the years in business and as a member of over forty boards, I have received good advice from corporate attorneys and on occasion bad advice as well.\u00a0 There is a line that should be drawn in a relationship between corporate attorney and CEO or board.\u00a0 Attorneys are paid to protect the corporation, not to give business advice.\u00a0 Some are experienced enough to provide great business advice. But the law degree they earned does not assure that, even though most CEO\u2019s respect the advice they receive from their attorney highly enough not to doubt the conclusions or the experience behind the conclusions offered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And since attorneys are paid to protect, often they will give a litany of warnings about what could go wrong when accepting a contract clause they have been trained to challenge.\u00a0 There comes a time when a CEO must decide to reject what may seem like important good advice from the attorney and chance acceptance of terms within a contract that may cause risk, but controllable risk or risk that is so remote as to be worth the acceptance of the business represented by the contract at hand.<\/p>\n

[Email readers continue here…]<\/span><\/em> I was chairman of a company that had been offered an investment by a Fortune 500 company making a strategic investment in our business, which was capable of driving new demand to the large company though a series of new web services creating a greater need for the large company\u2019s products.\u00a0 The business terms had been agreed to between the business development officer of the investing company and our board, as both companies turned the details over to their respective attorneys for documentation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The attorney for the investor was a member of a large, respected law firm in Silicon Valley, and certainly was full of himself as sole legal protector of the rights of his very significant investor.\u00a0 As drafts of the otherwise standard investment agreements passed from him to our attorney and our management, we immediately spotted a significant number of terms we not only had not agreed to but were contrary to the spirit of the investment.\u00a0 The attorney held fast at every challenge, stating that \u201cthese terms are standard for our client and cannot be changed.\u201d\u00a0 We appealed to the business development executive, who deferred to the attorney restating that the terms were unchangeable as far as the big company was concerned.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 After conferring between our attorney and board, we walked away from what would have been a fine strategic partnership, killed by an attorney who probably understood the client requirements but was unwilling to offer flexible solutions to problem areas. That attorney had made what we considered business decisions on behalf of his client.\u00a0 By the way, we immediately found a willing replacement that had an attorney not quite so full of himself and quickly concluded a similar deal to the acceptance of all.\u00a0 And to this day, I caution my CEO\u2019s not to deal with that Fortune 500 firm because of the experience we had with its attorney.\u00a0 You never know how much far reaching an action can be, given the speed and extent of communication between CEO\u2019s today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Over the years in business and as a member of over forty boards, I have received good advice from corporate attorneys and on occasion bad advice as well.\u00a0 There is a line that should be drawn in a relationship … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-depending-upon-others","category-surrounding-yourself-with-talent"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}