Wisconsin Business Law and Litigation
A blog dedicated to Wisconsin business law and business litigation matters, authored by Chris Moander of the Moander Law Firm.

Having attended law school in Oklahoma and thus been exposed to the Texas Bar, I have to hand it to the Texas Young Lawyers Association. They offer several tools for the practitioner but the crowning jewel is the “Ten Minute Mentor” series. One has to watch the state-specific law aspects of any presentation, but these lectures are wonderful and incredibly useful. The speakers almost always come off as (1) knowledgeable, (2) professional, and (3) passionate about what they do as evidenced by the detail and concision with which they present their material. I recommend that any and all practitioners check the site out.

I participated in TYLA’s trial competition while in law school, which is cosponsored with the American College of Trial Lawyers. I was coached by an outstanding and accomplished attorney who taught me volumes about trial lawyering. I think TYLA has a good thing going and hope they continue to produce valuable tools for the profession.

Social networking sites have been a “hot topic” for some time. There is site for every persuasion, which would indicate that your employees could very likely be a member of a social networking site. “So what,” you say? “I monitor whether my employees are looking at inappropriate material or spending a lot of time surfing.” As you should! However, these sites offer a unique set of problems, as outlined in this Computerworld article. Are you, as employer, aware of all that is being or can be posted on these websites? What about the unintentional downloading of malware, loss of bandwidth to the sites…or the risk that your employees engage in various business torts? Obviously, information can leak out of a company in any number of ways, but does it hurt to close off one more opportunity and reduce your risks? I don’t think so and neither does Bill Gates. Further, one particular site appears to have made it all but impossible to actually delete a person’s profile, so any given item of information posted may live on forever and thus be accessible to any number entities.

I personally use Linked-In and so disagree with the Computerworld article’s stance that executives don’t use these sites. I’ve found a lot of my professional friends, older and younger, put Linked-In to good use. Then again, it is also used as an effective recruiting tool…

So, employers, how do you respond to these social networking site concerns?

The Startup Lawyer is asking how the current economic downturn will affect startups? There are a number of ways to look at this, as I stated in The Startup Lawyer’s comments. PC’s are ubiquitous at this point, so those whose livelihoods rely on services and not goods may be in a position to open a company. However, those looking for venture capital may find there is none, or maybe there is, at least here in Wisconsin. An economy in this kind of flux could arguably reward those who can use technology in the most effective manner. Alternatively, it is certainly possible that people will not form startups. I’m not an economist, but I am an entrepreneur and I surely believe that, even when times are bad, startups can continue to sprout.

People looking to start a business of any kind understandably (and intelligently) look to prevent spending on any unnecessary services or goods. Sadly, legal services are often lumped into the “too costly” or “unnecessary” category. It’s easy to see why - legal services are not cheap and Foonberg’s Client’s Curve of Gratitude reflects a form of Buyer’s Remorse as applied to legal work. The former is the experience of the younger (lawyers are too expensive), the latter the experience of the older (I could have done it without legal advice). These reasons appear sound from a business standpoint. However, there are some very real downsides….

- Purchased form documents create a false sense of security as “boilerplate” terms are assumed by the entrepreneurs to be “safe,” which is hardly the case. Owners who are not getting along and decide to split may find themselves mired in extremely expensive litigation over a long period of time, all of which could have been avoided by spending a fraction of the litigation costs on quality document drafting by an attorney.

- Technical faults in any number of license or regulatory filings go unnoticed until the company is audited, a criminal investigation occurs, or some other form of litigation begins. The litigation costs dwarf up-front legal costs due to the belief that preventative legal advice was not necessary or worthwhile.

- Buyers and sellers throw together an amalgam of words, believing that the resulting document reflects a mutual understanding. Eventually, one party feels aggrieved and suddenly the so-called contract is revealed as imprecise and nebulous…and so costly litigation commences.

While I am an attorney and we attorneys do like to earn a living, most of us hate (and I do mean hate) to see client’s creations swallowed up by truly preventable events. As one business attorney told me “Businesses will either pay me now, or they will pay me later.” That’s not a threat, it is a fact. That fact may not apply to every situation, but it applies to enough of them to warrant attention - so much so that not getting good legal advice up front results in an inverse form of Buyer’s Remorse…that services should have been procured at the start.

The question is: is it worth it to pay now, or to pay later?

UPDATE: I failed to note that the Milwaukee Business Blog discussed this same issue a few weeks ago.