When to Use a Lawyer

Many years ago there was a movie with Danny DeVito where his character basically said “Lawyers are like nuclear weapons.  They have theirs so I have mine.  As soon as someone uses one of them, everything is fucked up.”  I personally couldn’t agree more.  🙂  This blog post will take a look at the use of lawyers on projects.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I am not a lawyer.  I am an international project manager.  However, I was sent for training by Hewlett Packard to learn Contracting for Project Managers.  That said, lawyers aren’t project managers either.  We have to work with each other and I have worked with many and even personally employed multiple lawyers at a time.

Now, the problem with engaging lawyers, whether they work for you or not, is, generally speaking, as soon as you engage one, they think they are in control.  This couldn’t be more wrong.  Lawyers most of the times don’t know shit about business or a damn thing about your deal that you are trying to close and they really don’t care to know.  It is the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg trying to explain Facebook to Congress.  This is not a time to lose control of your project and let a lawyer create an inferior contract that will sink you.

To make this is easy as possible, there are really only four times when you would need a lawyer on a project in general circumstances.  The first would be for contractual agreements between businesses.  The second would be for patent filings.  The third would be for regulatory issues.  Finally, any issues of litigation would certainly require a lawyer.  That’s it.  You don’t need them for anything else and you should keep them in their respective missile silos.

Lawyers are there to give advice on what is legal and what is not.  That’s it.  They don’t know the typical margins on contract manufacturing agreements or the design risk of dealing with India and China.  It is not their expertise and if you let them act superior and take over the agreement, you will lose and the project will fail.  I have had people read agreements I drove years after I left the company and they were always like “This is the way to do it!”

The bottom line is, if you hand 100 lawyers the same contract, you will get changes from 100 different people.  I think that they don’t feel like they are doing something unless they change something and they are not necessarily all that smart.  I once went through a contract that had been used for at least five years and found all sorts of errors in it including references to sections that didn’t exist.  When I gave the corrections to the VP of Legal he just looked at me and said “Are you kidding?”

In short, it is always your project or department or whatever.  Lawyers are working for you to advise you.  Don’t complicate things by giving up control to people that shouldn’t have it.  You will certainly pay for it later.

Your path to business success.