Our offline business deals with legal contracts daily and in some cases hourly throughout the normal business week. We’ve had to do deal with E&O, lawsuits, conflicts, attorneys and courts, I’ve given many, many taped statements, we’ve had all sorts of different business legal situations arise over the years simply from the nature of our business. I see people get freaked out by this stuff all the time. Weekly I have to step in and deal with some sort of conflict resolution and on bad weeks this happens daily. It is from this experience that my view is colorized.

I don’t think attorneys always opt for the most billable hours, I think they’d have a problem with the bar if they did. I think just as those who are on commission are more easily geared toward commissionable activities as many attorneys are more geared toward billable activities. They won’t pay their bills if they are doing everything pro bono.

It’s not a statement of guilt or that all lawyers are evil or anything dramatic like that, it’s a matter of reality. Yes, they will give you a free consultation/call, plenty of them will do that, but I’m sure you are familiar with retainers. If you go to the well or need to go to the well, that’s their method of keeping the costs in order. Law offices aren’t quite as bad as hospitals for billing, but they are close and many times the clients do most of the heavy lifting.

Not every attorney, not all of them, I’m not making blanket condemnations here, just saying in our experience as a whole on the other side. Your mileage and others reading might vary particularly based upon the amount of involvement you have had with them, but in our businesses it very much has worked out that way. Ask somebody who works regularly with attorneys — and isn’t or hasn’t been one of them — how they feel. Do your own real world poll and then get back to me.

I also have experience in conflict resolution and I can tell you from great experience that human beings react different when the word “lawyer” or “attorney” or “legal” is brought into the discussion. It’s like regular people have this switch that goes into legal mode (more paranoid, usually) once it’s thrown. I don’t have that mode, but I see plenty of others who get uptight, blood pressure rises, etc.

I do see the logic in your point about behaving in a responsible and legal manner regarding approaching another business first but the day one businessowner has to consult an attorney to ask another businessowner a question and have a rational discussion, is the day this country has gone completely tits up. I talk to people all the time regarding conflicts without contacting counsel first. You can’t run a business by always running things past legal first. It’s just not reality, sorry.

Does this mean businessowners will make mistakes sometimes? Of course. Sometimes we should have talked to legal first, but the vast majority of cases we don’t need to and in some cases it can make things even worse because the advice we are given can create extra tension and make it less likely to come to a resolution. I’ve been given bad advice by legal before, both bad legal advice and bad from a contact resolution standpoing.

We check with counsel on things all the time. There is nothing wrong with that and my commentary above shouldn’t suggest that I think a businessowner shouldn’t ever consult an attorney. Quite the opposite, there are situations like with contracts and things where it is necessary as I mentioned in our first exchange above. We used to be able to do more business on a handshake than we can do in this day and age and it’s kind of sad, but that too is a reality

But I have wavered somewhat after this discussion based on the new information provided. My opinion on Mike contacting his attorney first is now shaken after his answer in comment #13. I didn’t realize that the owner of a trademark contacting a possible violator and keeping detailed notes would not be evidence of enforcement in a court in a trademark law case. I’d like to learn more about trademark law regarding evidence of enforcement responsibilities in particular.

1. An apparent belief that attorneys always opt for the response that provides the most billable hours. My own experience tells me that’s incorrect. A lot of the time all you want is legal advice, a considered answer to a question that you are unqaulified to answer. And, a lot of the time that’s what you get: just an answer, not a recommendation to gather the legal aides and charge up the courthouse steps.

2. An expectation that people with financial interests in their web sites should not think first of the legal ramifications of their actions, but should instead consider the future of webmaster-to-webmaster relations. There’s nothing peculiar about web technology or the “blogosphere” that requires people to stop looking out for themselves and their business interests. When someone does something that may threaten those interests, contacting an attorney to ask about both the advisability of, and the legal fallout from, the alternative courses of action open to you seems to me a perfectly reasonable, and responsibile, thing to do. Going off on your own, winging it, seems irresponsible.

Gosh almighty this whole thing was inane.