At one stage of my career I did a great deal of work for a franchisor of bakeries. If the truth be known, my client was not exceptionally good at the franchisee selection process. The franchisee qualification process consisted of providing evidence of a bank account and a heartbeat.
Once upon a time, one of my litigation partners had a field day suing a very senior partner of a reputable law firm in the Toronto area. I will call that defendant “Max.”
The crux of the matter was that our client, who I will call Sue (appropriately, because that is what she ended up doing to Max) was involved in the sale of some shares of a corporation to the other shareholder. When Sue did not get paid, she came to see if we could do anything about it. When my partner asked Sue whether she was represented by counsel in the sale transaction, she identified Max as being her lawyer.
Spouses often both own shares in a corporation that operates a family business, sometimes because they are both active participants in the business, and sometimes as part of an income splitting or creditor protection plan.
I once had a partner who was a “heads down, get your work done” type of guy. Knew his law. Billed like a fiend. Not much of a people person. Let’s call him Ken.
Long ago, when it came to billing, lawyers addressed precedents in one of two ways:
I recently celebrated the 17th anniversary of one of the most significant events of my life.
Back on March 21, 2005, I came to what was, at the time, a stunning realization. I had accidentally fallen in love with a woman with whom I had been working very closely for six years. Luckily for me and all the other potential Defendants in this situation, she came to the same troubling realization about me at the exact same time.
Here are some of the provisions which I have found lurking in purchase orders (a “PO”):
1. The P.O. replaces every provision in the vendor’s quotation and invoice.
2. The provisions of the P.O. include terms set out on the purchaser’s website, which the purchaser may change at any time. All changes will be binding on the vendor. It is the vendor’s responsibility to monitor the purchaser’s website to see which new terms have been imposed on it.
I like accountants a lot. Most of them. But as for the others, here is something that I always wanted to say when I was practicing law but it seemed like a bad idea at the time while I was looking for referrals: Stay in your bloody lane!
Good accountants do accounting, tax, business consulting and some other stuff that relates to numbers (although the business valuators that I know to seem to think that the average accountant should keep their mouth shut about valuations.)
Bad accountants incorporate companies and draft letters of intent. Poorly. If it was up to me, I would report every last one of them for the unauthorized practice of law.
Did you ever see even a single lawyer prepare a financial statement? No, you didn’t.
I have lots of critical things to say about lawyers, but at least they usually try to practice only the profession for which they are licensed.
Leo Tolstoy said, “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Mary Karr wrote: “a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”
Few lawyers would disagree with the statement that “law school does not teach you what you have to know to be able to practice law.” I imagine that the general public would find that to be surprising. It is called “law school” after all.