Continuing my weekly theme of kvetching, I've had to wear my legal-related head piece this week. Not only are we being sued in some frivolous lawsuit by an unethical company over a billing dispute from last year, but we have several outstanding contracts pending, lingering over our heads all month. We often represent companies as an outside consultant and/or sales team, necessitating formalized agreements dealing with compensation, yadda yadda yod.
Check out this clause a company-who-shall-remain-nameless is trying to assert:
Your representation with the Company will be on an “at will” basis, meaning that the Company may terminate this agreement at any time for any reason or no reason, without further obligation or liability. Further, during your representation with the Company, you shall not use any information about the Company to attempt to negatively influence any of the Company’s clients, customers or suppliers from purchasing Company products or services or to solicit or attempt to influence any client, customer or supplier either directly or indirectly, to direct his or its purchase of products and/or services to any person, firm, corporation, institution or other entity in competition with the business of the Company.
Sort of negates the idea of having a contract doesn't it? Why should we even waste ink on printing the document out? If we didn't have a rather large potential sale of the product of company-who-shall-remain-nameless on the (metaphoric) table of a company-who-shall-remain-nameless-but-they-are-fracking-huge, we'd walk away in disgust. As it is, we get to spend hours debating the issue (and others similarly contentious).
In contrast, another company-that-shall-remain-nameless-but-you've-all-heard-of-them that we work with allowed us to present them with our contract, and really didn't have much negative to say, or really any insistence upon changing clauses. What a pleasure! More so because of the rarity of this occurring.
Don't you love how vague sounding it all is? Trust me, it is driving me and my partner to self-medicate like MoFos.
I wish I had a clever contract lawyer in my social circle. D's childhood friend is a successful attorney, but an environmental lawyer. My uncle R is a whip-smart lawyer in S.F., but specializes in real estate, if I'm not mistaken. So, even though my legal education boils down to an ability to parse minutia, I'm the designated “reader of contracts”. We've hired attorneys in the past (and no doubt will hire in the future, see second sentence at the top of this post), but we have yet to find an entrepreneurial business lawyer who can think on their feet to our satisfaction. Too often we do all the work, educate them to our peculiar situation, but they bill us anyway.
Bleh.
Ok, self-imposed moratorium on whining and complaining starts now. Really. :)
Tags: Advertising, /litigation
