Playground fun or death trap? Photo credit: Gabriel Pollard
I have young children, so I’ve been frequenting playgrounds over the last 8 years or so. I’ve noticed, during this time, that there’s an incredible degree of sameness to them. Something has homogenized our playgrounds. They are almost uniformly boring.
One example: I noticed that a staple of the playgrounds of my youth, the see-saw, is gone – gone, or replaced with a bastardized version with springs rather than a fulcrum, so that at rest, instead of one side being up and the other side down, it just sits there horizontally. The problem, of course, is that even when kids are using it, the springs prevent it from going up or down much on either side. What is the point of a seesaw that doesn’t go up and down? Lord have mercy. No wonder my kids have no interest in these.
I thought about it for about a half-second, and figured that personal injury lawyers must have something to do with this situation.
And indeed, it seems to be the case that after a spate of personal injury litigation in the 1970’s, municipalities started tearing up playgrounds, taking out equipment such as high jungle-gyms and fulcrum seesaws, and replacing them – if at all – with “safer” equipment. Safer, as in less challenging and less fun. (As an aside, I wonder if the problem in the 1970’s, when cities were going bankrupt, wasn’t so much with playground equipment per se, but rather, with poorly maintained equipment.)
I am sure that you can find some terrible stories of children getting hurt on playground equipment, but it’s hard for me to believe that they are a statistically significant source of childhood injuries. Checking the CDC website, one learns that in the decade 1990 to 2000 there were 147 playground deaths of children 14 and under. Each of those was a tragedy for a family. But looking at this scientifically, this amounts to just under 15 deaths per year. Some of these deaths, according to statistics, were due to inadequate supervision or other causes, not any inherent danger of the equipment. Now, look at the overall mortality rates for this age group. In just one year, 2008, 4,643 children age 14 years and under died from “unintentional injury.” Doing the division, this means that playground accidents accounted for three-tenths of one percent of the accidental fatalities. The leading causes were, in order: motor vehicle crashes, suffocation, drowning, and fires/burns. (So, if you really want to protect your child, live in a densely settled, walkable neighborhood that doesn’t require car trips for everything. Your family will be healthier in every way.)
Fortunately, it appears that the pendulum may be swinging back. (Swinging pendulums? Those are dangerous!) Experts in child play (what a great job that must be) have begun to appreciate the extent to which kids need challenges and, yes, just a little bit of danger in order overcome fears and master the real world — a world in which springs cannot be attached to everything to smooth out the highs and lows.
There’s a lesson to be learned that goes beyond playgrounds. People in general and lawyers in particular seem to think that all risk can be eliminated. Of course, it can’t be. A certain amount of risk is inherent in every human activity. By going overboard to stamp out risk – to prevent whatever small part of the 15 annual playground deaths that can be attributed to “dangerous” equipment – we have spent millions tearing up nice old playgrounds, and replacing them with bland, boring ones that don’t serve the intended developmental purposes. So, in which scenario lies the greater cost?
In business deals, the lawyer you want at your side is the one who tries to minimize risk but who also realizes that risks are unavoidable and, that by trying to avoid them completely, you run the larger risk of killing the deal entirely – losing out on potentially greater benefits.
Next time you are thinking about hiring a lawyer, ask where he or she stands on the issue of seesaws.
Among the benefits of leading a small legal practice is that it keeps all of the relationships close and manageable. I know my clients well, and I serve them directly (not via associates, paralegals or other intermediaries). Larger law firms are, well, larger. This means that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people affiliated with one another under the firm’s banner, many of whom don’t know each other particularly well. That is advantageous in some ways — especially financially for those at the top of the hierarchy. On the other hand, the partners are all responsible for each other’s work, legally and — as my tale below illustrates — in other important if less formal ways.
I recently asked some of my colleagues to send me recommendations for a superstar lawyer with a specific capabilities. I was given the name of one fellow and looked him up. Turns out, he is at a national law firm with a Chicago office that I encountered when I was general counsel at HighBeam Research. A corporate lawyer from that firm (not the Chicago office) was on the opposite side of the transaction from us when we were selling the company, and was one of those lawyers who gives lawyers a really bad name — overly legalistic, completely impractical, and lacking in any social skills on top of it all. (She would have been a great Dickens villain.) The deal almost didn’t happen because of her style of lawyering. I still have a physical reaction when I think of this — and it took place almost 4 years ago.
The lawyer who was recommended to me is probably very talented, but given his partners are, I will probably look elsewhere.
Lousy photo of Adrian Holovaty (right), with Alfonso Ponticelli
At last month’s Northwestern Entrepreneurship Conference, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason was a featured speaker. Mason, as many now know, was a music major at Northwestern. Peter Barris of NEA (one of Groupon’s major investors), who shared the stage with Mason, noted that musical talent seemed prevalent (in his experience) in technology entrepreneurs.
This observation came to mind when I went to see another fine Chicago entrepreneur, Adrian Holovaty, at the Green Mill last Wednesday. Adrian, the founder of Everyblock (now part of MSNBC.com) as well as the co-creator of Django (“an open source web application framework for Python”), is an extraordinarily talented guitarist, and performs each Wednesday at the Green Mill as part of the Django Rheinhart-influenced guitar group Alfonso Ponticelli and Swing Gitan. (Hmm, wonder where he came up with the name for that programming language of his.)
If you haven’t been to the Green Mill, it’s one of the famous music venues in Chicago, a must-visit. So go on a Wednesday and see Adrian play. I can’t say how Adrian’s software code his, but the man can really play guitar.
Lawyers, like everyone else working for a business, need to add value. I see so much legal work, however, that adds no value whatsoever. The economics term for it is “deadweight loss.” The client might as well just take out a few hundred-dollar bills and burn them.
This blog post is the first of what is sure to be a long series, shining light on things lawyers do, large and small, that are a complete waste of time.
Lawyers as a group too often ignore common sense, focus on form over substance, and fail to weigh the costs of an activity against its benefits. We have to get back to using good judgment, focusing on what’s really important, and abandoning the false idea that there is no risk too small to beat to death.
In my last post, I made a comment about startups not needing 45-page LLC agreements. I guess there’s even worse being perpetrated out there. A friend, who also represents startups, reports the following:
Apropos of your point, I am in the process of negotiating a 2-member, early stage operating agreement which spans 70 pages
I love Fred Wilson’s blog. Sure, he’s a smart VC, but he also writes well and believes in sharing his knowledge. I always learn something from his posts.
A little more than a year ago, Fred issued a challenge to startup lawyers: to keep legal fees down for startup investment transactions. Way down. In his view, when an entrepreneur sets up and raises $500K to $1MM, legal fees should be $5,000 or less. I completely agree with that. The fifteen or twenty thousand dollars that companies are paying for stuff like this? It’s nuts. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a lawyer secret: we recycle our documents. Over and over and over. We even have a fancy word for it – “precedent.” For the most part, the use of precedent is efficient and benefits the client. Few would want to pay for their agreements to be drafted from scratch, when a document from a similar transaction could be adapted. Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATED: The JOBS Act passed Congress and was signed into law by President Obama. Final bill text here.
I’ve previously posted (here and here) about the crowdfunding measures that have been working their way through Congress. The House has now passed the JOBS Act (text here, for the truly wonky), which contains these measures, and the Senate is debating the bill and some amendments as I write this.
If/when a final bill passes, I will review the final details and what they mean for entrepreneurs.
I certainly agree that it would be great to make it easier for startups to raise limited amounts of capital, and to allow non-“accredited” investors to participate in these investments to a reasonable extent. I am not so sure about the other provisions, which may loosen some appropriate rules put in place in the wake of Enron and Wall Street conflicts of interest. The relaxing of those rules may help a few of the larger “small” companies, but if it comes at the cost of significantly increased fraud, that would not be a good thing for anyone. I’m just not convinced that the regulatory burden is really a significant cause of a reduced level of IPO activity.
I strongly suspect that a broken and abused patent system is a far greater headwind to innovation and drag on the economy than the IPO rules are. But I digress…
Portfolio.com has an update on today’s action, and a good round-up of some of the critics’ views.
By tomorrow, we may have a final bill and then it’s in the President’s hands.
A great many founders that come to me for representation want to split ownership 50-50 with their co-founders. I’ve been thinking about 50-50 issues a lot lately. These situations present interesting challenges for the attorney, in terms of how to construct reasonable, practical mechanisms for dealing with disputes that can take place between the founders, which otherwise can result in deadlock.
Before sharing some thought on that issue, I first want to explore the question, should founders even do this at all? This is a question that has always aroused significant debate in entrepreneurial circles, and I am sure it always will. Read the rest of this entry »
