On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 16:22 -0700, Chris Gehlker wrote:
> On Dec 21, 2004, at 12:49 PM, Craig White wrote:
> 
> > I'm not sure that you can ever 'get a straight answer' when it comes to
> > licensing ambiguity and of course, even if you get the benefit of a
> > competent opinion from an attorney, it neither protects you from 
> > lawsuit
> > nor damages. The decisions are always left to user which in a corporate
> > environment, is the corporation.
> 
> This is simply not true. The reason that you get an opinion from a 
> lawyer is precisely so that the lawyer's malpractice insurance will 
> cover you if the courts decide that the opinion was wrong. When I asked 
> the our company lawyer why we should pay an outside firm to give us an 
> opinion that he had already drafted, he explained it just that way. He 
> only had $ 1 million of personal malpractice insurance where the 
> outside firm had $ 50 million. He thought that potential judgments 
> against our firm could be in the range of $ 3-5 million so his opinion 
> wasn't good enough. We needed the $ 50 million opinion.
> 
> That's when I leaned how it was possible for my opinion to be worth 
> nothing, the firms lawyer's opinion to be worth $ 1 million, and the 
> outside lawyer's opinion to be worth $ 50 million when we had the 
> essentially the same opinion. Opinions aren't valued on some abstract 
> metric of wisdom. They are valued precisely to the extent that they 
> make you judgment proof. That's why it is sometimes wise to get a legal 
> opinion even if it only confirms your own opinion.
----
Excuse my ignorance...I am not a lawyer and have made only limited
efforts to understand narrow aspects of the law.

If you get an opinion from a lawyer and it turns out that you act on
that opinion and are sued and lose, does that automatically constitute
malpractice and thus, you can make claim against that lawyers
malpractice insurance?

My understanding is that you would have to prove that the advice given
by the lawyer actually constituted malpractice and that if the lawyer's
advice hedged in some area that ultimately proved to be significant,
this might prove extremely difficult to collect. Thus the concept of
buying a $1 or $3 or $50 million opinion based upon potential recovery
of damages from malpractice insurance is possibly theoretical and not
guaranteed. Rarely are these issues so black and white where the advice
given obviously constitutes malpractice.

I believe you when you state that your company contracted for an outside
opinion but is is possible that the outcome of all potential litigation
in that matter was guaranteed by his malpractice insurance? I don't
recall getting any guarantees from a lawyer about anything except death
and taxes.

Craig

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