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.
--
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it.
-Upton Sinclair, novelist and reformer (1878-1968)
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