Contracts, agreements, and legal entities are tools founders can read, draft, and refactor like software — relationships with strings attached, not magic incantations left to lawyers.
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A couple of months back I wrote this article What Lawyers could Learn from Programmers. It was meant to be provocative and I had hoped for better responses from the law community itself. Well now George Grellas wrote a huge fantastic comment to the original post outlining the issues as seen from the eyes of a lawyer. …
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Over on the Extra Eagle Blog our company blog, we are trying to create a new simpler and shorter Consulting Agreement. If you’re a consultant, work freelance or even if you hire freelancers why not check it out. We’re looking for your input on creating the perfect general purpose consulting agreement.
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Due to the SEC’s closing of Prosper I do think that it is time to address the SEC rules, which were created by FDR during the New Deal. It was a very different world then. Not that I think they did a lot of good at that time either. We need the ability to innovate, even in the world of securities and investments. We …
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AmLaw Daily has a great interview with Richard Susskind about his new book The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services. It is essentially about the fundamental changes that are coming in the business models of lawyers due to changes in technology in general and the economy as a whole. The book points …
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We’ve already seen what happens when you leave drafting your agreements entirely to an uninterested legal team. Yet people still have their lawyers draft up an agreement, which more than likely for most contracts really is a paralegal filling out a word template. There are lots of myths surrounding agreements that I …
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By now you have no doubt heard about the issue with Google’s Chrome End User License Agreement (or EULA). The original clause of concern was: 1.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying …
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I’m sitting at the OAuth Summit held at Yahoo in Santa Clara. We’ve had a brief discussion about the IPR policy negotiation process that has been going on in the background between a few core OAuth people and legal departments in various large companies (most notably Yahoo, Google and Microsoft). Briefly the IPR policy …
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Rafe Needleman wrote a review of Agree2 today: Agree2 creates binding legal documents that won’t hold up in court I am proud of his comments about the technical aspects of the site, however the title about the legal documents that not hold up in court I find problematic. That said, I am really glad Rafe brought this …
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I see Google is creating a Alumni Relations Program to help create a informal network of ex Google employees. I think this is a great idea. I’ve always thought that current employees should be (but rarely are) thought of as potential future ambassadors, business partners and clients. Alumni such as the PayPal alumni, …
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Ringtones, ringtones, ringtones. Since Steve Jobs announced the ringtones for the iPhone some days ago lots of people have been talking about ringtones and how immoral the iTunes approach to ringtones is. And it is ridiculous. However it is not illegal, but then again neither is going around iTunes using the various …
