choosing useful friction with legal

A couple guardrails to consider:

  1. If you’re a leader, you shouldn’t outsource all your judgment about risk to your lawyer.

  2. If you’re a leader, you shouldn’t treat your lawyer as a magician who wa(i)ves away legal obstacles. 

Following both rules puts you and your lawyer in a frictional, discursive pattern. You have to figure things out together - neither person gets to dogmatically force the hand of the other. You have to refine and revise, likely over a high volume of decisions sorted out together, what the risk appetite of the organization is.

Good lawyers do more than fill in template agreements and redline contracts. They run multi-factor tests; they balance weird game-theoretic dynamics; they size up tradeoffs. 

Sharp, wise lawyers have taught me that they do their best work, the good ones do, when they get to look at problems with you long before they are legal problems, strictly speaking. 

-Eric

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i look for “the lean”

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a bet you shouldn’t hedge