Several weeks ago, I posted about the excesses of copyright attorneys. Now, Tim Ferris (author of the terrific best-seller, “The 4-Hour Workweek“) has a post with an even more outrageous example of overlawyering – a letter he received from a Massachusetts lawyer demanding that Tim omit a reference to the lawyer’s client (a sales call center) from his book. Why? Because the company was enduring “unnecessary work” in weeding out all of the unqualified potential customers being sent their way thanks to the book.

Rather than politely asking that the reference be deleted – or, far better yet, asking that it be corrected to encourage only qualified leads to call in – the company immediately resorted to the legal blunderbuss. How incredibly shortsighted.

Lawyers can tell you what your legal rights are, and they can write nasty letters on your behalf. However, they can – and should – also provide counsel on whether taking such a heavy-handed approach is really the right strategy. Something to consider when choosing a lawyer for your business: Will this lawyer be a partner, counseling you on the implications of different legal strategies, or will they simply be an order-taker?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 11:09 am by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under How to Choose a Lawyer, Josh King Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.