October 2008

(And Do You Mean It?)

By Stanley P. Jaskiewicz

What businessperson hasn’t complained about how lawyers ruin deals? The simple handshake and bar-napkin agreement too often turns into hundreds of pages of fine print, with hourly billing to match. Yet neither party really knows whether it all actually states the deal as each understood it over handshakes. Sometimes the fallout begins because the contracts are unintelligible to the layman — not good. Other times, the lawyer may have taken far longer than the deal allowed to write a contract, or simply blew the budget — also not good. Whatever the cause, these problems lead many businesspeople to wonder whether their lawyers are for them, or against them.

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