Lawyers don't litigate, their clients do (Score 2)

It's nice to see a number of intelligent contributions to this thread already, and hope I can bring more of the same. To begin, what exactly does a lawyer do? Many things, but essentially it's about formalizing relationships between people, to ensure that all interested parties know as best they can what their respective responsibilities are. The lawyer's job is to clarify the relationship that is being entered into, to mediate when it is in need of repair, and to litigate when it has finally broke. In the non-business world, our relationships with others often don't need to be so formal (friends, neighbours), but sometimes they do (divorce, estate battles, fences encroaching on another's property). In the business world, the same holds true. You can walk up to a garage sale and close a deal with cash and a handshake. Or make an online auction purchase, without worrying to much over the "click-wrapped" contract you've just entered into. But what if that great old chair you just bought has a structural defect neither the vendor nor the purchaser was aware of? What if someone had asked the vendor to hold the chair for him yesterday, and had given him $1.00 "as good and sufficient consideration"? In this relatively new world of high tech, there seem to be a lot of lawsuits being tossed around. Some are frivolous, some are valid, and most are about parties not be suring of what their rights and responsibilities are. Recall that lawyers don't sue; their clients do. Why do parties sue? Uncertainty. They don't know where they stand in law. And for that, don't blame the lawyers. Laws are constructed mainly in parliament, and some by judges. The lawyers themselves only try to navigate through all of this, and again only in the directions that their clients have requested them to take. Lawyers are agents, not principals. Finally, and off-topic from my above explanation, I don't think the problem here is one of geeks failing to understand lawyers, or vice-versa. There are many geeks-turned lawyers (just finished law school myself) to protect the /. interests. The _real_ problem is in the diversity of those interests. As a society, we're still trying to understand this phenomenon called intellectual property: what is it, whether it needs actual legal protection, what form, etc. You want to provide incentives to the geniuses out there who come up with the truly great ideas. But a great idea is not enough; in high tech, it's the proper execution of the idea that brings the benefit to society. Society v. the individual all over again. I think Plato had a few words on that :) Clearly some kind of legal framework is necessary. If I've got a great idea but can't protect it in law, M$ wins. As soon as a "deep pockets" high tech business gets a whiff of it, they can immediately direct more resources to it than I ever could. Very few first-to-market battles will be won by the little guy in the years to come.