Over the years in business and as a member of over forty boards, I have received good advice from corporate attorneys and on occasion bad advice as well. There is a line that should be drawn in a relationship between corporate attorney and CEO or board. Attorneys are paid to protect the corporation, not to give business advice. Some are experienced enough to provide great business advice.
But the law degree they earned does not assure that, even though most CEO’s respect the advice they receive from their attorney highly enough not to doubt the conclusions or the experience behind the conclusions offered. And since attorneys are paid to protect, often they will give a litany of warnings about what could go wrong when accepting a contract clause that they have been trained to challenge.
There comes a time when a CEO must decide to reject what may seem like important good advice from the attorney and chance acceptance of terms within a contract that may cause risk, but controllable risk or risk that is so remote as to be worth the acceptance of the business represented by the contract at hand.
I was chairman of a company that had been offered an investment by a Fortune 500 company offering to make a strategic investment in our business, which would be capable of driving new demand to the large company through a series of new web services creating a greater need for the large company’s products.
The business terms had been agreed between the business development officer of the investing company and our board, as both companies turned the details over to their respective attorneys for documentation. The attorney for the investor was a member of a large, respected law firm in Silicon Valley, and certainly was full of himself as sole legal protector of the rights of his very significant investor. As drafts of the otherwise standard investment agreements passed from him to our attorney and our management, we immediately spotted a significant number of terms we not only had not agreed to but were contrary to the spirit of the investment. The attorney held fast defending every challenge, stating that “these terms are standard for our client and cannot be changed.” We appealed to the business development executive, who deferred to the attorney restating that the terms were unchangeable as far as the big company was concerned. After conferring between our attorney and board, we walked away from what would have been a fine strategic partnership, killed by an attorney who probably understood the client requirements but was unwilling to offer flexible solutions to problem areas.
That attorney had made what we considered business decisions on behalf of his client. By the way, we immediately found a willing replacement that had an attorney not quite so full of himself and quickly concluded a similar deal to the acceptance of all. And to this day, I caution my CEO’s not to deal with that Fortune 500 firm because of the experience we had with its attorney. You never know how much far reaching an action can be, given the speed and extent of communication between CEO’s today.
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