Tag Archives: lawyer

Will Marshall: Improving Your Relationship with Your Lawyer

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Will Marshall is a co-founder and partner of UBM Law Group. He drafts and negotiates commercial contracts, especially SaaS and traditional software licensing agreements and takes care of all sorts of legal things that come up for businesses.  He is also especially knowledgeable in issues that come up with small businesses and startups.  If you are avoiding talking to your lawyer, have ever had a bad experience with a lawyer, or are curious about the issues that can come up when technical people deal with lawyers, listen to the episode.  Will gives tips for technical people on how to communicate with lawyers and save money by doing so.

Highlights:

Q: Tell us your story of how you came to work with tech companies.

“I had an unusual career where I started as a General Counsel of a company—so I did the whole startup thing—and then I went into private practice, for about the last 10 years or so.  Usually, it’s the reverse.  That’s important because I learned to be a lawyer in a business context with limited resources.  Even though my company was a technology-based manufacturer, not a tech company, I seemed to gravitate toward tech companies when I started my practice, doing software as a service and software licensing and that sort of thing.  I can’t say why that went that way.  Maybe I just liked that type of work or maybe I did a good job of it.  I’m not sure.”

Q: Why do technical people interact with lawyers?

“Sometimes it’s them coming to me and sometimes it’s me coming to them.  It can be pure technical matters, like negotiating an agreement for technical services.  It could be dealing with employee issues.  It could be dealing with raising money and startup-type issues.  It could be implementing policy issues, compliance.  There’s a whole slew of things where I might be interfacing with technical people.  Sometimes the technical person is the founder so they have a broad view of all the legal issues and sometimes they’re a junior technical person where we’re hammering out a lot of really technical issues and granular issues.”

Q: What hesitations and concerns do technical people have with lawyers?

“First of all, there’s the cost.  The costs when you’re working on an hourly basis can run up, particularly if you don’t know how to manage your lawyer and use them efficiently.  That’s really about building trust.  I cut my teeth as a co-founder, paying outside lawyers and seeing their invoices and knowing what aggravated me about them.  So, a key part of my customer relationships is building the trust that I’m as worried about spending their dollars almost as much as they are.  For example, I’m not going to suggest that they burn up all the profit on the deal having me make the perfect contract if it wipes out the profitability of the deal.”

“The other concerns are that law can be very confusing and not jive with common sense and, when lawyers aren’t doing their job right, they can be the sales prevention unit or the Doctor No.  When you’re talking to startups, for example, they have their foot on the gas and anything that stops them is terrible.”

Q: How do you help technical people understand the legalese?

“That’s more of a contract drafting scenario.  Legalese can be archaisms, like whereas, witnesseth, and that stuff.  Those things just need to go away.  If your lawyer is saying witnesseth in your contract, you need a new lawyer.  The other part of it is not as obvious.  Contract language needs to be precise, to a level of precision that is not common, certainly not like when we talk to one another.”

To hear more about navigating legalese, managing your lawyer to be efficient, and how to communicate effectively with them, listen to the episode.

Words of Wisdom:

“When we talk, we say things that are 10 ways ambiguous.  In a contract, we don’t have the luxury of doing that.”

“Employment law: it’s not a risk until it blows up in your face.”

“Technical people don’t like to be told how to do things without an appreciation of the complexities; lawyers don’t either.”

“Be careful when you grind your contractor or your attorney on fees because you might become the disfavored project.”

Contact Will Marshall:

Email: wmarshall@ubmlaw.com

Website: ubmlaw.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-marshall-9979242a/

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John Thornburgh: When Nerds Go to Trial

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Are you looking for free legal advice?  Tune in as Joanie interviews John Thornburgh, a patent litigator and principal at Fish & Richardson, about the people skills you need if you go to trial over your technology.  Whether you’re suing or being sued, you may end up testifying some day and it’s a totally different language in court.  They don’t speak in binary; interpreting the law lands you smack in the gray area.  This can be difficult for engineers and scientists who are used to being precisely correct or incorrect.  The lesson is that it takes a lot of work to prepare to explain technical things to judges and juries.

Highlights:

Q: Tell us about what you do.

“I’m a patent litigator, so I’m the kind of lawyer who helps to enforce patents in court and defend people who get sued.  I’m not the kind of lawyer who goes and obtains the patents.  We call them ‘patent prosecutors.’ They go to the patent office and file the patents.  Once people have patents, I go out and sue people or defend people.  It involves a lot of technology.  I have mostly over the years worked on computer cases both hardware and software, but I’ve also done all sorts of other things, like recently eye surgery and roller blades and all sorts of technical things.”

Q: What’s the major people challenge that you have to deal with in court?

“Lots of times we go to trial to enforce a patent and some of the jurors will probably have a college education and some will only have a high school education and they’ll be asked to decide which Ph.D. expert is right about some circuit design.  If that sounds hard, it is.  It’s hard for them, but they tend to take it very seriously.  One of our jobs as lawyers is to help our expert witnesses and our client witnesses explain these concepts to ordinary people in a way that will make sense.  We try to be accurate, but we try to focus on the key things that will decide the case and be understood.”

Q: How do you know if the juries understand your message when you don’t get feedback from them during trial?

“That’s really hard because juries are generally not allowed to ask questions or tell you what they think.  There’s a good reason for that.  In our judicial system, in general, we have rules of evidence so only certain questions can be asked.  For example, there’s the rule against hearsay.  You can’t say what somebody else said.  You have to say what’s true that you have personal knowledge of.  You can’t expect jurors to ask proper evidentiary questions, so that’s the main reason they’re not allowed to.”

“In general, it’s up to the lawyers to guess what questions the jurors may be having and ask those.  It’s not a complete guess.  We have experience with this, and we do a lot of tests.  We hardly ever go to trial without practicing in front of a mock jury.”

Q:  What kinds of people challenges come up for witnesses who have to testify in court, who may be engineers, coders, scientists, or inventors who are not expecting to speak to juries?

“We are typically working with engineers and scientists as witnesses, both as client witnesses and expert witnesses.  It’s a very alien experience for them.  Engineers are typically used to working in an environment in which truth is binary, that the circuit is either correct or not correct.  It either works or doesn’t work.  The shades of gray that are introduced by language and lawyers and litigation are oftentimes a challenge for them.”

“They are also challenged by how they may be treated by the other side.  They’re used to being respected and they’re trying to explain something and tell the truth.  Yet, the other side may look for ways to make them look bad and humiliate them.  They need to be prepared for how to deal with that.”

Q: How do you prepare technical people to go to trial?
“We practice cross examinations.  We subject them to the kinds of adversity they might experience.  We try to make them comfortable with the process.  We spend lots and lots of time brainstorming how to explain something complicated in simple language.”

To hear more advice on going to trial and entertaining stories that illustrate his points, listen to John’s interview.

Words of Wisdom:

“The truth is complicated.”

“A lot of times the jury may not understand the details, but they will understand the body language.  Don’t be argumentative.”

“You have to be careful about analogies.  Every analogy usually breaks down at some point.”

“It’s unlikely in normal technical work that anyone is quite out to twist their words as an opposing lawyer may be.”

“Lawyer shows on TV are not accurate.”

Contact John Thornburgh:

Email: thornburgh@fr.com

Website: https://www.fr.com/john-w-thornburgh/

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