In-House Counsel

Specialist lawyers see their legal domain in everything; the sniglet ?experteyes?

By Rees Morrison

We need a sniglet (a made up word for a common situation) for the idea that specialist lawyers can usually find one of their arcane issues tucked into any set of facts. A knowledgeable tax lawyer can find subtle tax implications in any business transaction; an anti-trust specialist spots collusions and combines lurking everywhere; a litigator anticipates risks of future causes of action. For a carpenter every problem is a nail; for a highly trained lawyer, business transactions resonate with specialized risks.

Let?s call this experteyes.

Experteyes saves us if the specialist peers ahead and avoids a significant risk; experteyes complicates life, delays business and expands into a heftu bill for outside counsel.

This may be a variant of Say?s Law: the supply of goods in an economy creates its own demand. Says Lawyer Law holds that a supply of legal expertise in a company creates its own demand, in the form of risks and opportunities identified by specialists. Worse, a corollary is the possibility that the more in-house lawyers collaborate, the more likely a sharp-eyed specialist among them will touch off a controversy about some conceivable risk.

Full post as published by Law Department Management on May 10, 2009 (boomark / email).