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This is kind of what I'm talking about

By Michael Rice

Last week I was bemoaning the state of relations between lawyers and startups. It still seems to me that lawyers are strangely missing in the startup scene. Oh sure, they're around at events (relegated to "service provider" status) and willing to sell some hours. I don't mean that. I mean I wish lawyers were engineering new relationships, new communities, and new business models just as enthusiastically as their technologist clients. Or, maybe I just have a unique background and experience.

Too abstract for you? Here's an example of what I'm thinking--at least as a matter of first impression:

Last month [Dean Karlan,] a professor at Yale, launched stickK.com, a company based on this contractual approach to achieving tough personal goals. It is based on Mr. Karlan's beloved behavioural economics, which combines insights from psychology and economics to explain how people make decisions. The traditional rational economic model of decision-making cannot explain why people are tempted to do bad things in the short run (smoke, eat too much) that they know have long-term consequences they do not want (cancer, obesity). One behavioural-economics theory is that the (bad) short-term self does not give sufficient weight to the outcomes that the (good) long-term self values most.

The article, from The Economist no less, is here.

UPDATE: Ok, so in looking over the excerpt more carefully it seems like Mr. Karlan is leveraging some other set of skills. Similarly, I fall back on my tech and startup experiences often. But I still don't want to believe that it's required that a lawyer come with similarly extensive backgrounds... or is it?

Full post as published by Coderights on February 07, 2008 (boomark / email).