I don’t question your motives in this instance, but I always pay extra attention when someone’s advice is to hire them or someone like them.
Obviously, “hire a lawyer,” is sometimes right. But if I hired a lawyer every time I was told to, I would be out hundreds of hours of billing fees. Anecdotally, I’ve never fucked anything up royally. That doesn’t mean that I made the right decision, but is something I strive for.
Spending $300-1000 on a consult every time I might need one is like taking an antibiotic every time I might have encountered a bacteria. It’s important to qualify and spend money when I actually need to rather than every time.
It’s like those people who say “don’t criticize my book until you read it” (since that usually means that it makes them some money to have me buy their book). If I had to read every book to figure out if I should like it or not, that’s impossible. I need to develop effective evaluations and filters to prevent me from wasting my time and money.
> Spending $300-1000 on a consult every time I might need one
Actually I’ve been surprised to find that many times even high priced attorneys are usually willing to spend 20-30 minutes+ giving you some general advice before even retaining them. I’ve gotten very valuable advice this way several times at no cost.
They need to due a little due diligence before taking you in as a client, such as assessing if your needs fall within their expertise and whether you will be a potentially profitable client. If you work as hard as you can to summarize your case to respect their time, as opposed to rambling like an incoherent crazy person, you can often get a free pointer on how to handle the case & maybe a referral to someone who is better prepared to assist you.
> Anecdotally, I’ve never fucked anything up royally.
You're not necessarily wrong, but that's definitely a survivalship bias. You only need to lose once for a game over, so everyone still playing underestimates the stakes at play, as there is close to no interaction to people that have lost.
In my experience, a lawyer will also nudge you towards whichever course involves keeping a lawyer involved. They'll never tell you "if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't keep going".
A bad lawyer will never help you get to the point, because a bad lawyer needs to milk you as they have little to no referral business.
I got a semi-serious traffic ticket in Colorado in 2014, but I lived in California. I forgot about the ticket, and remembered a couple years later. I wanted to clear up the situation, but navigating the court system from a different state was challenging. I decided hiring an attorney local to the area would be easier than traveling to Colorado.
I called maybe 6 to 8 attorneys, and they fell into three categories: too expensive, too inexperienced, or just right.
Too expensive sounded like “we’ll need a $2000 retainer to even look at your case.”
Too inexperienced sounded like “I just graduated from law school, and I’ll give you a super good rate for the experience of working on your case.”
Just right sounded like “I know the district attorney who is overseeing your case. Their name is $NAME, and here’s exactly how I’m going to handle your case… <time passes> …I might be able to handle this for $500, but it could cost maybe double that if it’s more work than expected.”
I got the matter resolved for between 1X and 2X the minimum estimate, and was happy with the results.
> In my experience, a lawyer will also nudge you towards whichever course involves keeping a lawyer involved.
Both of the times my wife and I have consulted an attorney, they provided an overview of the relevant legal and practical context, a description of options of how to approach it and what they could do as part of that and the fee structure involved, and a description of why hiring them would probably not be cost-effective for the issue at hand.
I'm sorry you had such an experience. Ethical lawyers will give you the best advice they can, which often includes "you are going to end up paying me way more than what's at stake here." (This literally just happened to me as a client over a land-sale-deposit dispute.) Or, "This is a turkey of a case and you should roll over. You owe me nothing."
Glad it worked out for you, but it's a bad idea to extrapolate that to broader advice. Maybe you got lucky. Maybe it wasn't luck and you have some kind of gift for assessing case trajectory. But in either case, most people aren't going to be able to predict a case outcome better than experienced attorneys.
two out of three common auto mechanics were caught here giving false estimates and cheating to some extent on common operations.. how many people can discern minor errors with law?
My experience differs. I once had a legal dispute in which I was asked to sign away some additional rights in order to receive some money that I was owed anyway. My lawyer said, essentially, "you are in the right, but you aren't planning on using those rights anyway, so just sign the paper and get this over with."
There are scrupulous and unscrupulous lawyers, much as in any profession.
> My lawyer said, essentially, "you are in the right, but you aren't planning on using those rights anyway, so just sign the paper and get this over with."
There are situations where this is very good legal advice. Collecting things you are owed from people who don't want to give them up takes time and money (and involves risk), and even when it nominally works the systems intended to make you whole for the additional costs don't always, and especially often don't value time (both delay and the consumption of your personal time) as much as you do.
A lawyer's job isn't just to advise you on what the law says you are entitled to, but more critically to do so on the course of action that will best achieve your interests given the pragmatics of the legal system.
They will, because they don’t want to pursue legal action where there’s little chance of them getting paid. It’s worth giving you a half-hour of their time for free to figure out if 1) there’s enough money involved, 2) the defendant can pay up in the event of a win or 3) you can pay up if you don’t win. Nothing worse than working 100 hours and not being able to collect because the defendant is “judgment-proof” (aka flat broke).
Have a home issue where the builder owes me $100k in an open-and-shut case… but there are a dozen other people in the same situation, his company has folded and he’s under indictment for fraud in an unrelated case. My lawyer advised me to just move on with my life as any chance of collecting is near-zero.
99% of the lawyers I've met are scum, and I've met hundreds.
One lawyer I hired to defend me in a contractual pay dispute said to me on the first meeting with both sides "Do not let this get to court. If this goes to court the only people that will win are me and the other lawyer. We'll both get to take an extra vacation this year." So, 1% of lawyers are not scum.
Luckily it didn't need to go to court. I walked into the meeting, let the other side play hardball, "We're not going to pay you any of the money we owe you, go fuck yourself." and then showed them in the contract they had signed where it says they don't own any of the copyright to any of the work I developed for them. They left the room and came back several minutes later with a cheque.
Since your comment is categorical, I'd like to chime in with a counterexample. I've gone in for a consult and gotten "you've already pretty much done everything I would. I can charge you $2000 for the rest but you probably wouldn't want to do this seeing that you already have done all of the work."
I've consulted lawyers perhaps a dozen times in life, and not once have they attempted to make me use them. Most actually help me in the 30 or so minutes free to find a better solution. A few times I had to go all in and hire them: I won a copyright infringement suit, stopping someone from selling knockoffs of things I sell, I needed some to represent me in states half way across the country to get a trust drawn in that state rejiggered, I won a case against a landlord. Each of those times I needed one to screw it up by not hiring a lawyer could have cost me significant money. And in each case, by hiring one when I was in in the right, the lawyers delivered. And only the copyright suit was expensive to pay lawyers for - the rest would amount to a few months rent to obtain significantly more in return.
This is also the experience of a few friends I consult each time I weight "do I need a lawyer". So my experience is 100% the opposite of yours.
How many times have you used a lawyer for something and had your example happen? How many times have they not done what you claim? Care to share examples?
Ive had three legal advice experiences - two with work and one personal. The employer ones were both straightforward about whether or not we should do something, and they did not encourage us to keep returning to them on the issue, and the personal one the guy gave me a 30 minute phone call, advised me that if I wanted to formally pursue the matter I would need to engage his services at £200/hour, however his unofficial legal advice was to just proceed and not bother.
As another anecdote, my experience with developers is that developers will repeatedly tell you that the software isn't complete and requires extra attention to keep it running and to maintain it, and that it needs extra time for refactoring, despite it functioning correctly right now...
> my experience with developers is that developers will repeatedly tell you that the software isn't complete and requires extra attention to keep it running and to maintain it
Is that not true in most cases? A running system will eventually become vulnerable to attacks, and/or services it relies on may be deprecated. The last thing you want is to be in a situation where your software is easily exploitable, but your dependencies are so far behind that a fix becomes a multi-month or year long project.
It is essential to ask around for recommendations -- there are some great lawyers out there. When you need a good one, you may find yourself suddenly-surprised and grateful to be paying their (substantial) hourly rate.
Even if they want to give it up, the agreement will likely have representations and warranties (see part about any known/future claims) which OP should not just sign without an attorney reading it over. The agreement will surely be written in a way that is very favorable to the other party.
It isn't that simple. The burden of proof and the cost of filing suit is entirely on the people who own the .net domain. You can't lose a domain based off of a threatening email.
I have received threaten letters before and have responded with "I dispute these claims. Please do not contact me again in any manner" and I never heard from them again.
I don't know enough about the company sending the threatening letter here, so I can't say if that would work or not here, but it is very possible you don't need a lawyer.
> You can't lose a domain based off of a threatening email.
Indeed, but if you take no action at all, the opposing counsel does take action, and you don't contest the action, then the default outcome could be a forced transfer of the domain.
So you agree that he doesn't need a lawyer at this junction. But if a lawsuit is filled, he will need to respond and request that the case be dismissed. Using a lawyer for that step isn't a bad idea.
They are going to have a hard time finding a case that set a precedent that you can take over another company's website because you registered a similar company 5 years later. Lookup nissan.com
This is not legal advice, but I don't recommend waiting until a suit is filed. Hiring counsel early and figuring out how to respond to the initial notice can be important: it might keep the courts out of the dispute altogether (especially if the other side is on very weak grounds) and might increase the settlement amount (if any) should OP choose to settle and transfer the domain.
There's more to this issue than just the naked law and legal procedure. Context matters, and experienced lawyers help you navigate situations. They're called "counsel" for a reason. :-)
But at what cost? 200/hour to navigate a situation that is easily winnable? Also if the other party knows that he has a lawyer they can use that to run up legal fees, making a settlement seem like the cheaper option.
You are assuming "easily winnable" without knowledge of all the facts and the law. The whole reason to hire an attorney is to get an informed opinion about where you stand in the first place.
Usually you have something like insurance for this. In Dutch it is called “rechtsbijstand” for private persons and pretty affordable. These are not necessarily the best lawyers obviously but they are backed by huge law firms. Probably the same exists for businesses but way more expensive.
So it doesn’t need to be expensive to request the support of a lawyer.
"Rechtsbijstand" is dependent on certain conditions. Amongst which a minimum amount of financial damage.
The "juridisch loket" is an organisation that provides free legal advice and is financed by the Dutch government. This is probably a better option in most cases.
There are free consults, but then you aren’t their client. Paying for an hours time gets a more detailed consult and makes you a client that gives me more meaningful iformation and also some “work.”
Obviously, “hire a lawyer,” is sometimes right. But if I hired a lawyer every time I was told to, I would be out hundreds of hours of billing fees. Anecdotally, I’ve never fucked anything up royally. That doesn’t mean that I made the right decision, but is something I strive for.
Spending $300-1000 on a consult every time I might need one is like taking an antibiotic every time I might have encountered a bacteria. It’s important to qualify and spend money when I actually need to rather than every time.
It’s like those people who say “don’t criticize my book until you read it” (since that usually means that it makes them some money to have me buy their book). If I had to read every book to figure out if I should like it or not, that’s impossible. I need to develop effective evaluations and filters to prevent me from wasting my time and money.