In-house Lawyer Grumbling
Unsolicited advice from Rob the Llama Butcher:
"If you want a memo on a particular point of law to present
to some government agency, don't write one yourself and send it to your
outside counsel for fixing up. Instead, just let them write it from the
ground up."Buh-lieve me, you'll save yourself a lot of time and money."
Unsolicited response from in-house counsel (me):
Only if you promise not to stick some first-year associate trained in law school to spot problems instead of answers on the project!
I've noticed that much of the work product outside lawyers prepare for me is wordier and covers far more ground than required by the scope of the project. Of course we're tossing around generalizations here, but. . .
<rant mode>Outside lawyers seem to focus more on problems than solutions. When you have a limited budget, you get pretty frustrated that a ham-handed rookie with no business sense is anally citing and shepardizing the basic principles of law known to all of us in perfect Bluebook fashion, but forgetting to answer the question we asked, all the while charging us close to $200 an hour!</rant mode>