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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

People questioning whether the lawyer really had the power to block this don't know how legal departments in big corporations work, as others have pointed out.

A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can only get in trouble for saying Yes. They feel they're doing their jobs by saying No and they'll also use the phrase "out of an abundance of caution."

The lawyer's supervisor is very rarely going to overrule him or her and say Yes. They will just say "it's their case, they're in charge." They defer to each other that way.

This probably seems excessively cynical to you. Indeed it doesn't always turn out this way. Sometimes rationality prevails.

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I’ve found good corporate lawyers will summarize the risks of taking some action and ask you (or higher up leadership) to weight those against the business case for taking said action.

Agreed, I worked with some very good lawyers at Google who understood the technical details and the context outside of corporate/industry. It wasn't always default 'no', especially if you knew how to ask the questions properly. It was default 'maybe and here's why'.

In fact, I was in Google Patent Litigation, and that's largely where that came from.

But you're right: you have to prepare the ground very carefully when you ask for legal advice. If you just ask out of the blue "can we do this?" you're asking for trouble.

Agreed. When I deal with our legal counsel, I often try to draw him out to determine how I need to prioritize my team's work. Generally he declines to give me any firm yes or no, and just tells me where he sees risks.

> A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can only get in trouble for saying Yes.

This. AND: There's seldom if ever much near-term personal upside for the lawyer, just downside if things go wrong --- and lawyers are a natural target for business people to point the fingers at if things do go wrong, because they're of different tribes.

Warren Buffett's longtime business partner Charlie Munger famously said, "Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower. * * * Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives." [0]

That said, good business lawyers think of themselves as kinda being business people with legal training, assessing all the relevant risks and making recommendations for the business. (I tell my students: Try to think as though you were the CEO — but remember that you're not.)

https://perma.cc/LNG7-JG6Y.

The question that should be asked is not "can we do this?" but "what do we need to do to make this happen?"

This holds true for a number of situations where approval is required. For me it's particularly helpful when looking for IT/Information Security approval. "What actions/precautions do you recommend I take, so that you will approve this when you are asked to (and we are implementing a secure solution)?"

Hence why the phrase "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" exists.

The few times I was involved in “we should ask legal” situations and it wasn’t the most obvious yes… I just checked out after that as some legal drone always came back with some “no” and sometimes some really wonky situations they made up that frankly read more like some random internet legal expert rather than someone with training.

Yes, indeed. I could tell a great story, but just doing that would itself violate a No some lawyer gave me.

That "no" probably expired a long time ago. Another lawyer would be able to tell you.

Often enough, only specific trade secrets get long-term protection.

Non-commissioned crewmen on board ships conducting classified missions, not themselves cleared, can usually say everything they did; it was the officers' responsibility to keep them from knowing any classified details.

Thanks for the (mostly irrelevant to this case) details, but I can't divulge the reason for the No, and I do suspect it would still apply.

Also it's NOT corporate legal that makes ANY decisions - that's reserved for management hierarchy - legal is merely advisory to management and NOTHING MORE.

It's called liability, isn't it? Lawyers only go out of their way to rationalize something when it's deemed profitable.

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