The BUSKLAW Newsletter

  Children's literature can provide unique insights into best practices and procedures related to my legal specialty: business and technology contracts. Consider Bilbo Baggins's frustration when faced with a contract rife with legal jargon in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, a subject that my colleague Michael Braem and I wrote about here . Or how about using Lewis Carroll's  Alice in Wonderland  to discuss - and refute - curious excuses for legal jargon in this Michigan Bar Journal article . And in J.M. Barrie's  Peter Pan , we hear Peter accuse the ineffectual Captain Hook of being a codfish, causing the old pirate Smee to consider if the brigands have been captained by a codfish, adding "it's lowerin' to our pride." Let's talk about leadership in the context of organizational contract management. In my experience, many companies - large and small - don't grasp the importance of the careful and continuous tending of their contracts. They are ...

I just finished the excellent article "13 Things System Administrators Hate About IT Vendors" by Jeff James at Petri IT Knowledgebase . Here are those 13 pain points: Sales reps who don't know their own products. Over promise, meet under deliver. It's a software problem! No, it's a hardware problem! One size fits all documentation. Vanishing support after the sale. Putting down other vendors. Configuration fails. Outsourced telephone tech support. Customer-hostile online support. Abusing a monopoly position. Throwing [system] admins under the bus to make a sale. Getting what you pay for. Clueless consultants. Good news! Well-drafted contract documents between the IT vendor and customer can mitigate many of these issues. Here's how: First, the customer should base its selection of an IT vendor on the vendor's written response to a carefully-prepared Request for Proposal ("RFP"). In my experience, IT customers don't s...