The idea is to give readers an informed opinion that, while not specific to their situation, highlights some of the major issues involved in various decisions, such as whether to form an LLC or corporation for your tech startup. (Hint: read this first.)

What is free advice all about?

To some, these posts look like free advice, which makes no sense for a lawyer who gets paid for giving advice. But that’s only half-right at most. From the lawyer’s perspective, only specific advice is worthwhile — after all, you can learn lots of general stuff about incorporation, venture financing documents, and even (although rarely) about venture math from lawyers, VCs, and entrepreneurs (who are now VCs).

What I tell prospective clients is this: you need advice that is competent, focused, reliable, and dedicated. These other writers all fall short on one or more of these factors, and even my own posts have the fault, necessary though it may be, of not being specific to *your* exact situation. Even something as otherwise “standard” as the Delaware C-corp will not apply to certain tech startups depending on the business model, the resources available to the founders, and even the actual nature of the underlying business. Could I lay out some examples here? Sure, but even then you wouldn’t necessarily be sure that your situation fell within the general guidelines. And you wouldn’t know whether there is some other fact in your situation that would change everything, like a substantial spendthrift trust for your living expenses. Trust me: no VC is worried about that issue from your perspective.

If I can’t ever get “real” advice, am I wasting my time?

So why do I write if I’m ultimately doomed to fail by my own standards? Well, first, I think there’s no harm in having high standards. Second, my real goal isn’t, and can’t be, to give you THE answer. Third, what I can do is tell you most of the questions, point you to many of the factors, and most importantly, show you how I approach the issues and structure my advice.

Because what you need, what you come to me for, is trusted advice. I show you that I’m trustworthy by showing (not telling) you that I know what I’m talking about and by giving you lots of evidence of my mindset so that you can see what sort of service, experience, and advice you’re getting.

And that makes a difference for different types of work: putting a typical venture deal together requires a classic Silicon Valley approach: focus on the high payoff terms, put everything else within the zone of reason, and get the parties moving forward; on the other hand, negotiating debt with strict operating covenants and a *gulp* personal guarantee requires a classic New York City approach: no stone unturned, every phrase — representation, covenant, and condition — examined and pushed in your direction.

Please share any examples of when you got the “wrong” type of lawyer for work you needed. What do you expect from a lawyer — what’s just the price of admission and what closes the deal?

Of course, they’re pretty much all useful and accurate. I mean, it’s hard to write a “tip” that is flat-out wrong. But I was thinking about it more in the sense of why, in 2010, do high-profile people with things to say get caught up in “email tips” or other minutiae of their fields?

For Seth, email is no more specially relevant (in the sense it’s discussed here) than it is for pretty much anyone. (He does have special things to say about marketing emails to customers and how to dance the tango with that one; but that’s really about marketing, not email.) For Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, the basic, undergrad level stuff about finance that he’s been posting as “MBA Mondays” is far below the level at which he’s presumably operating (assumption based on: Wharton MBA, co-founder Flatiron Partners, investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Etsy, Meetup, Return Path, Del.icio.us, Feedburner).

So two questions: first, why don’t we know how to use email yet? Is it really just that everyone my parents’ age is emailing all the time now? Really? For work? They’re in their early 60s. I don’t think there are many folks that age just starting to use email in the workplace, but I could be wrong. Show me, and I’ll believe it.

What should experts write about?

Second, if you’re a hotshot guru, if you’re an actual expert at something, even if that’s being an expert in communicating about something that seems mundane or even unimportant or at least non-mystical to many people (Blogs about wine? Gardening? Cooking? With a waffle iron?), what would drive you to spend time on these types of seemingly low-value questions? Is it just about sharing what’s free?

I thought recently about why I answer basic questions in my field — it’s because my clients are not experts in the field and these seemingly basic questions are not basic for them. So it’s my belief that these readers get value disproportionate (hopefully in their favor!) to my cost to provide it. It gives them a chance to learn about my way of approaching problems, a sense of my depth of of knowledge on the real issues, and maybe even an introduction to me when we wouldn’t have met otherwise. So sure, the Five-Minute General Counsel series is marketing. But it provides value because it’s me talking about topics on which I am an expert.

I am worried about the viability of my potential client base, however, if the pool of startup candidates for Fred’s attention are so far down the learning curve in terms of business planning that they don’t understand discount rates, CAGR, or the law of large numbers. Conveniently for many of them, I’m well-versed in finance too. Financial models and ranger-level attention to detail? Match made in heaven (twice).

Front-line management (which is the starting point for most leadership development) has had its share of tips from me, which I think of as different, but maybe that’s not true. And I’ve written about email and productivity too. Part of the productivity dance is sharing what works for me, a version of the mobile professional: I’m a lawyer and strategic advisor who works with relatively small teams on any particular engagement or matter. My advice is  (not the same as having 75+ people working on a software beta launch).

Email tips? Really?

So back to the main point: really, do we still need email tips? Even people of my generation (early 40s, or what I like to call “mid-30s”) who didn’t see email commonly until after college (for me, it was law school in 1994 at Cornell that introduced email as a common tool), have still had 15+ years of experience with email.

If we keep working at this level, if we don’t expect some kind of improvement, we’re going to be telling people every year for the next 50 years about how to write emails, how to read email, and how to save money for retirement.

We can’t have our smartest guides, our best communicators, teaching remedial classes. Not if we want to make any progress.

Mekki and a friend ran with an idea I tweeted last October: “Who’s got a web-based service that will take a huge pastebomb (300K of text) and smarten all quotes, turn — into em-dash, etc?” They created something called Cleantext. I just pasted in the entire text of my next short story collection (written as plain ASCII in a text editor) and out came something that was beautifully formatted and ready to be pasted into a layout program for further massaging. I’m delighted by this — how useful!

I’m really excited by this: it shows that there are people who can execute on an idea and create something. I’m also very encouraged that Cory doesn’t seem interested in getting his “piece of the action.” Of course, given his writing and his recent approach to publishing his books as free ebooks, that’s about what you’d expect.

Congratulations to Cleantext and a hearty well-done to Cory for providing inspiration without no strings attached. Even better, he just gave this site scads of good great word of mouth.

Maybe I’ll finally break out my comp (fka Senior Comprehensive Project) or my not-quite-finished note from law school and give this a try.

——————–

I started the orphan ideas category of posts because I wanted to accomplish three goals: first, get these ideas out of my mental baggage list, second, maybe give someone else a little spark, and third, maybe, just maybe, see something get built or done.

It’s hiding the ball from your customers to try to create a motivation to engage with your company that they wouldn’t naturally have, i.e., don’t need and don’t want.

Example: “emailing” travel reservation info that consists of a link to a website rather than, you know, the actual itinerary info. (Tip: that means you, Expedia.)

History: probably a holdover from the days of hits, page views, and monetizing eyeballs.

Also seen when “giving away” an eBook that actually requires you to confirm your email, ostensibly for the purpose of getting a link to the file but really for the purpose of adding you to the author’s email marketing list. (Tech tip: you need my email if you’re going to email me; if the PDF is hosted on your website, you could, you know, provide a link.)

BUT SEE Copyblogger/Chris Garrett’s Authority Rules ebook and Seth Godin’s recent What Matters Now.

If your business model or marketing plan hinges on getting people to give you an email address so you can send them things they haven’t actually asked for (and “opt-in” isn’t the same as asking for your marketing pitch), you might want to rethink that strategy or at least figure out how you’re going to move away from it. Remember, your customers are your friends. If you treat them that way, they might just become fans.

As I think about it now, I suppose I should edit to make that point clearer. But it’s there even without the keywords. I’ll explore this framework further on Simplifying Complexity if there’s interest: are you interested?

The new page, Observations, is available from the header throughout rickcolosimo.com. Depending on the amount of feedback from those items, I may try to integrate them into the regular posts for anyone viewing the RSS feed.

Let me know what you think.

Quick Reference for Causes of Action and Affirmative Defenses in Texas. — Caselaw Snippets from Recent Texas Appellate Opinions.

Lawyers with a national practice (often driven by national clients) can spend a surprising amount of time pulling specific quotes from the relevant jurisdiction to either get complaints or answers filed or serve as the initial structure for various motions. The exact language of a cause of action may vary just slightly from state to state, and it never hurts to have the elements exactly right, since words, and the particularities of construction and meaning, are the tools of a good lawyer.

This is a great idea worth copying and extending to other jurisdictions, and even, if another tech-savvy lawyer were inclined, to collate into a wiki-style site to collect these statements.

Laws (and court opinions) belong to the people.

One way to continue the flow of the conversation and activity on a Facebook page is to schedule events through the page and invite your fans. You shouldn’t just make up events; they should be meaningful to your audience from their perspective.

Since REED is having its Seventh Annual Fall Fundraiser next month, I added the event details to the Facebook page. The tools allow you to easily signal all the fans, but even though the school has 200+ fans (not bad for a school of about 20 students), each of those fans has hundreds of facebook friends who they want to invite.

Using our event as an example, here’s how to share an event with your friends on Facebook:

Step 1 – go to the right fan page, like this REED page: http://www.facebook.com/reedacademy

Step 2 – find the event you want to invite people to

Step 3 – look at the menu at the bottom and select the “invite guests” option. (Follow the arrow in this picture.)

Arrow showing "invite guests" option

Step 4 – this brings up a neat dialog box that will let you select from everyone in your friends list. It then sends off the event as an invite.

Bonus step – if you also send a link to these instructions to your friends, they could send an invite to their friends as well.

(As an aside, if you just share the event, it’s much harder to add everyone to the list, and there’s a “send as message” option in the lower let of that dialog box.)

If you find this useful and would like more information about how my social media consulting can help you shape and share your message, contact me here.

I’ve got productivity software reviews, posts about behavioral analysis, and comments on corporate governance. And even a few social media how-to’s.

Finally — a question for you: what questions would you like to see answered in posts? And does anyone have any suggestions for me on how/where best to present my more law-related posts?

However, I need to get those events back into my Outlook calendar so I can keep track of them and not double-book myself. I described the workaround for that problem in my Anagram post. What I realized in the course of turning to Anagram was that this problem could be easily prevented. If the event plugin also creates an ics file with a download link, not only could I add the events myself, but people looking to attend those events would probably benefit even more from the feature, allowing for greater attendance. That’s a win-win for bloggers and readers.

As with the last WP plugin software bounty:

There are a number of ways that you might address this problem, so there will be no constraints; this means, however, that judging a winner will be more subjective. I will judge finalists and ask a programmer/designer from the Triiibes WP users group to select a winner.

This plugin is a work-for-hire but we’ll agree to a suitable CC license so you have an opportunity to redistribute and even sell.