Why we love lawyers (well, OUR lawyers, anyway)
Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2018 03:00:00 -0700
This IT pilot fish has spent the past year and a half helping his company’s clients prepare for the European Union’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation, and with a month to go, it’s been smooth sailing — mostly.
“Over the last 18 months I’ve been asking my customers time and again about their readiness to implement the GDPR rules,” says fish. “We have mostly small companies as our customers, family businesses and one-to-ten-person outfits, and most of them had need of our services one way or another.
“But one customer, a lawyer, told me every time that this particular set of rules does not apply to him, because everything he does is governed by an obligation to confidentiality. Ten weeks before the final date, he still thought it had nothing to do with him.”
But then the lawyer attends a seminar hosted by a professional group, where he is told otherwise.
And the next day, fish’s company gets a letter from the lawyer informing them that the lawyer has filed charges against the company for neglect of duty because fish didn’t inform him of the legal implications of the GDPR.
Fish reads the letter. Then he checks to make sure his copies of his messages to the lawyer are where they’re supposed to be.
“I keep all my correspondence in write-once archives with digital signing and all the other nice things archiving systems can do,” fish says. “I made a nice bundle for my own lawyer, put it on a thumb drive and walked over to his office.”
Fish’s lawyer reads the other lawyer’s letter — twice — and bursts out laughing.
After about five minutes, he composes himself and drafts a very lawyery letter to his colleague, informing him that it would be his pleasure to drag the other lawyer before a court and to rip his reputation to shreds.
Ten days after that, another letter arrives — a one-sentence letter from the other lawyer, informing fish that the lawyer has withdrawn his charges and doesn’t want anything to do with fish ever again.
“I bundled his data on a DDS cartridge — well aware that he does not own a DDS drive — and sent it via courier to his office,” says fish. “The Termination of Contract, usually to be sent three months in advance, I included in the bundle.
“I definitely love getting rid of this kind of customer.”
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