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Comment by anticensor | Hacker News Reader

What if they are not allowed to say no to lawyers?

Legal is a cost center, which means that they don't get to say no. Here is how that conversation goes:

Lawyer: You must include my unenforceable EULA.

Anyone-with-a-brain: lol, no. Your "contribution" to this project only serves to do the direct opposite of our stated intent... Actually, why are you involving yourself here - are you billing for this?

Lawyer scampering noises recede into the distance

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that a lawyers job is to provide advise, not to make decisions.

Poorly conceived advice apparently.

Only in the minds of HN engineers. Lawyers who tell their clients to do nothing rather than actually help try to figure out a path forward go out of business very quickly.

In-house counsel is a little different but again even at places like IBM the lawyers could not get away with blocking meaningful business

Specifically, lawyers advise their clients on how to avoid liability.

The minimum liability comes from doing nothing, so the default advice is "Don't."

> The minimum liability comes from doing nothing

You must be working in a very unregulated industry if that’s true!

It still follows:

"How do I not get sued for my new medical device?"

"Don't sell it to anybody."

As a recovering lawyer, all I will say is that, it is extremely rare for any lawyer to have the power to do anything directly themselves of their own initiative, which is even more true in business than in other areas of law (lawyers can railroad their immigration, criminal defense, family law, etc clients a bit more because these clients have even less clue what is the right thing to do).

More likely in your scenario is:

Lawyer: You must include this EULA that this person/board/committee demands, and will fire both of us if you don't, because they asked me how to cover their asses in case of XYZ.

Anyone-with-a-brain: okay.

Lawyers themselves are certainly powerful, but they only really derive power from people with real power; states, boards of directors, judges, etc.

In a room sit three great men. A CEO, a lawyer, and an investor paying for both.

As a person who as been described as an "activist investor" by several angry businessmen, I've never seen a shareholder or board member demand anything like that. The only thing that I can think of that would loosely fit your hypothetical scenario would involve a non-human shareholder like a hedge fund making the demand, at the behest of their lawyers. I suppose another potential loose fit would be a fresh business school grad whining about the absence of a "moat" - and this sort of thing being the best that legal could offer in response. In either case both legal and management is to blame: legal for the bad council and management for not pushing back against something so stupid.

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