Dave Winer is going through an interesting legal problem, he is being sued by his former lawyers/law firm, Russo & Hale. Bottom line, his lawyers want a piece of a nice pie that they had very little, if anything, to do with, according to Dave.
While I don’t pretend to know the inner workings, and only know from what has been written publicly, by Dave himself (with limited comments by others, such as this one), and I like Dave’s argument (IANAL)…. Today they are in arbitration, I don’t know if it’s binding or not….
One thing I do know, is compromise. I have been through a legal proceeding. One that I didn’t want to go through, but it was a matter of principle and about a breach of contract. In the end, I won. But the company continued to drag it out through the legal process so we ended up settling. It’s what I learned from this that is what I want to point out to Dave….
Most people think that “compromise” is both parties going away happy. I’m a “glass half full” kind of person myself, but my lawyer taught me (as did the legal process), that compromise is actually just the opposite! Why, you ask…? Well, if everyone was happy, they would have gotten everything they wanted and wouldn’t have had to give anything up, that isn’t a compromise :-). With a compromise, you have to give up something, accept something that is less than desirable. Most aren’t happy about that, but in the end you get nearly all of what you want, and that’s OK….
So as you see, a compromise is both parties going away unhappy…. :-)! Maybe Dave’s old lawyers need to learn this?