Opinion | Adaptive legal advice for shape-shifting businesses

#Discussion(General) [ via IoTGroup ]

The fact of the matter is that ever since law school, we’ve been trained to look for problems in the issues that our clients present us with, examining them through the lens of existing laws and testing them against relevant precedents with the sole purpose of uncovering all the different legal and regulatory risks that could affect the business we are advising.
On the other hand, truly disruptive business models operate so completely outside all existing legal frames of reference that they exist in a sort of regulatory limbo—neither fully regulated by existing laws nor specifically permitted.
Given our lawyers’ instinct to focus on risk, we struggle to endorse either kind of business model, not realizing that most investors are willing to absorb a significant amount of risk if the potential upside is high enough.
It takes a different kind of lawyer to work with modern businesses—lawyers who don’t just present their clients with the risks, but help them assess the actual likelihood that any of these risks will come to pass; lawyers who can call upon their instinctual understanding of how regulators will react to models that have never previously come up for regulatory scrutiny and opine optimistically on structures that exist in the interstices of established regulatory business plans; lawyers who have the imagination to anticipate what will happen once the business expands to the point where governments are forced to reshape the regulatory fabric to account for them, and who can, therefore advise clients not just on the basis of the law as it exists today, but as it will most likely come to be.
Startups need advisers who, instead of telling them what’s not possible, can tell them what they need to change in their current structures in order to optimally achieve their business objectives; who, like former Canadian ice hockey player Wayne Gretski used to advise, have learnt to skate to where the puck is going to be.

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