Читать книгу Growing the Top Line - Cliff Farrah - Страница 16

In order to transact, you have to be able to bound your offering. People need to know what they are getting for what they are paying. In some markets this is pretty straightforward. You go to a shoe store and buy a pair of shoes. Definable/measurable. When you get into services, things get much harder to bound. Toss in “as a service” and you’ll find that lawyers are making a lot of money bounding definitions of what you are and are not buying, as well as your rights to any data produced by your usage. Understanding what you are selling, especially as companies move to offerings that marry product, service, and software, is really important.

I talked about this a bit with my good friend Ray Ausrotas. Ray is one of Boston’s successful trial attorneys, a twice‐published author of Lexis practice guides, and has helped me several times throughout the years as Beacon has protected much of its own proprietary and confidential information. He is smart, tireless, fierce, and yet kind and reasonable. Killer combination. I cannot recommend him highly enough should you ever need a litigator. We talked about how poorly written and defined services agreements can lead to bad outcomes:

Especially in the services world, communication and clarity defining the scope of what is going to be a continuing business relationship – where both sides understand precisely what is being delivered, and how and when – is critical. If parties structuring their interactions rush this process (or get “go fever”) at the outset, or don’t adjust when circumstances have changed, it is not unusual to see litigation occur. Many of the commercial cases I have litigated and tried over the last 20‐plus years have had poorly defined terms at their core. Of course parties can’t realistically expect to foresee and negotiate risks for every future situation they will encounter; but hard work on the front end, with each side specifying and adequately protecting their rights (including over who holds rights to proprietary business confidential information and intellectual property), can help to prevent costly and unpredictable outcomes down the road.

He’s right. In the services world, or in the product world, what you sell needs to be clearly understood and defined. There are too many snakes out there who are all too willing to bite.