The brute reality of the thing

5 August 2026

A fun fact that I carry around in my head (next to a lot of half-remembered education and a perfectly-preserved library of song lyrics) is that contracts predate both writing and lawyers. The first formal contracts that we have evidence for were clay tokens, stored in clay balls and given to temple priests to represent specific quantities of grain or livestock offerings owed to the temple. Once the goods were delivered, the ball was broken to represent the fulfillment of the contract. Over time, a habit developed of pressing the tokens directly into wet clay to act as an aide-mémoire, and the whole thing more or less snowballed from there into cuneiform. I like to keep this fact in my head because it reminds me that lawyers are ultimately not responsible for this mess, priests and taxmen are. So please either direct your criticisms there, or come up with better jokes about the legal profession.

Unfortunately, lawyers often deserve the hate. And this includes IP lawyers and in-house counsel types, who often trade in the blood-sucker reputation for 'big, expensive stick that doesn't actually make me any money' and 'general mood killer and wet blanket', respectively*. The reasons for this poor reputation are fairly well-discussed, but essentially comes down to a fundamental difference in training and incentives between lawyers and business owners. Lawyers, as I like to say, are not trained to be right. They are instead trained not to be wrong. Because the penalty for not making the most sparkling legal argument is, by and large, much smaller than the penalty for making even trivial mistakes. This is obviously in tension with the whole ethos of entrepreneurs, which is based on being wrong in little ways the whole time, iterating each time, until you get it right in a big way.