This admittedly is a hard turn from writing about the beginnings of my honeymoon business to something that really frustrates me these days.
Our honeymoon bridal registry has been quite successful with German, Austrian and Swiss users, now we are pushing hard to speed up our travel sales as well. Since many wedding couples in Germany are still fond of personal service when it comes to booking a honeymoon, we are creating an exciting new online travel portal with a number of interesting partners and a lot of personal service.
Currently we are in the process of designing partner contracts. And as you might have guessed from the title of this post, I just found out about the dark side of working with lawyers.
So far we have been more than lucky to have been able to work with the immensely knowledgeable, super-friendly, always helpful and more than fair Information Technology Lawyer Stephan Hansen-Oest, who has been our legal counsel for everything Web 2.0.
Well, travel industry contracts are a thing for itself so we went with a new lawyer specialized on tourism law. A specialized lawyer in this field was hard to find in Munich and our lawyer sure is very friendly, talks a lot and likes to discuss everything in detail. But she is also charging us by the hour and with only half of the contracts barely finished, we already hit 3! times the hours she forecasted when we discussed her mandate.
And while I of course see that “this contract (like most documents I will not just buy online) is not a standard contract” it’s still by far not a M&A transaction either. Am I so mistaken to expect a good lawyer to predict time and effort needed to set up a not so complex document more or less accurate? Can it be that the client is paying a multiple because the lawyer over-estimated her competency in the matter? (Can I say this without being sued? I won’t give names, though).
I absolutely love the sometimes curious life of a female internet entrepreneur. But working with lawyers (Stephan Hansen-Oest excluded) on simple things like setting up contracts can be a truly frustrating experience.
March 4th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Well, nice article….
I love it.