Are You Wise Or Merely Clever?
For years my family and I made maple syrup in rural Vermont – collecting buckets of sap in horse-drawn sleds (Percherons - for the equine-minded among you :-)) and boiling thousands of gallons of maple sap into precious gallons of maple syrup. After representing and advising small businesses including a number of pest and wildlife concerns as an attorney for the better part of four decades, I decided to pen this column using the maple syrup metaphor to boil away the steam of decades of experience just leaving the essence – the sweet golden maple syrup of wisdom.
If I had to find a soundbite that best expressed how successful businesses mature and grow it would be “make the transition from being clever to being wise”. A useful definition distinguishing the two is that the clever person knows how to get out of the situation that the wise person would have never gotten into in the first place. Hopefully this column will be a place to share anecdotes and war stories about the situations which indelibly imprinted that lesson on my psyche.
Perhaps this sentiment was expressed best by Will Rogers when he said “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.” You know who you are.
Years ago, I taught business contracts in a local college. I would constantly tell my students to “see an attorney, have the contract reviewed by an attorney”. One of my bolder students once accused me of using my platform as a professor to generate legal work for my practice. I told him in no uncertain terms that if I really wanted to create work I would tell them not to see an attorney because for every dollar I got reading a contract, I got $10 to $20 litigating their way out of the contract they should have never signed. That my friends is a difference between being clever and being wise.
Lawyers basically come in two flavors – lawyer planners and lawyer problem solvers. Like I said above, for every dollar you spend with a lawyer planner you will save tenfold by avoiding having to deal with the lawyer problem solvers. I recently got a spate of new businesses referred to me from a client, their problems all involving avoidable litigation. I told each one of them that as far as the first horse escaping the barn I could make no promises but I could certainly fix the broken locks and make sure that no other horses got out! We then sat down and looked at their contracts and sales agreements and did some tweaking (think of it as a legal exclusion) and they should be just fine going forward.
By the way, the best lawyer planners are those who were problem solvers in a former life – as litigators they clashed in court and on paper over poorly drafted agreements, nonexistent agreements or better yet, agreements that existed in the minds of only one of the parties. Having a lawyer prepare or review your existing contract (and hopefully we will discuss contracts in future installments of this column in greater detail) increases the likelihood of avoiding expensive litigation or worse down the road. A neighbor of mine proudly showed me a book he wrote “How to Win in Court”. Perhaps the book that should have been written is “How to Avoid Court”. That’s the difference between being clever and wise.
