only when a lawyer gets involved

My apologies to my lawyer who happens to be my oldest and best friend (and a few other good guys that have mistakenly taken up this profession) , but some lawyers are just stupid.

My company is a marketing company and we have a main website for all of our product and individual websites for each individual product. The other day we found that someone with a similar product stole our website, made minor changes and was marketing it. The company did not even have the sense to remove all the code that referenced our website on it.

So I tracked down their "registered agent" as they did not have a phone and called him (he is a lawyer). Of course he would not take my call so I shot him an email. Friendly, asking nothing more than to have his client change everything that was taken from us. NO threatening language ... just a request to remove it.

Mr Lawyer emails me back, says client has taken care of it but the client simply removed the source reference to my site ... he left all of MY graphics that he stole.

This time I emailed the lawyer back with links to the graphics, source code ... really everything that is hanging his client but again with absolutely NO threat of lawsuits or anything. I simply stated to the guy that if his client had wanted our site, he could have hired us and for $500 we would have duplicated it for him.

Twenty minutes later I get an email ... the easiest solution is for my client to pay you $500. I will insure that he does that and get you a release form.

This was the ultimate in arrogance if you ask me. From the minute I started this endeavor, all I had ever asked for was that my graphics be removed. Heck, I never even threatened to sue him if he didn't remove them. But the lawyer immediately decided that it was best to settle. Settle what?

I have been sued over the years on numerous occasions (anyone who owns a company has) but to date, I have never sued anyone. The amount of time and focus that it takes is just generally not worth it. What am I going to sue this guy for ... a few thousand dollars in damages ... and how many hours would that take me?

So to cap it off, when I spoke with Jeff (my attorney) the other night I told him the story and his immediate response was, "you only asked for $500?"

Classic ...

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