On Sun, 17 Oct 1999, Jean Morissette wrote:
> Well, be careful. When I said what I said (wrote anyway) I meant that even
> though you did a good job, went by the book etc... If somebody's job is on
> the line, or company's reputation or lawyers wanting to have some fun, you
> ARE DONE. Because you will have to DEFEND yourself and that's what is going
Certainly true... at least in the immediate sense... I admit I haven't
thought about getting sued as much as I should, perhaps it is time to get
creative. HmM.
Mabye have a puppet corporation overseas somewhere, and have transactions
go through it?
How about, form a corporation for every project? File like :
CONSULTCO-41823 LIMITED LIABILITY CORPORATION, where 48123 is some serial
number of all the various companies on different projects you've formed?
Or like,
"CONSULTCO-PERFORMS-SECURITY-AUDIT-ON-ANNUAL-BASIS-FOR-ABC-CORPORATION
LIMITED LIABILITY CORPORATION" So you can only get sued one at a time, so
if sued you hit the panic button and tear up that contract and declare
bancruptcy as our friend on the list noted... Damn is that even legal?
Or encourage them to hire you at "part time" as an employee, and hire your
own employees as well, at whatever rate for like as long as the project
lasts, but charge 25% extra for all the hassle and tax hits...
Mabye get way out there and charge 99% of the money for some phony service
when in reality it's that 1% the client is really paying for...? Like say
you get hired to fix some problems with data diddling going on in a bank
(well run away from banks, I wouldn't do them but just for example)... so
you sell them an old box of some sort which is a VITAL COMPONENT of the
real service that's going on... for $10,000 (whatever "would be" your
service fee), and only include certain services billable by hour such as
time spent programming, etc...? Then you sell them this time as a LLC...?
Of course when sued you argue that the damages awarded should be
proportionate to the $ recieved, which was like $100, so you give them
$200 and be done with it? Haha... I think I've done a bit of that before,
just by instinct, you cluster the big sums around peices of hardware wich
do something, then you make them do the magic backstage for free. it's
almost like ripping the client off on one thing and then doing being
incredibly generous with another, giving a whole bunch of "free" services
for him ("support") which never get billed (or taxed).
All these will piss the client off though. The thing is my clients don't
seem to be considering sueing me. Don't SEEM to be. Usually I get called
during/after some disaster so... but this is intriguing, there must be
some successful ways to avoid this sort of thing... I've probably just
been either too lucky or too small-time to get hit. There's so much shit
to think about! Intellectual property rights, taxes, support, disasters,
... all whilst trying to actually provide a legitimate service which
people desperately need.
I like what someone on the list said about using an agency, that's a
wicked idea, a bunch of guys get together and pool resources, but without
too much paperwork between them, and just sort of share the clients
amongst them... and they can then back each other up since the client has
to take on the legal power of 100 of these consultants who've accumulated
funds for such an event rather than one unsuspecting dude ... do you know
of specific incidents where a consultant has been fucked over by an evil
client? We should look into that and see the after-shock, what's been
learned...
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