She responded the very next day and she was still very enthusiastic about helping me, but unfortunately she couldn't be of much help towards this specific topic. She wrote back saying that she would not be able to answer my questions because the questions were not in her field of expertise. I understood her reasoning behind her response because my questions mostly had to do with intellectual property and copyright issues within the photography business, and it takes a specific type of lawyer to know the answers right off the bat. She told me that intellectual property is a very specialized and specific area of law but she didn't want to leave my questions unanswered and she still wanted to help. She mentioned that she knows an intellectual property lawyer and she offered to discuss the questions with him. She promised to get back to me right away as soon as she spoke to him but I knew that changing my lawyer at this point in time would be a major setback. I agreed with her suggestion and I thanked her for her help but I knew that I would have to start looking for a new lawyer just in case.
"One of the major challenges for legal institutions in regulating copyrights is simply that modern intellectual property is so easy to copy. Many consumers are in the habit of violating the law by downloading copyrighted material—music, movies and books—for free. They seem to believe that if it is easy to steal something, then the theft is somehow acceptable. In one survey of adolescents aged 12 to 17, 75 percent agreed with the statement, “file sharing is so easy to do, it's unrealistic to expect people not to do it.” (Cengage Advantage Books: Introduction to Business Law, Page: 508)
I still wanted to try and find someone who I personally knew because I figured that their answers would be more honest and genuine and they would want to spend more time answering my questions. I carefully thought about who else I might know that is a lawyer. Then it hit me that we have another family friend named, Tim Johnson (name changed to protect identity) who is a lawyer and a judge as well. I was sure that he would be able to answer my questions because he has many years of experience in the field and I figured he must know the law since he is a judge. I went through the same process as I did with Jennifer, and he also agreed to help me. I emailed him as well and he wrote back with a similar response to Jennifer’s. He said that the topic was out of his expertise and that it would take a lot of time and research on his part to be able to answer the questions.
In the mean time, I heard back from Jennifer and she told me that after speaking to the other lawyer, he said that he mostly deals with patent law and he does not know the answer to my questions either. Needless to say, my questions were viewed by three different lawyers and neither of them was able to give me answers. This experience has taught me that I would have to find a very specific lawyer, although my original understanding was that any lawyer would've been able to give me some kind of answer. By the time I got done contacting these lawyers, I realized that I was starting to run out of time to contact a completely new lawyer. I was left with very little time, still no lawyer, and unanswered questions. I had to take the matter into my own hands and find my own answers to the questions by researching. It wasn't what I originally had in mind but I was able to learn a lot just by researching, maybe even just as much as getting my answers from a lawyer.
Although things didn't go as planned, I do see the importance of talking to a lawyer and even hiring a lawyer for future business matters. “Business people are optimists—they believe that they have negotiated a great deal and everything is going to go well—sales will boom, the company will prosper. Lawyers have a different perspective—their primary goal is to protect their clients by avoiding litigation, now and in the future. For this reason, lawyers are trained to be pessimists—they try to foresee and protect against everything that can possibly go wrong. Business people sometimes view this lawyering as a waste of time and a potential deal-killer, but it may just save them from some dire failure.”
(Cengage Advantage Books: Introduction to Business Law, Page: 208)
I have definitely considered getting a lawyer once I start my own business, for it will make my job a lot easier because in the end, we’re not lawyers, we’re artists!
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