Our biggest legal predator lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, and his name is Donald Trump. Unfortunately, there are many more out there. Our legal system is built with so many loopholes, which is exactly why we embrace civil debate (at least we used to), and why laws evolve as things change and/or are interpreted differently.
The system was designed to protect with certain guardrails, with the expectation that most people will follow the letter of the law. But what that same system has also created are legal predators — people who sue you for things you didn’t do, from the ADA to unions to employees who come after you for firing them when they had it coming, with thorough documentation, but none of that matters. When you are faced with a lawsuit, you have to respond, hire lawyers, and pay out for something you didn’t see coming.
Many of these predator lawyers know full well their client has a worthless case, but they figure they can still extract cash from someone. It doesn’t matter if they can’t win; they can clog up the legal system. They know the only way out is to pay them off to walk away. It’s happened to us more than once.
What I’ve told plenty of entrepreneurs is this: everything is built on a legal foundation, and it’s a lot like building a house. Your specs can’t be eighty percent complete when you send them out to bid, or you will find yourself paying more than you had bargained. In the legal world, it doesn’t matter how buttoned-up you are — someone can still come after you with a case that has no real merit, just enough teeth to make it expensive to fight. What I don’t understand is how the lawyers who take on these cases, who push them through a system that’s already buried in paperwork and wasn’t built to handle this kind of legal harassment, look at themselves in the mirror every morning and think, “This is what I do for a living. It’s grift, dressed up in a suit and a bar license, working its way through loopholes. And I am utterly disgusted by it.
