O O Ø O O O O
The Litigation Disease
Lawyer smack.
I was in Staples last week, buying some products that would undoubtedly make my life much more organized, where I saw a free pamphlet from the Canadian Bankers Association entitled Preparing business for the Year 2000.
I was immediately pleased by its clear, reasonable approach, but page 14 caught my attention. Under the header Who can help me? there were three professional business advisors listed:
- Your accountant
- Your lawyer
- Your systems consultant
I don’t quite understand what my accountant might tell me, but I certainly know what they meant by my lawyer.
The threat of legal action has been a constant Y2K scare tactic over the past 12 months. For example:
- My coffee shop depends on yours for a vital service, stir sticks.
- If I wake up on Wednesday morning next century, and you’re not able to meet your contractual stir stick commitments due to a Y2K related failure*, then your ass is mine.
(* Your inventory ran out after your stir stick extruders failed due to a 99-09 maintenance mode bug.)
Symptoms are Showing
The spectre of legal paralysis is very real. Here’s a few examples of companies that have already gotten their feet wet with legal matters.
- Project Damocles: Peter de Jager’s noble, but misguided project goes Beta-max.
- Intuit Gets Sued: If a company doesn’t want to fix a bug, any bug, in a piece of software, who do you call? Your lawyer, of course!
- 2000 Reasons to Sue: This was my first exposure to the concept of lemon law. You take a lemon law complaint, replace the bit about cars with the words Year 2000, and voila! Lawsuit to go.
- www.2000legal.com: “Companies might also have responsibilities to investors, shareholders and others to bring suits against parties who are responsible for Year 2000-related losses.” Yech.
A Contract Is A Contract
I wouldn’t dream of touching on the subject of contract law, but my point is this: Let’s leave the lawyering for after the date change event. Until then, we’re busy.
The threat of lawsuits has already produced the following results:
- Inability to extract timely compliance information from system suppliers
- Failure of companies to declare themselves or their products as Y2K ready, for fear of legal reprisals
- Systems declared Non-Compliant due to lack of vendor response
- Continued silence from almost all of the critical utilities
- The anecdotal spotting of lawyers browsing the COBOL manuals in computer bookstores
We need as much information on the subject to flow as freely as possible for the 19 remaining months. Let me be naïve for a moment and suggest a general agreement to work on a reasonable efforts basis until we make it through this.
Naïveté Expanded
Let me now make my plea. In the name of preventing an economic collapse, and a subsequent worldwide deflationary event, let’s put an end to the stone-walling and weasel-wording that have been going on. When I call you up and ask if your software is going to make it, come clean. I didn’t sue Microsoft for the latest bug that rendered my operating system comatose, I won’t sue you.
It’s only a bug, remember? Okay, its a pervasive bug, that just happens to be the closest thing to man made force majeure we will ever come up against. But let’s go back to treating it like a bug, not an opportunity to inflict someone with litigation.
Coming out of dreamland, we all still have contractual obligations to fulfil, both now and in the future. But how are those of us working on Y2K supposed to ready ourselves, our companies, and our economies when everyone is suffering from legal paralysis?
Evan Spence
Friday, May 29, 1998