This is

as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

. Here I write about many things. In the past I wrote about other things but the past is past. I write code for people to play with, I write about my life on Twitter, and I write here.

On I wrote Not a lawyer any more, on the subject of Rants.

So according to Naked Law, the technology blog for the law firm I used to work for, Centrica contracted Accenture to write some software, and that software turned out not to work like they wanted. The court found Accenture liable for around £29 million. The lawyer response?

[This] demonstrates how widely the Courts are willing to interpret 'direct loss'. This will comfort the customer, but IT suppliers may want to consider strengthening their liability clauses.

Or, y'know, writing software that doesn't suck.

This is why I no longer work for lawyers.

Simon

Yeah, speaking as a developer in that area, the things claimed as direct losses all seem reasonable to me. Billing problems are very visible to affected customers, and tend to result in a ton of bad publicity for businesses like Centrica - half the costs relate to keeping customers happy, to avoiding a costly PR disaster...

jimb

Don't be a Democrat, either. Consider this:

Thoughtful point of view: This has been around before but is a good reminder.

The Democrat Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer, and so is his wife, Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Look at the Democratic Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.

The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and, Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.

Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976. The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work. The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich.

The Lawyers' Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America And, so we have seen the procession of official enemies, in the eyes of the Lawyers'Party, grow.

Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.

This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.

Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all consuming. Some Americans become 'adverse parties' of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.

Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When lawyers use criminal prosecution as a continuation of politics by other means, as happened in the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, then the power of lawyers in America is too great. When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.

We cannot expect the Lawyers' Party to provide real change, real reform, or real hope in America. Most Americans know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789.

Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.

Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work.

Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.

sil

jimb: why do I give a shit? I'm not American.

Mattj

Looks like spam to me, it's been posted in various blog comments and forums word for word.

Alex

And the President's name is no longer Bush.

Chris Cunningham

Ignoring the wingnut spam, I don't see that this warrants a pithy response. Software is an art, and art is hard. It is not necessarily the case that sucky software is produced only by sucky software companies, or even that delivering non-sucky software is actually possible in some situations. Ideally you'd have some sort of insurance situation here rather than a limited liability clause though.

- Chris

sil

Chris: obviously you're right and I was just being snarky, but the point still stands, I think.

agoodic

yes, you are right i think~

Pablo

What does that mean? Customers should test software before accepting it; unless the systems provided were actually buggy, if the customer just says that he or she doesn't "like" something like software in order to claim a hefty compensation is just a way to take money out of others, a very damaging practice indeed, a legal scam. It seems then like software development is going the way of plastic surgery and small aircraft: people frequently sue plastic surgeons based on subjective impressions and ideas ("My nose is ugly"), and a small aircraft costs about seven times more than fifteen years go thanks to merely opportunistic lawyers.

hervino

passsa; NA troy71701 GEROIA OT AKYVESTAR 100% PANANIK ac $ 1000082

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