*Disclaimer – of course, a legal document needs to start with a disclaimer: our firm has a Slack channel called the #unlawyerzone, where we post adventures that team members get up to that are slightly less serious. This blog post comes from the hidden ether of our #unlawyerzone and should be read in that context. Also, I couldn’t resist butchering the title of that most famous and brilliant song (with apologies to Eddy Grant) to sugar up this rant.
I’ve been working as a commercial attorney for about 10 years and something that we inevitably see a lot of is how most of the business world seems to go into crazy mode whenever a new hyped idea comes along.
Any honest lawyer will admit that hype in the business world is to lawyers’ what blood is to sharks (with apologies to sharks). Hype does create work for us, but like that hairstyle you were so proud of in varsity: you may just be investing time and money in something that will be redundant (at best) and scary (at worst) a couple of years down the line.
Remember when the new Companies Act came into effect and you just had to adopt a new MOI for your company by midnight or the world would go up in flames? It was long before I joined our firm, but I’m glad to see that my partner Adrian Dommisse put things into perspective for our clients at the time with a slightly less Armageddonesque view on the situation.
Our firm has always been hesitant on hyped subjects (without being stuck in the past), but we’ve found that even if you don’t run towards the noise whenever there is an air of excitement in the business world, the party inevitably tends to move to your doorstep after a while.
I’m thinking of all the queries from people who wanted to put everything they ever owned into a Section 12J fund and how hyped that was a few years ago. People with no investment experience at all wanted to start Section 12J funds on every corner, until they learned about all the rules and red tape!
When every millennial with an online Python course in the bag started their own crypto fund from their garage, the queries took a different shape (often the misplaced shape of pyramids). Then there was the period when it was almost frowned upon not to refer to your start-up company as “the Uber of this or that…” or “the Spotify of organic vegetables”, but I see that we’re (mostly) past that now.
My goal is not to be the Grinch who stole hype – I have just been reflecting a lot over the years about what the best position is to take when the next best thing arrives. Our approach as a firm is simple: use hype to learn, but only spend your time and exert your energy on ideas or businesses that have substance.
For example, I think some of the hype around Section 12J has died down a bit over the last few years, with mostly only the serious players (who genuinely want to invest in exciting scalable businesses in the way that the Tax Man intended) still plying their trade in this way. Similarly, with the crypto world having come down to earth over the last year or two (read: the quick buck barbarians have left town), we can now focus on the amazing possibilities offered by blockchain technology.
Even though the dust has settled on the hype around topics like these, we are wiser on these topics now than we were before the circus came to town, so we can now use our tricks for real-world solutions. And how fulfilling it is to work with clients who are using blockchain technology to build or invest in real-world businesses that will improve the lives of people and take the friction out of exchanging and growing value.
