Partnering for More Than Profits. A Model for Business Philanthropy

You and I benefit from philanthropy, whether we think about it or not. I’ve said it before: good businesses make money, but great businesses build the communities that make good business possible. By investing in social and civic capital, from health care and human services to arts and education, great businesses create the foundation of the towns and cities where commerce happens.

It was for that reason that I attended the Denver Business Journal’s Partners in Philanthropy Summit last week. Leaders of Colorado’s profit and non-profit sectors met to discuss the practices that would best benefit the businesses, the non-profits and the community, especially in an economy that will be continue to challenge our communities even after our businesses begin to emerge from recession.

True partnering with non-profits requires a business to do more than write the occasional check. Engaging employees in business philanthropy is a best practice that resonates with me. When employees have both a voice and a hands-on role in the community-building efforts of the business, the non-profit, the business and the employees all benefit.

The non-profit strengthens its bond with the business, plus it has a good chance for individual support from the employees. The employees appreciate being included in their company’s civic engagement and are happier in the knowledge that profits aren’t the only measure of their worth to the company. The business benefits from a more committed workforce and from the goodwill the practice generates both inside and out of the company.

Best yet, the idea of nonprofit/business/employee partnership is not limited to the big companies. Human-owned businesses can and do make great use of this model. Case in point: the relationship of Minor & Brown, my law firm, with the Morgan Adams Foundation, which raises money to raise hope for children with cancer.  This year M&B evolved from simple check-writing sponsor to full fledged non-profit/business/employee partnership, and it was one of the most rewarding things we’ve ever done.

Over half of our employees, lawyers and staff alike, and their family and friends participated at various stages of the MAF's artma event, beginning with our work with cancer patients at The Children’s Hospital, chronicled in this blog in January, through setting-up and staffing the event, and finally cleaning-up the event site.

In closing, here are some photos of our crew at artma 2010, having a great time giving of themselves and being wonderful ambassadors for our law firm. Next up, the Morgan Adams Concours d’Elegance in August; I guess I should tell them now that we can’t drive the cars or fly the planes.

Some photos are mine; the great ones are by Steven Adams of the Morgan Adams Foundation.

No Funny Lawyers?

Two of the works of the kids we helped at The Children's Hospital.

The MiBro night-of-the-event gang with Morgan Adams.

On Reading Contracts: What to do When Asked for Your Immortal Soul

Whether it’s your soul or just your money at risk, assume that every contract you sign can and will be used against you. I don’t practice canonical law, so I can’t say if an agreement to sell your immortal soul can be enforced against you. An agreement to hold Facebook harmless against trouble coming from your use of its site is a different matter altogether, at least in Colorado.

British gaming vendor Gamestation reestablished what my regular readers already know. People don’t read contracts carefully, if at all, whether they are online contracts or one page agreements from smiling seventh graders.

Gamestation recently added the following requirement to its online terms of use:

By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions.

It was an April Fool’s stunt, to be sure, but some 7500 people, almost 90% of the site’s users on April 1st, agreed to the Faustian bargain while ignoring the opt-out option that would instead give them a £5 credit (about $8) toward their purchase.

Another online contract has led Colorado Attorney General John Suthers to shut down the Facebook pages of Colorado state agencies. The action was an apparent response to Section 15.2 of Facebook’s terms of service, which requires, as I assume virtually all social media platforms do, site users to hold the company against any harm suffered as a result of the user’s activities on the site. We’re not talking theoretical harms here, either. Copyright infringement and defamation are just two examples of serious matters that could get you, or a state agency, and Facebook sued.

Attorney General Suthers apparently takes his online contracts seriously and is not taking chances with the adhesion-contracts-are-not-enforceable theory I addressed earlier this year. Neither should you. No word on whether the State of Colorado purchased anything from Gamestation on April 1st, so the state of the State’s immortal soul is still unknown.

Thanks to Alli Gerkman of the Colorado Bar Association for her tip on the Gamestation contract.

Telling Lawyer Jokes on National Be Kind to Lawyers Day.

Weird coincidence or karmic convergence? This afternoon, I learned that today, the second Tuesday in April, is National Be Kind to Lawyers Day. Well, as it happens, this morning I was telling lawyer jokes to lawyers at the Colorado Bar Association.

The Bar Association had asked me to lead a continuing education seminar for lawyers on the subject of client service. Good client service is all about the perception of the clients. Lawyer jokes tell us a great deal about public perception of the profession, so I planned out a program using lawyer jokes to illustrate my points.

What’s wrong with lawyer jokes?

Lawyers don’t think they’re funny and nobody else thinks they’re jokes.

Many lawyer jokes, however, express frustration not with poor client service, but with the role of lawyers in a society that seems overly or unfairly legalistic. “What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.” is an example of that kind of lawyer joke, but the classic statement in that vein is:

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Henry VI, Part II
(Act IV, Scene II)
By William Shakespeare

There’s not much lawyers can learn about client service from those jokes, but plenty other lawyer jokes speak directly to the lawyer/client relationship. Those jokes I’ll work into some future posts that I hope will be helpful to lawyers and clients, alike, as they pursue the common goal of better working relationships.

But for now, since it is National Be Kind to Lawyers Day (which doesn’t qualify as a real legal holiday, like those I’ve covered over the last 11 months), I at least need to acknowledge the day and remind myself (and my lawyer friends) that if we want people, and clients in particular, to be kind to us, then let’s be the kind of lawyer that earns it.

Colorado Now Charging by the Character for Legal Filings

Cash-strapped Colorado state government got a boost today with the announcement that, effective immediately (April 1), certain legal filings with the office of the Secretary of State would be assessed a $1 per character surcharge. While other states are attempting to resolve their budget troubles with sales taxes on legal services, Colorado is the first state in the country to require lawyers to pay by the letters, numbers and other characters used in filed documents.

The surcharge applies only to filings at the Secretary of State’s office, which handles the formation of legal entities, such as corporations and limited liability companies, the registration of business names, and the recording of liens under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). Other legal documents filed with the state, such as in court proceedings or real estate transactions, are not subject to the character surcharge.

Art Ickles, spokesman for the business division of Secretary of State’s office, explained the surcharge only applies to filings using more than 140 characters:

The vast majority of our filings are made by individuals acting on their own behalf, not by lawyers, and these people have no problem completing our forms (standardized documents on the Secretary of State’s web site) using 140 characters or less. It’s only the lawyers who overload the system with pages of extra information.

 The announcement was met with immediate objections by the Colorado Bar Association. From Liz Pendens, Chair of the Bar’s Business Law Section:

This is really outrageous. There are many, many good reasons for Colorado lawyers to add information to the standard forms on the Secretary of State site. Businesses that rely on the bare minimums of the state forms are missing out some vital protections, not to mention the obvious, which is that most business concepts simply cannot be expressed in 140 characters. Charging a dollar per character, including spaces for crying out loud, will put business lawyers in a real bind. Doing a great job for their clients will require them to rack up huge surcharges, but will they be able to pass those costs on to their clients without making important work unaffordable for business?

Mr. Ickles was not dissuaded: “If 50 million tweets (posts on the popular social media service Twitter) per day can be made with a 140 character per tweet limit, there is no reason that Colorado lawyers cannot learn brevity or pay for their long-windedness.”

Colorado’s human-owned businesses should check with their lawyers, first, to see if their current filings with the Secretary of State adequately protect the business and, second, to see how proficient those lawyers are at using Twitter.

Click here for more information on this important business concern.