IANAL, but if you have correspondence indicating that you wanted something removed and both sides agreed to it, then I'd imagine you'd have a case in court if they slipped something in. Contracts are never 'iron-clad' -- for example, you cannot legally sign away your soul. Lots of stuff can be invalidated in court.

Sure, but when they "fix" things like ticket/issue response times, SLAs, responsibilities of both companies, it can later be very hard to prove what you've agreed on a video call with a CEO/CTO. Especially when that other company decides that you'll be the one taking the blame for their internal politics.

Always get everything in writing. If you've been passing redlines back and forth, you should have that at minimum.

That sounds expensive.

That's a really prejudiced and unwarranted view of Americans. If anything it says more about your biases and prejudices than it does about one nation.

I am American?

I am saying that as an American, one that works in America, and from my subjective experience working in b2b and consulting jobs, the business culture around me is full of contractual bullshit.

Just think about the larger situation of EULAs and no-competes and arbitration clauses. Everything is hoping you don't read the fine-print, or have no energy to fight it, even to say you haven't read or were mislead and therefore it shouldn't apply.

Being an American doesn't make it any less prejudiced. It's a gross generalization. Even assuming it were true, how is this an exclusive characteristic of America?

I don't know whether it's exclusive. I never claimed that.

Your singling out of the country implies as much.

If it's not exclusive to America, you should have said "It's standard bullshit"

> But I guess Americans think that's fine because "it's just business".

That's a really prejudiced and unwarranted view of Americans. If anything it says more about your biases and prejudices than it does about one nation.

> That's a really prejudiced and unwarranted view of Americans. If anything it says more about your biases and prejudices than it does about one nation.

I am an American citizen so you can take it from an American citizen instead. Companies have zero scruples whatsoever about screwing over others in business.

But other companies still do business with them, right? So they're getting away with it.

"It doesn't matter how we behave as long as they're still forced to do business with us." attitude is exactly what I was talking about :)

Being an American doesn't make it any less prejudiced. It's a gross generalization. Even assuming it were true, how is this an exclusive characteristic of America?

> It isn't. I've noticed that Chinese companies are even worse.

Then it isn't "standard American bullshit". It's just "standard bullshit".

I wouldn't word it like this if it wouldn't be a very noticable pattern of behaviour comming pretty much only from US customers. Negotiations with customers from other cultures have been significantly more honest - it doesn't mean they weren't seeking an advantage, but this agreesive backstabing from legal departments right after signing up the customer was something that was very very US American.

After seeing it first-hand, I'm noticing this attitude even in fields like global politics, where burning goodwill to gain very minor advantages seems to be the policy these days.

> I wouldn't word it like this if it wouldn't be a very noticable pattern of behaviour comming pretty much only from US customers.

But that's the thing... do you have access to a representative, uniform, random sample of US customers? Do you have a similar sample of customers from other regions to compare against? Are those samples based on your actual data rather than personal anecdotes? Have you eliminated hidden variables that could better explain this behavior than simply the place they are from?

If you answered "no" to any of the above, you're suffering from availability bias.

> After seeing it first-hand, I'm noticing this attitude even in fields like global politics, where burning goodwill to gain very minor advantages seems to be the policy these days.

And that one is called confirmation bias.