Then, about two months later, the client got into an accelerator, where they got free AWS credits. Suddenly, my choice didn't seem as good -- mostly because paying nothing is cheaper than paying something. (Never mind that the vendor I had gone with had stellar service, which was one of the reasons we chose them.)

The client told the cloud provider that I had been unauthorized to speak on the company's behalf (untrue), that no one had told him we were signing a contract (not true), and tried to wiggle out of the contract (which went nowhere). That didn't go anywhere. So he got angry with me, and canceled our consulting agreement.

As it happens, that client was simultaneously trying to figure out how to pay for taxes and pensions, and was getting rid of some other people. So it wasn't a direct cause-and-effect. But it did happen.

And this is yet another reason why I've been delighted to get out of the "regular" consulting world, and switch to only doing training.

Apropos of nothing, it's funny how nearly every single consulting contract I've seen which has been prepared by an attorney on the client side tries to slip in a clause like "you shall not act on our behalf or hold yourself out as having authority to obligate or bind us", when that's actually exactly what they're looking to hire me to do (eg. "Please come manage our projects, employees, customer relationships, vendors, banking relationships, products, research branch" or whatever else the role entails).

You are managing the projects etc. as a service being provided under contract.

You are not being granted actual authority to act as an agent of the company.

The clause they are slipping in actually protects you both. If you are appointed as an agent (expressly or by implication) then you become a fiduciary for them which might give you obligations that aren’t necessary spelled out in the contract.

So, this isn’t a clause most well advised people push back on.

If they do still need to sign on behalf of the company in some discreet situations they look into getting a limited power of attorney instead. Safer and clearer for both parties.

Not legal advice of course. I assume your own attorney would have explained this to you anyway.

Tell us more about this transition? Sounds interesting!

Here are two interviews I've given on the subject:

- https://devjourney.info/Guests/83-ReuvenLerner.html - https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/business-freelancing-episo...

I'm always happy to talk about training. I love it, and recommend that everyone in the consulting world look into it more.

I also have a training newsletter, at https://TrainerWeekly.com/.

The quote is better interpreted as "certain vendors are mainstream enough that nobody above you is going to even question your reasoning for choosing that vendor"

the partner company sent us an implementation doc that was full of red flags, "just send your private API key to the client packed deep in a nested JSON and ROT13 it to authenticate requests, users aren't technical enough to unpack it" sort of place

after I kicked it back to the director saying there was no way I was going to sign my name to that jank code, they tried implementing it themselves anyway, and were found out during a routine "check if API keys are leaking" job

"Survivor" bias here. I imagine on average it ends excellently for the executive.

It wasn't just picking the wrong vendor but one of our competitors got a new CTO after a critical system was poorly migrated to the cloud.

Do you prefer mandatory arbitration to being able to use the public court system? That's a privatized justice system.

No, it is mandatory in the sense that parties will be obliged by the normal justice system to submit to the specified process and will be held bound by the results by the normal justice system (with narrow exceptions.)

> if as the parent posits the normal justice system does not exist then everything becomes "Mandatory arbitration", right?

No, if the normal justice system does not exist, there is nothing holding anyone to a particular pre-specified arbitration process or enforcing the results of that process.

If the monetary damage was high enough vis-a-vis the ability of the public system to deliver me restitution for my losses, I'd very quickly be hiring private detectives yes.

This guy got arrested by the police, he was released and then run away to Dubai where he's from. He came back after a month and opened a company under a false name and started doing the same scam. I knew his address, I reported everything to the police and the police dropped the case without doing anything.

I'm already paying 25+k£ in taxes every year. If I didn't have to spend that and there would be no police or laws, private companies (aka burly guys with guns) would be needed to ensure citizens safety, in exchange for a fee. Different private companies would need to interact with each other to settle down cases, eventually agreeing on a set of laws to compensate people subjected to crimes.

In this hypothetical world, I would have been happy to pay for my protection agency to go and fetch this individual and bring him to a private court where my protection agency and his protection agency could debate whether the crime happened or not.

It was a blatant crime so there was no reason I would lose and that guy should have been forced to return my money (according to laws agreed on by contracts between our private protection agencies) or work in jail until I'm repaid.

Not that I'm happy with the current system, but I can't really see how a privatized one would not end up with an even bigger class divide where the laws are only enforced against people that are on the same level as you or below.

I don't see why corrupting a private judge would be easier than corrupting a public one.

The private one at least could default if they had no more business due to their unfairness.

For what history says about such firms, look up Pinkerton agents and London's policing before the current system.

An equivalent would be paying the expensive private security firm subscriptions for 10 years and then expecting service when something bad happens.

There is definitely a competition between them; but is violence or negotiation the most business effective way of dealing with it?

Warfare is expensive, you risk men lives and weapons aren't cheap.

If there is violence on the street or if protection money is too high, no-one would want to live there and there would be less people to sustain your army.

I think the incentives are aligned to solve disputes in a pacific way.

See for example, "The Problem of Sexual Harassment and Forced Arbitration": https://www.correiaputh.com/news/problem-sexual-harassment-f...

Parties with fewer resources are at a huge disadvantage in either system, but there are degrees of disadvantage. It is misleading to examine the outcome of arbitration once the rules are "agreed" to without taking into account that the process of setting the rules strongly influences said outcome.

What if that meant that people could fire their police department and replace it with a different one if they didn't like the way it operated?

That would depend on exactly how things were set up, but we do it with politicians who have all the same bad incentives to keep power.

Even law making and law enforcing please.

Governments are incompetent by definition and hold too much power. I'd rather have a N local corporations competing against each other and not being able to extract money from everyone's profit - compared to a massive monopoly governing and profiting off millions of people.

I just wish someone would drag both political parties kicking and screaming into the modern age. Give Republicans their voter ID requirements they claim to want so much and give Democrats mandatory widespread adoption for every citizen homeless or otherwise. Make it mandatory to even pay income tax.

0: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/pandadoc-the-e-document-st...

Docusign is the only current major e-sign platform that works with the federal government (Adobe is applying).

If you have to pick one vendor and there’s even an outside chance you’ll interface with the fed govt, you just choose Docusign.

> A method [...] is used to identify the signer and to indicate the signer’s intention to sign the document;

> The method used is as reliable as appropriate for the purposes of the communication or is proven to identify the person and indicate their intention; and

> The signer consents to the method used, with such consent allowed to be express or inferred from the circumstances.

Guess what? Australian courts apparently accept a name written at the bottom of an email as passing this test as being "as reliable as appropriate" for many situations. The barrier to entry in Australia is essentially zero. Europe has much stricter laws, introduced in the same year, in a two-tier arrangement where the strict version requires something like DocuSign, and moreover that the ability to produce a signature rests in the control of the person it identify, and that person only. (This paper http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MqLawJl/2017/9.pdf argues for adopting the European approach in Australia.) A sibling comment identifies the US federal government's requirements as being essentially "we must approve individual e-sig services for use with the federal government", which is insane to me but there you go.

> Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage

... but they are attesting that they have read the laws about e-signatures, those claims are affirmed by their continued existence, and that's worth a lot of time otherwise spent second-guessing your chosen platform.

I knew roughly the position in Australia, but wasn't aware of the European requirements -- DocuSign has done a medium amount of work researching and documenting their compliance to give you peace of mind, and quite a lot of work complying with the stricter laws that are out there. There's nothing in that that is particularly difficult to replicate, i.e. there's no secret sauce, it's just a lot of work. The overall product (works for doing business with anyone you need it to) is more than the sum of its parts.

This has (just searched for a link) been turned into EU law under the term "eIDAS Regulation" [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_electronic_signature

I think this confirms my guess above: https://www.docusign.com/how-it-works/electronic-signature/d...

(But they are making it vague on purpose instead of just stating in plain words)

As such, DocuSign is unlikely to be valid as a qualified electronic signature in Germany or other European countries.

But in all of the contractual law ever present in the world, as long as you do not dispute that it's your signature, or there are witnesses to you agreeing to a contract (even verbal ones), a contract would hold as if signed by you.

> ...the use of electronic signatures or requires that the “written form” be used (which requires use of a qualified electronic signature), then any non-qualified electronic signature may be used.

As such, DocuSign is an "electronic signature", but not a qualified electronic signature. This seems to be defined directly in eIDAS, so it probably applies to most of EU countries, and countries on the path to joining the EU.