Deliberately Misleading
Yesterday’s public hearing by the USA’s House January 6 investigation was in USA prime time, which is the wee hours of the night for me. I haven’t gotten to watch it yet. News coverage so far sounds like it met the high bar the committee has set for effectively laying out what happened.
GOP talking heads complain about not getting to cross-examine witnesses. (They were maddening to hear this morning.) That’s what happens in courtrooms at trial. They aren’t actually eager to see charges filed and legal proceedings happen. They’re just trying to confuse people, struggling to find ways to cast doubt on ironclad facts.
This is not unique to politics.
Deliberate Confusion in Business
Yesterday a friend drew my attention to a post in LinkedIn about resolution of a court case between two companies, Medidata and Veeva. It hinged on Medidata’s assertion of extraordinarily excessive “rights” to block employees from being able to change jobs within their industry.
Many companies insist that employees and even contractors must sign non-competition agreements or include non-competition clauses in their contracts. In my field, it’s common to block people from going to a competitor within some number of months after leaving a company. Although the clauses in contracts may extend to a number of years, courts in the USA tend to declare that unenforceable, an illegitimate restraint of trade, if it’s longer than about a year and a half. There’s no solid rule about it. Each state’s courts interpret this in their own way. But somewhere there is a boundary between reasonable protection of a company’s intellectual property and trade secrets, and unreasonable infringement on the rights of workers and freedom to trade.
My clients are bigger than me, sometimes bigger than small countries, and usually present their “standard” contract to me with a few clauses that only a fool would sign. The non-competition clause is frequently one of the clauses I have to push back against. Some companies have tried to demand that to do business with them I must drop all my existing customers or, worse, must give them at no extra charge all intellectual property owned or created by me or my business even if it belongs to some other company that paid for that work. One notable multinational wanted the rights to everything my company had ever created or would create in the future, even long after our contract ended.
Clients always say it’s a standard legal template that everyone signs and cannot be changed. That’s never true. People who actually read the whole contract refuse to sign it as originally presented, and the client backs down to something acceptable as soon as anyone highlights that the clause is illegally expansive.
Why?
Why does anybody try these stunts?
Because they work.
Not all the time. Not on everyone. But on enough people to make it worthwhile.
The January 6 committee has shown with startling clarity how deliberately misleading people was used to power an attempted overthrow of the government, subversion of the Constitution and derailment of the peaceful transfer of power. It’s routinely used in election campaigns and lobbying. It isn’t used by everyone.
The same applies in business. Many people sign contracts without fully understanding them, and when confronted by nefarious clauses, they are intimidated into knuckling under. The business then gets more than it should for its money. This is routinely used in all manner of contracts and business deals, but not by everyone.
It’s used by those who are willing to be unfair and play dirty in order to get what they want. It’s used by those who are happy to poison the societal environment we all live in so they can take undue advantage over others.
Everybody is wrong once in a while, but accidental missteps are not the same as actions with intent. If a person or organization shows a pattern of deliberately misleading, lying, being duplicitous or greedy… you can only deal with them as long as you are on alert and your shields are on full. Even then, they may get through your shields to hurt you.
When the fine print or the campaign doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, if possible it’s best to walk away.
