After a couple of months in both Panama and Argentina I am now back in Denmark. It’s been great being away in particular because it has helped me focus and do a lot of work. But now I’m back on a client project.

I will be posting an comparison of Panama and Argentina for web entrepreneurs as they are both cool low cost places to get away from it all and code and focus on your business. Both have advantages and disadvantages which I shall cover.

Via Boing Boing I rediscovered this fantastic book which we had in kindergarten in Denmark when I was growing up. The copy at hand is in German, but who cares about the text anyway, I learnt everything I know from this book. Oh the memories.

Rich from Basement.org writes about how lawyers really are like programmers when they write contracts. Here is an example:

“Exception” Handling. Any lawyer will tell you that a primary role of a contract is that of a reference document for when things go bad. If all is well in a business relationship, the contract is seldom ever referred to. But when things go sour, every word or phrase may be picked apart. As such, it’s wise to think through how scenarios would play out against your contract. When coding, a similar premise applies. How much load will this object have to withstand? What if a particular transaction (which is dependent on an outside service) fails? What if the database goes down? Good code insulates itself from or gracefully addresses these “bad scenarios.”

In my last post Pragmatic contract law for entrepreneurs I covered the basics of contracts.

It was pretty thin though with respects to covering jurisdictions. Jurisdiction basically means, who has the right to decide what happens over a contract in case of a dispute. As I mentioned before the legality of a contract really means the enforceability of a contract. So these are very closely related.

As my last post I need to say that IANAL. I probably should say that this is not intended as legal advice, but that would be another annoying lawyeristic lie. Yes this is intended as legal advice but you must use it at your own risk.

Why you need to think of jurisdiction?

The most important factors of jurisdiction are cost and preparedness. If you feel you need to take things to court then it might cost you a lot of money and take a long time. But then again this can also be a useful threat against another party in a contract.

I am now sitting in Buenos Aires with my head full of debates back and forth across the Atlantic around Electronic Contracts, Electronic Signatures etc. for Tractis one of the projects I’m working on right now. I thought it might not be a bad idea to write some of my ideas out here publicly to perhaps open a debate a bit and also help other entrepreneurs understand exactly what contracts are and what they really mean to in particular small high tech startups.

As in any such discussion I need to say that IANAL. I probably should say that this is not intended as legal advice, but that would be another annoying lawyeristic lie. Yes this is intended as legal advice but you must use it at your own risk.

I think DHH ideas of pragmatic and opinionated programing really is very applicable to contract law as well. Let the big guys with their legal teams do their stuff and let us small fish worry about our business.