February 28, 2007 by jack petrie.

Attorneys get a bad rap.

I agree, $400/hour for legal review of a document is a lot of money.  However, what most clients don’t do is to ask their attorney for either their hourly rate or a ballpark estimate of total hours necessary for review of a document.  Take that number of hours and multiply it by the hourly rate and just accept that number as a cost of doing business.  And most importantly, ask your attorney to let you know when he/she reaches that number of hours.  For example, let’s call it 25 hours and/or $10,000.

At this point, you have bought in to the attorney’s pricing schedule.  Here’s where the value proposition comes….

Consider a typical New York City commercial lease.  While most leases more closely resemble the White Pages in size, every lease contains a set of clauses created to offset and prevent historical contingencies that at some point in time cost a landlord some of his/her “M-O-N-E-Y”.

However, once a tenant exceeds the first $10,000 of fees for legal review, each incremental $400 hour becomes more and more valuable.  

Over a period of time, a lease document will take a life of it’s own long past the payment of attorney’s fees, the relocation, and the occupancy itself.  However, many of the pro-landlord lease clauses can take effect, even after the lease term.  Careful negotiation of these clauses can have a much greater financial impact than the few hundred dollars (or few hours of time) invested.

Consider the downside: after concluding payment of an escalating rental stream over a ten-year period and vacating a property, you find yourself in litigation with your former landlord over a lease clause which you remember conceding in the interest of saving a little time or money ten years earlier.

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February 7, 2007 by jack petrie.

CRESA Partners cosponsored the January 12th, 2007 iBreakfast with Craig Newmark of Craig’s List.  Here’s the official event recap:

6 Billion Pageviews Worldwide

It is fascinating to meet the man behind a site that grew from a “new-kid-on-the-block”, programmer’s social advancement tool to a six billion page view worldwide listing phenomenon. “The lunch event on Friday was wonderful. I felt like I’d been dipped in a fountain of fresh water.” - Sharon Anstey, ClickandBuy

“Gentle” View of Capitalism
What emerged from this event are the sincere humanism of Craig Newmark himself, the site’s focus and intent on serving the community and its very gentle view of capitalism.  Clearly, there are some great lessons to be learned here, especially for high-profit, investor-pressured organizations that have to compete against a Craigslist. We believe the challenge is adding more value and sharpening the marketing tools.

Five (5) Top Takeaways:
1. Who’s Zooming Who - Craigslist isn’t putting newspaper classifieds out of business as much as specialized and focused classified sources with aggressive salesmanship are. (At one point in time, Craigslist is rumored to have taken $64 million out of the Bay Area newspaper economy.)
2. International Growth - Craigslist is in 450 cities worldwide but growth overseas is slow. Apparently, even giving something away overseas is an uphill battle. 
3. The Net Neutrality Debate - This is a big deal that few people understand. It is filled with disinformation and pseudo-public interest ads (”astroturf”) by telcos who see an opportunity for big bucks. The problem seems to be that the average user will be hurt even if big business is free to buy premium services.
4. User Ratings - While eBay may own a piece of Craigslist, so far the site is not utilizing a reputation system. We predict that this will change in the near term as Craigslist has become too much of a target for scammers.
5. Wikis and Other Forms of Immortality - If there was one wistful note it is that Craigslist is filled with ephemera and Craig seemed to admire Wikipedia and other forms of durable data. This is particularly in light of his interests in non-profit social issues and liberal politics. Expect to see more from Craig on these issues.    

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