Do Engineers Fear Lawyers? - Part 2 (Final)

In part one, I detailed being confronted with an accidental climate change debate at a local college in Troy, New York. A comment by the presenter - a PhD level tribologist at a local research company - got me to imagine, in a John Lennon sort of way, how things might have been different for controlling climate change over the past thirty years or so if the majority of politicians in the U.S. - at all levels of government - had had an engineering or science background, instead of a legal one.

In this last part, I'm demonstrating from personal experiences during and after engineering school - 1990 and beyond - how my own behavior and that of a company I worked for has been guided - to a certain degree - by a fear of lawyers and their possible actions. To be clear, it's not the law that myself and folks I've worked with have been fearful of, but instead, those who both make the law and are lawyers. I've always had respect for the law, as have the majority of the folks I've worked for over the years.

My idea is that, beyond being responsible for inaction on climate change, lawyers may also be impacting on the innovation of engineers generally, and holding American companies back at a time when they should be pushing forward with new products and ideas. At the same time, I'm also trying to demonstrate the positive side to lawyers in my experiences with them over the years, to try and be fair.

While using Google to check my work on part one, it was so very nice to stumble upon an Internet article published this year from respected U.K. publication The Economist.

The author of the April 16th piece - who's name was likely revealed in the print version but not on the web - supported with data and graphs the assertion made by the tribologist who inspired me to write part one. The Economist author called the idea of lawyers crafting legislation that wasn't as rational - that's how I'd call preserving our planet - as laws that might have been crafted instead by engineers and scientists, selection bias.

After explaining selection bias, The Economist author then went on to present 2009 global statistics of the most common professions for politicians worldwide, by percentage. Engineering was ranked at about 7%, while Law was ranked at about 19% - almost three times. A world-wide problem of irrational lawmaking!

<-- My wife and I are long-time fans of the American Law & Order television series.

Sam Waterston plays Jack McCoy, a highly ethical and much respected District Attorney. This and other images courtesy Wikipedia.

Within the U.S., the statistic was even worse - less than 5% percent of politicians have an engineering background, while approximately 45% have a legal background!!

Engineering School Memories
My earliest "adult" experience with the legal profession was asking for help in reducing the penalty for a speeding ticket acquired while driving the great distance between Albany and Potsdam, New York - a pre-cell-phone, four-to-eight hour drive through the Adirondacks. The length and pleasure of this trip - which I repeated frequently while attending Clarkson University in the early 90's - strongly depended on the weather, and the frequent snow storms that blanket northern New York.

My counsel - a personal friend and member of Albany's O'Connell and Aronowicz law firm at the time - did a good job, and helped me to get the fine reduced. What I remember most about this experience are the cigars my friend and his lawyer friends enjoyed smoking, and, of course, the expense of hiring a legal counsel. In addition to my own fear of it, my employers' fears of expensive legal billing was something I then witnessed over and over again at the companies I worked for after graduation from engineering school.

An Engineer works with a Lawyer at an Injection Molder
Fast forward to 1995, and I had an opportunity to work as an engineer at a small - less than $10 Million per year at the time - plastics & high-technology composites factory in Upstate, New York, about an hour south of Albany.

Among other costs, electricity to power molding machines was a major expense to ownership. In order to bring costs down, a per machine estimate of power usage was required for each piece of machinery - from Comet molding machines to Brown & Sharpe screw machines to the PC's I had brought out onto the shop floor. I came in on a weekend, armed with my camera and a spreadsheet, ready to record serial numbers, manufacturer names, and power usage information available on metal plates.

It was a lawyer practicing in Hudson, New York that I reported my information to, taking direction from ownership. I can't really say I was intimidated during this experience, but I did realize at the time that the law firm we were working with was vital to my company. Advice was heeded and kept my company profitable during the go-go late nineties, a time when work for engineers in my area - fasteners, injection molding and machining - exceeded those available to perform it.

Hope for the future? U.S. Representative Paul Tonko, 1971 Clarkson University graduate in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. -->

The Go-Go Late 90's - Why Risk It?
So collaboration with my usually better-dressed legal colleagues on saving energy costs was relatively low-fear. However, during the same period, I noticed my company would not quote on jobs where our manufactured products would be used in human medical applications.

Our products - polymer fasteners available in thousands of possible grades and sizes - both machined and injection molded - were cutting-edge, and many of the big players in the semiconductor and military worlds - companies like Hewlett Packard, Submicron, Verteq, the U.S. Army and Navy, and so on - were big customers. Without it ever being explicitly stated, it was obvious that we stayed clear of human medical applications because of the potential for company-killing law suits. After all, if business tied to the rapidly expanding PC purchases of the late 90's was profitable, why risk a good thing?

- Larry Kelley

Resources:

The Economist - April 2009 - There was a lawyer, an engineer and a politician...

Selection Bias formally defined - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

Congressman from New York's 21st district - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tonko