the Zealous

On this day 102 years ago, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a lawyer with serious mojo, was arrested and charged with sedition for leading a campaign of mass civil disobedience against the British in India. After years of frequent arrests and imprisonments in his campaign for independence from British rule, Gandhi, nicknamed "Mahatma," meaning, the "great-souled one," appeared without counsel in the Ahmedabad court before a British judge. He pled guilty to all charges and requested that he be given the maximum penalty. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

What if everyone could know every detail about any person? What if, Matrix-style, you could upload into your brain, on demand, every intimate life experience and detail about any person that you meet? Every weakness and insecurity, every sin and virtue, every insane thought and unrequited longing, every proclivity, kink and quirk, every scar and tattoo, naked and exposed? No fact about a person, in this thought experiment, could be kept private. Privacy simply does not exist.

If your client is in the business of providing value in exchange for payment, whether the consideration offered is goods, services, licenses to IP, data, expertise, or anything else, there are certain must-have clauses that your client’s agreement should carry in order to maximize payment leverage and enforceability.