Don't fence me in!

The entrepreneur is creative and expansive: an outside-the-box, visionary, don’t-fence-me-in personality. If you wanted or were able to conform, you'd get a job.

A lawyer, perhaps by temperament and certainly by training, is a strategist and tactician and his form of warfare is conventional. A lawyer's greatest joy is to take an entrepreneur's unprecedented idea and give it a mundane structure that will conform smoothly to legal requirements and not break new legal ground. The lawyer is all about putting the expansiveness into boundaries.

All this can feel like a drag on your progress, but remember, your lawyer is not an agent of the Borg, relentlessly assimilating you into the Collective.  Your lawyer is protecting you from the Borg.

It may seem that your lawyer is trying to bring this great force of nature, your imagination, to heel when in fact he’s trying to set you free. Both contributions are needed for a business to succeed.
 
Thanks to Cathy Orpet for contributing this insight.

What does an entrepreneur need from the law?

I met an entrepreneur from Kenya who told me that the number one need of every business is that the the government must promote the rule of law.

In the United States we get worked up over marginal tax rates, employer mandates, regulation and such. To my Kenyan friend, none of these are important. Being free from extortion, being able to enforce a contract in court and not having to bribe every high or low government official whose bailiwick touches one's business: These are the legal prerequisites to business success.

Puts things in perspective, doesn't it? Truth is, business can thrive wherever there is civil authority, relative peace, the rudiments of a justice system and civil servants whose primary agenda is not self-enrichment. (Remember last year's scandal over the BLM officials who partied at oil company expense while overlooking billions in lease underpayments? In many countries, this would be considered the norm.) Whatever our problems in the United States, our system of law and government make us the envy of entrepreneurs the world over.