the Zealous

M&A lawyers (of which I'm one): we are not above criticism.

M&A has been characterized as a bloodsport. In a strategic transaction, the stakes are high for all concerned: careers, reputations, and business and financial fortunes and are on the line. In addition to the high stakes, the one-off relationship between a typical seller and buyer in an M&A transaction may particularly lend itself to disputes. Opportunities and incentives to resolve disputes or even to be reasonable in deference to the greater relationship are often absent in M&A, with the calculus changing (and the incentives to cooperate often declining) after each successive step of a transaction, from signature through closing to the end of the survival period for indemnification rights.

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In the nineties, Saturday Night Live ran a series of skits centered around an unfrozen caveman lawyer, played by Phil Hartman. This was a typical episode:

Announcer:

One hundred thousand years ago, a caveman was out hunting on the frozen wastes when he slipped and fell into a crevasse. In 1988, he was discovered by some scientists and thawed out.

He then went to law school and became … Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.

Not-in-Index URLs

Google has critically expanded notice and takedown in another important way: We accept notices for URLs that are not even in our index in the first place. That way, we can collect information even about pages and domains we have not yet crawled. We process these URLs as we do the others. Once one of these not-in-index URLs is approved for takedown, we prophylactically block it from appearing in our Search results, and we take all the additional deterrent measures listed above. We recently discovered that some bulk submitters make very heavy use of this feature. In one sample we found that around 82 percent of the URLs we approved were not in our index (and have therefore never appeared in any search results). How this discovery will influence the further evolution of our processes, only time will tell. It does suggest that the number of takedown notices we get is not a good proxy for the number of allegedly infringing links we serve.