New law firm [updated]

Lawyers are supposed to be your best friend when your rights are violated by the government -- or you need to ensure they won't be. At least, that's what it says on the label.

And blogging is supposed to be a great way to promote your business (it works for me anyway even when all I can link to is a creaky old website ripe for redevelopment).

So put those together and we see lawyer Stephen Franks using his blog to help launch his new legal partnership in which he hopes to help make client's businesses work better "by cutting legal mumbo jumbo down to size." Clients he's targetting include:

• Directors who want a second opinion after being scared into paralysis by legal warnings and complexity,
• Businesses threatened by new law coming down the parliamentary track;
• Investors wanting to know their real balance of risks if they have to ignore some parts of securities law to raise capital

"We see a real gap for public law legal advice tied to deep commercial experience," says Stephen. Given that one of his chief competitors, Geoffrey Palmer, is almost completely unencumbered by commercial experience, that gap would appear to be a large one.

I wish him well.

UPDATE: Cactus Kate offers an object lesson in how good lawyers can cut through the bullshit when your rights are violated by the government. The subject is tax, and all those many morons who "think that avoiding tax is theft." The latest target for this envy-ridden attitude is, of coure, the BNZ, courtesy of one of the finest examples of non-objective law in recent years used to justify the theft of the BNZ's profits.

Message from Cactus to all the morons who think that avoiding tax is theft, which in this case includes (disgracefully) Bernard Hickey:

I say the initial taxation is the real theft and avoiding tax is not a criminal offence, it is a civil matter which is often decided by litigation and the "toss of the bench" through the Courts. He confuses avoidance with evasion. This is a common mistake.
But he is not alone. . .

No, he's not. Read Cactus's whole post to see some of the others and to learn why they're wrong -- and to discover for yourself (if you haven't already) the nightmare's nest of non-objective law that is the tax code. In which other area of law could defendants be told by a presiding judge, for example, that "Technical compliance with the law is never enough."

And just contemplate for a moment too that Cactus isn't just right legally, but she's also right morally. Your honestly gotten profits are rightfully yours to do with as you please, whether that's spending, reinvesting, or baking into pies. They're not "society's profits" -- they're yours. You made them, you rightfully get to say what happens to them.

I say that's the correct ethical standpoint on tax. I say that only a "redistribution-of-wealth" supporter would disagree. I say that it's the initial taxation that is the real theft, and that avoiding tax should not be a criminal offence at all -- it should instead be a moral imperative.