02. How do lawyers add value?
At Bloomworks Legal, we believe that the law is about more than simple compliance. A strong legal strategy can:
mitigate risk and avoid unnecessary time, cost and effort;
contribute to business objectives and growth;
enable innovation;
protect business interests; and
add to the bottom line.
It’s not always possible to quantify the value a good lawyer can add, but sometimes the worst-case scenario makes this all too apparent. A great demonstration of this is the documentary “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?”
In 1996, Pepsi ran a TV advertisement inviting customers to exchange points from the product packaging for small items of Pepsi-branded merchandise such as clothing. The final frame of the ad depicted a boy arriving at school in a harrier fighter jet. The caption read: “HARRIER FIGHTER, 7,000,000 PEPSI POINTS”, with no fine print in sight.
Pepsi didn’t count on John Leonard, the one customer who took this as a challenge, found a way to gather 7 million points and tried to claim the harrier jet.
Leonard showed some strong lawyerly thinking in his quest to redeem the jet. Having noticed the lack of small print in the ad, he then found a loophole in the scheme that would allow him to purchase 7 million points without having to buy the equivalent amount of Pepsi.
Pepsi’s stance was that the harrier jet offer was clearly a joke, and that Leonard was just an opportunist looking for a settlement.
We won’t spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it, but in short it’s every lawyer’s nightmare: a marketing campaign gone wrong due to a lack of appropriate disclaimers.
It’s clear that a lot of time, cost and effort would have been saved if a creative solution had been found to demonstrate that the promotion was a joke. While lengthy fine print to the effect of “this is not serious” probably wouldn’t pass muster with Pepsi’s marketing team, a pragmatic legal review might have surfaced several options (whether through disclaimers, visuals or stipulating a plainly unattainable number of points) that could well have avoided this costly error.
For more information about Bloomworks Legal’s services (including marketing reviews and disclaimers), click here.
The fine print:
This newsletter is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice or create any kind of solicitor/client relationship; please consult with a qualified professional if you need advice on a legal issue.
