Graceful degradation was something that I had originally heard of in a computing context, but that I find has real application in the legal field (which is my field of work). When giving legal advice, whenever possible, you want to give guidance that will work even if only part of it is followed. (Because even as an in-house lawyer, I can pretty much count on my clients ignoring or reinterpreting my advice pretty regularly.)
This is especially important when some action or behavior becomes critical, but only in certain circumstances. For instance, advising my engineering clients NOT to do their own research into our competitors’ proprietary technology is very important advice (because if they do, it leads to higher damages if they are found to infringe patents on said technology, and can also put the company at risk for misappropriating another company’s trade secrets). On the other hand, if they are to learn something proprietary about a competitor, it is critical that they let the legal team know about it, since the consequences of mishandling that information are so high.
So to attempt to give gracefully degrading instructions in this space becomes a little self-contradictory if half the instructions are forgotten. “Don’t try to reverse engineer competitor’s code. But if you do, make sure to tell me about it.” This usually results in clients remembering either: “Don’t tell the lawyers if you learn competitor information” (resulting in not warning us they have competitor info) or “Be sure to tell the lawyers about any reverse engineering you do” (resulting in teams going out to try to specifically research competitor information).
This type of “Don’t …, But if you do …” situation resists degrading gracefully, but comes up more than I’d like.
On an unrelated note, when I first learned this term, I just had an image of a very refined woman at a fancy dinner party, taking a sip of her wine and then turning to her husband and saying, “Darling, I love you, but this is simply the worst affair you’ve ever dragged me out to.”
Graceful degradation was something that I had originally heard of in a computing context, but that I find has real application in the legal field (which is my field of work). When giving legal advice, whenever possible, you want to give guidance that will work even if only part of it is followed. (Because even as an in-house lawyer, I can pretty much count on my clients ignoring or reinterpreting my advice pretty regularly.)
This is especially important when some action or behavior becomes critical, but only in certain circumstances. For instance, advising my engineering clients NOT to do their own research into our competitors’ proprietary technology is very important advice (because if they do, it leads to higher damages if they are found to infringe patents on said technology, and can also put the company at risk for misappropriating another company’s trade secrets). On the other hand, if they are to learn something proprietary about a competitor, it is critical that they let the legal team know about it, since the consequences of mishandling that information are so high.
So to attempt to give gracefully degrading instructions in this space becomes a little self-contradictory if half the instructions are forgotten. “Don’t try to reverse engineer competitor’s code. But if you do, make sure to tell me about it.” This usually results in clients remembering either: “Don’t tell the lawyers if you learn competitor information” (resulting in not warning us they have competitor info) or “Be sure to tell the lawyers about any reverse engineering you do” (resulting in teams going out to try to specifically research competitor information).
This type of “Don’t …, But if you do …” situation resists degrading gracefully, but comes up more than I’d like.
On an unrelated note, when I first learned this term, I just had an image of a very refined woman at a fancy dinner party, taking a sip of her wine and then turning to her husband and saying, “Darling, I love you, but this is simply the worst affair you’ve ever dragged me out to.”
How would you solve the example legal situation you gave?