Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The Industry

When I interviewed for the position at this startup, one of the guys informed me that, if I didn't know already, the music industry is very old school. For example, he said, none of the industry attorneys will use the track changes feature to redline agreements. They mark them up by hand and have them emailed to you as a PDF. This seemed amazing to me, but believable. To be fair, I know older attorneys in the technology sector who still do that.

Sure enough, my experience has been of emailed PDFs with semi-legible question marks and brackets in the margins. Still, I didn't entirely understood what old school really meant, until I got an email from an industry attorney in LA. It was about a paragraph long, acknowledging receipt of our change requests (a proper redline).

At the bottom of the email below his name, it said: "Dictated but not read."

2 comments:

E. McPan said...

I worked for a guy who had his secretary print out his emails so he could hand-write the response and then have it delivered by inter-office mail. Needless to say, he was very old school.

sarahgreeneyes said...

This is actually pretty funny because at imeem everyone redlined every agreement but I just got my first agreement back at my new job and sure enough it was a pdf with scribble all over it. I haven't encountered this yet and thought 'how bizarre" but then I read your blog and realized imeem must have been the bizarre place.