Last week we drew your attention to 10 reasons why entrepreneurs hate lawyers. Because to find the path to self-improvement one has to recognise one’s faults, right? Whatever.

One lawyer-blogger saw this and sought to point out that the bat swings both ways. In a mutually negative piece, JD Hull on What About Paris? had this to say:

Start-up clients: A “miserable and tortuous” hell?

For over ten years, our firm has shied away from representing start-ups–even those run by savvy entrepreneurs with past successes and big bucks. To be more precise, we have routinely run from them.

Reason: Start-ups are not generally sophisticated users of legal services. They cannot distinguish between, say, a David Boies or James Freund, and JoJo the Demented Car Accident Lawyer. Although creative and way fun, start-up people are moreover (a) paranoid about lawyers (“lawyers are all alike and our enemy”), (b) flat-out cheap and/or (c) too wild and crazy to listen to us.

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It being Friday, you may feel generous enough to sympathise with both sides of this. It’s not hard to see that people from virtually opposite ends of the risk tolerance spectrum are never going to have their views of the world aligned. Even when they have to work together. Comprehensive engagement letter, yes please.

One of our commenters put it like this, “there’s a bit of the playground thing going on”. Seeking to explain that, business practices aside, these two personality types have been at odds since the playground. Which has merely been replaced by the boardroom. Another took the philosophical route to dampening the mutual negativity – “Who really cares what any of the others think. If you are happy in your job count yourself lucky whatever you do.”

Which is fine but probably won’t make working together any easier.