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(feel free to mail this page) (Links to documents appear after the summary.) Estimates of the cost of litigation resulting from the y2k problem are as "low" as $300 billion and as high as $1.25 trillion -- just in the United States. The legal profession is gearing up for its biggest windfall in history. The threat of this to managers and board members has not yet registered. How do I know this? Because the price of COBOL programmers working on y2k projects today (mid-1997) is under $50 per hour. The cost of corporate legal talent is three or more times this. When the cost of COBOL programmers working on y2k reaches the cost of hiring a big-time corporate lawyer in the same city, managers and board members will at last be taking this threat seriously. There will be quiet resignations at some point. That is when managers and board members at long last realize that y2k cannot be fixed, and that their careers and capital -- especially stock holdings -- are on the line. When insider short selling becomes widespread, we will have an indicator that the the corporate world is getting the picture. It is too late now to get started. Every day that the legal threat does not raise the wages of COBOL programmers is another day of denial by managers. When denial by managers stops, it will be too late for you to get out of the stock market. (See category, "Stock Market.") The largest collection of Year 2000 legal/government references is at http://www.comlinks.com/mmenu.htm
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