That’s the upshot of an interesting post by Matt Craven over on Blog Network Watch. Is it true?

Like all such assertions: up to a point.

We Brits are a lot more cautious about the legal profession than most Americans, who can be very litigious. I’ll qualify that last statement by saying that even here in the land of the free (UK) we seem to be following the same trajectory, especially under European “Human” Rights legislation.

But Matt’s specific point is that blog networks need lawyers to watch their backs and get down and dirty on their behalf in the nasty corporate world out there. I’ve no doubt that’s true. There are other models to consider, though.

First, let’s nail the position of Syntagma Media. We’re not incorporated yet, but we intend to be so during the first half of 2006. At present we operate on what I call the Resiliency Model.

The Resiliency Model works out the costs of having a water-tight operation. In other words, what it will cost to shore up every wall and dyke so they’re impregnable — Matt’s lawyer-infested swamp. Then it compares the costs with the losses likely to be incurred with a general “you win some, you lose some” business case.

In the startup phase, the latter almost always works out more economic, and much less harrassing. That’s the Resiliency Model.

Once a business gets clients or partners who operate in the full glare of the tracked marketplace, however, the situation changes. It needs to conform with the prevailing tide or get pulled under by the many Great Whites out there.

The Resiliency Model needs some bounce-back too in the case of having your ideas stolen by others. Matt specifically targets content providers in his piece. But the point about content is that even when “stolen”, it’s still working on your site and attracting search traffic to the Internet’s version of plankton: Adsense clicks.

Having a complete book or thesis stolen is far worse than having an RSS feed scraped of content without attribution.

So, while agreeing with Matt in general, I would be cautious about having too many lawyers around until you need them, and that could be further down the track than you might think. VCs will demand them, of course.

For bootstrappers, like the early Microsoft, there’s a trade-off involved that doesn’t tip over into real-time losses for quite a while.

Jason Calacanis, for example, has come full circle from Startup Johnny to Corporate Man in two years or so. Now he’s surrounded by AOL’s legal eagles. Might he just wish he was back in Resiliency mode? What’s life for anyway?

But that’s a much bigger question.