Oh! Congradulations, Rachel. You are probably one of the very few that takes this position. Continue with the self praise though, and maybe the other VM's will take notice.

No, I have not missed the point. What VM's should do, and what they actually do in the real world are two different matters. Otherwise you would not so many complaints on the SOT board. I do a thriving collections business suing defendant's that owe my clients hundreds of thousands of dollars in the aggregate each year. In the past twenty years I have seen every excuse in the book as to why defendant's haven't paid their bills. Generally it comes down to two reasons. Either the defendant is cash poor, and can't pay the bill, or they adopt a posture of "why pay now when we can pay later." Their favorite trick was to include bankruptcy as part of their business model. Hopefully, the new bankruptcy law will eliminate or at least limit this practice.

The truth of the matter is that the VM's care very little about abstractor/vendor relations. They are only interested in the lowest price for the fastest turn around time. One of the local abstractors recently told me that she was doing work for a major client...it would be known to all of you. She told them that she would be on vacation for two weeks during the Christmas holidays. After her vacation she called the client to let them know she was back. The client told her that they were reassigning her work to another abstractor permanently, and that she was terminated. Vendor ethics? I think not. If a book were written on vendor ethics, it would probably be one of the shortest books ever written.