Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla fame has yet another company, and that company is looking for an in-house counsel.
If the tunnel building venture, which has the tongue-in-cheek name The Boring Co., goes forward with the hire, it's likely that Musk won't be looking to bring on just any old attorney. Experts cited a number of desirable traits for this new in-house counsel, including a solid understanding of state and federal transportation rules and safety regulations as well as a sense of loyalty to what could be a pretty challenging project.
Musk's newest company is focused on building a network of underground tunnels for private and shared vehicle use. It is similar to technology currently in development called "Hyperloop." That technology is being used by two separate companies to build above-ground train tracks that rocket passengers from destination to destination. The Boring Co. takes that idea underground and modifies it so that regular cars can utilize this kind of high-speed transportation system.
In a video posted on The Boring Co.'s website, a red, computer-generated Tesla cruises down a traffic-backed two-way street in a busy metropolitan area. The car pulls to the right and docks at a platform, pulled below street level in an elevator shaft. The car, still on its platform, is ushered along a rail and hits speeds of 125 mph, merging with other rail-attached vehicles including a shared public vehicle that fits about six people, standing and sitting. The video reveals a vast, imagined network of railways, an underground freeway, almost.
On the company's careers webpage is a list of 11 open positions. The last one is for legal: "In-House Counsel with Transactional Experience (Transportation Law Experience Preferred)." There is no additional information available on the website, and a message sent to a company email address found on the jobs page was not returned.
On July 20, Musk tweeted out that he received "verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop." The travel time between New York and Washington, D.C., Musk wrote, would be 29 minutes.
Eric Zalud, chair of the transportation practice at Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff, said any in-house counsel joining Musk's project would, generally, need to grapple with fitting Musk's cutting edge technology to regulatory and statutory regimes that are decades to more than a century old.
"The Carmack Amendment, the federal statute that governs all freight loss and damage claims nationwide, is so old that the senator whom it is named after was killed in a duel," Zalud said. "A duel. That's how old this regime is."