In my database, Concessions have a many-to-one relationship with Firms (each Concession has a FirmID). SqlMetal has captured this relationship and generated the appropriate classes, so that each Concession has a Firm element. I'm binding against a query (simplified here) that returns a list of Concessions along with information about the corresponding Firm:

```
From c as Concession in Db.Concessions _
Select _
   c.ConcessionID, _
   c.Title, _
   c.Firm.Title

```

The problem is that in some cases a Concession has not been assigned to a Firm (c.FirmID is null), so c.Firm is nothing and I get `Object not set to an instance` etc.

I can get around this by doing a join as follows:

```
From c As Concession In Db.Concessions _
Join f As Firm In Db.Firms On f.FirmID Equals c.FirmID _
Select _
    c.ConcessionID, _
    c.Title, _
    Firm_Title = f.Title 

```

This doesn't throw an error when FirmID is null (Firm\_Title is just an empty string), but it's not elegant: it's not object-oriented, and it doesn't leverage all of the relational intelligence that Linq to SQL has already captured. 

Is there a more graceful way to deal with this situation?