It’s no secret that lawyers aren’t always affordable – but this blog post will help you to get more value from your lawyer. By understanding the services that lawyers provide and how to best use them, you stand a better chance of getting more value – as well as a return on your investment – from your lawyer.
How To Get More Value From Your Lawyer
By being a savvy consumer of legal services, you can get more value from your lawyer. Below are a few tips that can help anybody who has hired a lawyer or plans to hire a lawyer. By following them, you have a good chance of lowering your legal bills and getting more from your lawyer.
- Be Proactive: The best way to get more for your money when hiring a lawyer is to be proactive. In other words, avoiding a problem rather than trying to solve it after it has happened is a great way to reduce your legal fees and get more for your money. Often, it costs much more to fix something than it does to get proactive legal advice before things go wrong or you learn that there is a better way to solve a problem. Our firm offers the Creators’ Legal Program as a way for our clients to get in touch with a lawyer early on, and save money, time and frustration.
- Understand the Law: Similarly, by becoming educated about legal issues you can get more value from your lawyer. Often, if a client doesn’t understand certain legal basics, we will have to spend time (and money – see below) going over them so that everybody is up to speed. No need to be an expert on the law, but having an overview of general legal issues is a great investment that pays dividends every time you speak to an attorney. A good place to start would be The Creators’ Legal Guide, which is a short ebook that goes over copyrights, trademarks, contracts and other things that affect a growing business.
- Be Careful with Hourly Billing: Although many of us lawyers offer flat-fee options for certain projects, a good amount of legal work is billed hourly. That can get expensive if you’re not careful; lawyers will generally bill for communications such as phone calls or emails – that’s because lawyers are selling their time and if you have a lot of questions, it might be more efficient to gather them all for a single phone call rather than a series of emails back and forth (or join a subscription program like the Creators’ Legal Program). Some lawyers will often be lenient about billing for communications, but not always, so it’s good to check before you get that giant invoice.
- Know What You’re Buying: Sometimes legal clients aren’t actually sure what they are buying – this can be an expensive mistake that is easily fixed. Allow me to put it simply: when you are hiring a lawyer, you’re not buying a document, you are buying the legal advice that goes along with it. That’s where the real value lies. A lawyer can tell you if you are using the best document, or if there are alternatives to an approach that you may have chosen. A good lawyer will give you options that you didn’t necessarily know existed and point out hazards that can cause problems down the line. Even with something like a privacy policy, that seems like “boilerplate”,
- Don’t Try To Cut Corners: Every now and then, I get a client who brings a poorly-drafted document and wants me to work from it, hoping that it will save money. The thinking is that if they bring a document, that the attorney will be able to get the job done faster. But…the opposite is true. Lawyers already have document templates that they are familiar with and that they can turn into a finished product quickly – using someone else’s template (especially if it is terrible) generally takes more time. Look at this way: if you were hiring a contractor to build a house and you put up a bad house that you wanted that contractor to work from, it will actually be more expensive because the contractor is probably going to have tear down the house or do complex workarounds to make things work, rather than doing it right in the first place.
Hopefully those help. Although legal fees aren’t always cheap (but sometimes they can be!), by being a smart customer you can get way more for the money that you spend. If you have questions about this or want to know more about what I have written – go ahead and get in touch with me by email – jon@counselforcreators.com
By being a smart consumer of legal services, you can get more for your money.
