You have that meeting with a lawyer coming up. What are they going to ask me? What do I have to tell them? Going to see a lawyer can seem like a daunting thing to do especially if it is the first time you have been to see a lawyer or a particular lawyer. Depending on your personality and where you are at in your business knowing what to do to prepare for the meeting is often a challenge.
Understanding the legal aspects of your business is crucial for your success. All too often we see business owners spend thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to solve a legal problem in their business. Sure some of those problems are unavoidable but whether you are going to see a lawyer to prevent a problem or if you are reacting to something that has happened there is a lot you can do to prepare to see a lawyer.
What do you need/want?
To get the most out of any appointment or work with any professional you need to be able to articulate exactly what it is that you are seeking from the lawyer in the meeting. Having a clear understanding of what it is that you are after will allow the lawyer to ask you the proper questions (see below) that will help you. To help work this out you need to educate yourself on what it is that you can seek from your lawyer and to understand how they will be able to help you.
What types of questions
It is impossible to prepare the exact questions but in a general sense the lawyer will ask:
- What it is that you want to do?
- What is the history of the matter?
- What legal steps (if any) have you tried before?
- What other steps (non-legal) have you tried before?
- If it is a dispute
– What if any documents you have to support or contradict your argument?
– What would the otherside say if they were sitting here?
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment Tool and Education Course to help you to understand the law without a law degree. It is often difficult to understand what you need to do before you go to a lawyer and what costs you will save by taking a proactive approach (by its very nature a proactive approach saves you money that you would otherwise spend) but trust us that the savings are huge.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
How do I contact a lawyer to get legal advice? You don’t know what to do. How am I going to work out if I get a good lawyer? Depending on where you are at in your business knowing how to go about getting legal advice can be confusing and difficult for some people.
Understanding the legal aspects of your business is crucial for your success. All too often we see business owners spend thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to solve a legal problem in their business. Sure some of those problems are unavoidable but whether you are going to see a lawyer to prevent a problem or if you are reacting to something that has happened there is a lot you can do to prepare to see a lawyer.
Contacting a Lawyer
When you have a legal problem often it can be difficult to find a lawyer that can help you. You need to look for a recommendation from someone you know, like and trust for a lawyer that they have used. Alternatively, you can search on the internet to find a lawyer who is knowledgeable in the area that you need assistance with. We can also assist here with our lawyer referral program. You want to ask them questions around their experience, how they charge for the work that they will do for you and ask for references where you think you need them.
Educate Yourself
Next you want to educate yourself on what the legal issues are. You won’t find all of the solutions but you need to educate yourself on what your issue is and start to find some solutions on how to solve it. There are lots of great internet based resources, much of them on this site, that will give you that information. Caution here, this is general advice,you need to get advice from your lawyer to make sure that it is correct for you.
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment Tool and Education Course to help you to understand the law without a law degree. It is often difficult to understand how you go about getting advice from a lawyer. Doing so though will save you a lot of costs and issues in the future.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
This is a question that I am often asked. Why is it that I have received a bill from my lawyer and they have charged me time in blocks of 6 minutes and where I have spent say 6 and a half minutes on the phone with the lawyer why does that cost me twice as much as if I had spent 6 minutes on the phone with them. This is a frustration for many business owners when they are dealing with a lawyer as they don’t know why lawyers charge the way that they charge.
The short answer is that it is based on a misunderstanding of a series of papers written for the American Bar Association Journal from 1940. As quoted in Implementing Value Pricing by Ronald J. Baker, the author of these papers was Reginald Heber Smith who was a managing partner at a Boston law firm. At the time Mr Smith was looking for a way to account for and manage the cost of the inventory of his business. In this case Mr Smith saw time as the commodity that the business of law was producing.
To do this Mr Smith argued that the time sheet should be kept in periods of 1/10th of an hour, therefore 6 minutes to enable tracking and monitoring of the commodity of time. Therefore, Mr Smith advocated that lawyers should keep time sheets to prove this efficiency. He did not advocate that the lawyer should use this to charge their clients. Unfortunately this paper and this approach has since 1940 become more and more the way that lawyers charge for the work they perform.
If your lawyer is charging you based on the time they spend on your matter you should challenge them to provide a fixed fee quote to give you certainty on the price that you are going to be charged moving forward.
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment Tool and Education Course to help you to understand the law without a law degree. It is often difficult to understand what you need to do before you go to a lawyer and what costs you will save by taking a proactive approach (by its very nature a proactive approach saves you money that you would otherwise spend) but trust us that the savings are huge.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
You have a legal problem that has come up. What do you do, who do you speak to? What are my options for dealing with this in a way that isn’t going to cost me a lot of money. Depending on your personality and where you are at in your business knowing what to take with you to a meeting with a lawyer is often a challenge.
Understanding the legal aspects of your business is crucial for your success. All too often we see business owners spend thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to solve a legal problem in their business. Sure, some of those problems are unavoidable but whether you are going to see a lawyer to prevent a problem or if you are reacting to something that has happened there is a lot you can do to prepare to see a lawyer.
Ask great questions
When you go to a lawyer they will generally ask you a lot of questions about your situation. Before you go to the lawyer you should spend time seeking to understand what it is that they will be asking you so that you can properly prepare for that meeting. Part of that is educating yourself on different legal aspects of your business, what they mean and how they might apply to you.
Next, you should ask the lawyer (or their team) what you need to bring to the consultation. Depending on the type of meeting that you are having with the lawyer you may need to bring documentation a completed questionnaire or other important information to that meeting.
What our tool is not designed to do?
The tool is specifically designed to produce a report that you can take to your lawyer so that they can help to implement the legal risks. Generally to obtain this type of advice from a lawyer would require an investment of around $1,000.00 (or 1,000.00 pounds) so that the lawyer can interview you, obtain all of your information and then write the report. Alternatively often lawyers may try to do this advice for free and then charge you more when they implement and do the work.
Either way the report is designed to save your time and money to find out this information and then have your lawyer do the work. We have also designed it to explain to you, in plain English, what all of these legal terms mean and why they are important. This means that when you go to see your lawyer you will not need them to explain what you need to do, you will already understand.
How you can use it to better work with your lawyer
Designing a tool that identifies every single risk factor in your business is impossible and any tool that tried to do that would take many hours to complete. Your time is far too valuable to waste doing that and any tool that pretends to do that will have gaps. For that reason we designed the tool to give you a broad understanding of what your legal risks are and what to do about them.
The same is true of our education material and Jeremy Streten’s book, The Business Legal Lifecycle. They are designed to give you a broad understanding of what you need to put in place for your business.
What if they say its up to you?
Sometimes the lawyer or their team members may leave it up to you so here is a list of what you should bring:
- A written statement as to what happened and why you need their help (even if this is in note form it will help you not miss anything);
- A list of questions that you want answered;
- Any documents that go for or against what you are trying to argue (where you have a dispute and remember they need to see everything);
- The details of all of your entities and structures so that the lawyer can understand your business structure and what you own (as well as owe); and
- Details of any previous advice that you have received.
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment Tool and Education Course to help you to understand the law without a law degree. It is often difficult to understand what you need to do before you go to a lawyer and what costs you will save by taking a proactive approach (by its very nature a proactive approach saves you money that you would otherwise spend) but trust us that the savings are huge.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
How much does it cost to ask a lawyer a question? I don’t know what I will be charged or even how they will calculate those charges? How do I know if I am being overcharged receiving legal advice? Understanding the legal aspects of your business is crucial for your success. All too often we see business owners not asking questions of their lawyer because they don’t know what the cost will be. This ends up costing the business owner a lot of money when they encounter problems that could have been avoided. Sure some of those problems are unavoidable depending on who you deal with but the vast majority of problems within a business can be solved if you take a proactive approach to protecting your business.
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we prepared this article to give you a guide on how lawyers should charge so you know what they cost.
Cost of a Lawyer
To work out the cost of a lawyer you need to ask them what they will charge to help you. Generally lawyers charge their clients on one of two basis, firstly is a fixed fee for a service and second is an hourly basis based on how much time they spend doing the work.
Time Based Charging
Let’s start with charging based on time. These costs can vary from $200 per hour to as high as $1,200 per hour. Some law firms will calculate this on the actual time spent (i.e. they will track all of the minutes that they work on your file but more commonly they work this out in 6 minute increments). This is an antiquated way of running a business and creates a lot of problems between lawyers and their clients.
The problems with this approach are numerous, some of the key ones are it:
- Disincentives you as the client to get legal advice and to carry on a discussion because you are worried about the time you are being charged. Imagine you are on the phone to a lawyer and the call goes for 6 minutes and 30 seconds, all of a sudden you are up for 2 x 6 minute increments (also known as power billing);
- Incentives your lawyer to spend more time doing the work on your file and not find the more efficient way to deal with your opportunity or problem;
Fixed Feed Based Charging
The second way of charging for the work performed by a lawyer, a fixed price, is a much better way for you to understand what you are being charged and control the expenses in your business. Frankly this is a much better business model for you to engage a lawyer through so that you know exactly what you are being charged and if a lawyer can’t give you a fixed price then they don’t understand the work that they need to do well enough.
These charges are often out of reach for many business owners. That is why we created the Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment. It is a tool that takes about 10 minutes to complete online by answering 31 questions about your business and costs $97. It provides a report that sets out the legal risks in your business and what you need to do to protect them. For a lawyer to prepare a similar type of report it will take generally between 2 to 4 hours. That means that the cost of obtaining this advice from a lawyer could be as little as $400 and as much as $4,800.
The Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment gives you a report that sets out what is missing in your business, why you need to prevent those legal risks and a plan for the future of your business. Importantly you can take it to your lawyer to then do the work that they are good at, preventing those legal risks within your business and you get all of this without the cost of a lawyer preparing the report in the first place.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
How did my lawyer work out the hours that they worked on my matter? I can’t seem to get this invoice to add up? How do I know if I am being overcharged receiving legal advice? These are all questions that we often see coming up for business owners when they receive legal advice. Sometimes it is difficult to understand just how a lawyer has calculated their hours and their fees.
If a lawyer charges you based on a fixed price quote then the hours that they worked for you don’t matter so long as you receive the outcome that you are after from the lawyer. This can be difficult to realise for some people especially those who are used to being charged by their lawyer based on the number of hours that they worked.
Time Based Charging
The cost per hour can vary from $200 per hour to as high as $1,200 per hour. Some law firms will calculate this on the actual time spent. This is an antiquated way of running a business and creates a lot of problems between lawyers and their clients.
The problems with this approach are numerous, some of the key ones are it:
- Disincentives you as the client to get legal advice and to carry on a discussion because you are worried about the time you are being charged;
- Incentives your lawyer to spend more time doing the work on your file and not find the more efficient way to deal with your opportunity or problem;
What our tool is not designed to do?
The tool is specifically designed to produce a report that you can take to your lawyer so that they can help to implement the legal risks. Generally to obtain this type of advice from a lawyer would require an investment of around $1,000.00 (or 1,000.00 pounds) so that the lawyer can interview you, obtain all of your information and then write the report. Alternatively often lawyers may try to do this advice for free and then charge you more when they implement and do the work.
Either way the report is designed to save your time and money to find out this information and then have your lawyer do the work. We have also designed it to explain to you, in plain English, what all of these legal terms mean and why they are important. This means that when you go to see your lawyer you will not need them to explain what you need to do, you will already understand.
Calculating the hours
When you are being billed based on time the lawyer needs to count the number of hours that they work on your file. To do this, they will track all of the minutes that they work on your file but more commonly they work this out in 6 minute increments. This means that if you are on the phone to a lawyer and the call goes for 6 minutes and 30 seconds, all of the sudden you are up for 2 x 6 minute increments (also known as power billing). This is how a lawyer’s bill can really add up and you can feel as if you are being ripped off.
These charges are often out of reach for many business owners. That is why we created the Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment. It is a tool that takes about 10 minutes to complete online by answering 31 questions about your business and costs $97. It provides a report that sets out the legal risks in your business and what you need to do to protect them. For a lawyer to prepare a similar type of report it will take generally between 2 to 4 hours. That means that the cost of obtaining this advice from a lawyer could be as little as $400 and as much as $4,800.
The Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment gives you a report that sets out what is missing in your business, why you need to prevent those legal risks and a plan for the future of your business. Importantly you can take it to your lawyer to then do the work that they are good at, preventing those legal risks within your business and you get all of this without the cost of a lawyer preparing the report in the first place.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment Tool and Education Course to help you to understand the law without a law degree. It is often difficult to understand the costs that you will save by taking a proactive approach (by its very nature a proactive approach saves you money that you would otherwise spend) but trust us that the savings are huge.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
What questions should I ask my lawyer?
To ensure that there are no surprises, that you are all on the same page and that you are not left guessing you should prepare a list of questions to ask your lawyer at the appointment. You should prepare questions relating to your specific matter as well as asking the suggested general questions below:
- How much will this cost me?
- What is the timeframe for completion of the work?
- What further information do I need to provide to you so you can get started?
- What do you anticipate will be the outcome of this matter?
- What is the best way to contact you, phone/email?
- How often will you provide me with updates on the matter?
- Will anyone else be working on my matter?
Your lawyer will also ask you a lot of questions about your situation. Make sure that if you believe that something has been missed that is important that you raise it in the meeting (or tell them later). To do that properly you need to educate yourself on different legal aspects of your business, what they mean and how they might apply to you.
How can I educate myself before I see my lawyer?
When you go to see a lawyer you need to be aware of some of the terms and areas that you may cover in that meeting. There are lots of great tools that you can use to educate yourself on what other lawyers see as important for your legal matter. Importantly though you don’t want to tell your lawyer that you know what needs to be done and that you just want them to confirm that position. You need to spend time understanding what it is that you will need to then have a discussion with your lawyer about those maters in an intelligible manner.
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment Tool and Education Course to help you to understand the law without a law degree. It is often difficult to understand the costs that you will save by taking a proactive approach (by its very nature a proactive approach saves you money that you would otherwise spend) but trust us that the savings are huge.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
If you’re considering taking our Business Legal Lifecycle Risk Assessment Tool and have done your research on the web you’ve probably thought to yourself that this won’t work for me because my business is different. This is one of the most common comments I hear from business owners, that their business is unique and requires advice specific to the business or industry.
The purpose of this article is to address, with full disclosure, why this is not correct and why our tool will work for you. In the spirit of full disclosure, we have to point out that there are “problems”.
Every Business is Unique but the Business of Business is the same
There are well over 210 million different companies in the world and many more businesses that are run as sole traders. Depending on your definitions there are at least 19 different industries that those businesses fall into. Each of those businesses and industries is unique because the way that they deliver their product or service is unique and will have its own challenges and opportunities.
However the business of business is the same across those different businesses. Whilst every country and in some cases every state within a country has different rules the legal risks of businesses are generally the same throughout the rule. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment tool to be quick and easy to use.
Our tool is designed to be quick and easy to use. It asks around 30 questions and should take you about 10 minutes. It is designed to give you a snapshot of your legal risks by identifying what you have in your business and what you are missing. By identifying which phase you are in, in the Business Legal Lifecycle you will understand better what your legal gaps are in your business so that you can plug them.
How you can use it to better work with your lawyer
The tool is specifically designed to produce a report that you can take to your lawyer so that they can help to implement the legal risks specific to your business and industry. Generally to obtain this type of advice from a lawyer would require an investment of around $1,000.00 (or 1,000.00 pounds) so that the lawyer can interview you, obtain all of your information and then write the report. Alternatively often lawyers may try to do this advice for free and then charge you more when they implement and do the work.
Either way the report is designed to save your time and money to find out this information and then have your lawyer do the work. We have also designed it to explain to you, in plain English, what all of these legal terms mean and why they are important. This means that when you go to see your lawyer you will not need them to explain what you need to do, you will already understand.
About Business Legal Lifecycle
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment Tool and Education Course to help you to understand the law without a law degree. It is often difficult to understand the costs that you will save by taking a proactive approach (by its very nature a proactive approach saves you money that you would otherwise spend) but trust us that the savings are huge.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
If you’re considering taking our Business Legal Lifecycle Risk Assessment Tool and have done your research on the web you’ve probably encountered some discussion about the problems with this type of advice.
The purpose of this article is to address, with full disclosure, what the limitations are of the tool … but we won’t leave you there. We will give you all of the ways that you can use those limitations to your advantage. In the spirit of full disclosure, we have to point out that there are “problems”.
What our tool is designed to do?
Our tool is designed to be quick and easy to do. It asks around 30 questions and should take you about 10 minutes. It is designed to give you a snapshot of your legal risks by identifying what you have in your business and what you are missing. By identifying which phase you are in, in the Business Legal Lifecycle you will understand better what your legal gaps are in your business so that you can plug them.
What our tool is not designed to do?
The tool is specifically designed to produce a report that you can take to your lawyer so that they can help to implement the legal risks. Generally to obtain this type of advice from a lawyer would require an investment of around $1,000.00 (or 1,000.00 pounds) so that the lawyer can interview you, obtain all of your information and then write the report. Alternatively often lawyers may try to do this advice for free and then charge you more when they implement and do the work.
Either way the report is designed to save your time and money to find out this information and then have your lawyer do the work. We have also designed it to explain to you, in plain English, what all of these legal terms mean and why they are important. This means that when you go to see your lawyer you will not need them to explain what you need to do, you will already understand.
How you can use it to better work with your lawyer
Designing a tool that identifies every single risk factor in your business is impossible and any tool that tried to do that would take many hours to complete. Your time is far too valuable to waste doing that and any tool that pretends to do that will have gaps. For that reason we designed the tool to give you a broad understanding of what your legal risks are and what to do about them.
The same is true of our education material and Jeremy Streten’s book, The Business Legal Lifecycle. They are designed to give you a broad understanding of what you need to put in place for your business.
About Business Legal Lifecycle
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment Tool and Education Course to help you to understand the law without a law degree. It is often difficult to understand the costs that you will save by taking a proactive approach (by its very nature a proactive approach saves you money that you would otherwise spend) but trust us that the savings are huge.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
It’s coming up. You have put off preparing for this for weeks. I don’t know what they will need. Depending on your personality and where you are at in your business going to see a lawyer can be a challenging meeting to prepare for.
Understanding the legal aspects of your business is crucial for your success. All too often we see business owners spend thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to solve a legal problem in their business. Sure some of those problems are unavoidable but whether you are going to see a lawyer to prevent a problem or if you are reacting to something that has happened there is a lot you can do to prepare to see a lawyer.
What questions should I ask when I book the meeting?
When you go to a lawyer they will generally ask you a lot of questions about your situation. Before you go to the lawyer you should spend time seeking to understand what it is that they will be asking you so that you can properly prepare for that meeting. Part of that is educating yourself on different legal aspects of your business, what they mean and how they might apply to you.
Next, you should ask your lawyer if they have any documentation or questionnaires that they would like you to complete. Often a lawyer will have a questionnaire asking some basic information about you that would help them before a meeting. Also ask if you should bring any documentation. This is especially true if you are in a dispute with someone, your lawyer will need to see all of the documentation that you have in support of your case.
Importantly you should ask if there is a fee for the meeting. Some lawyers charge a fee to meet with them, others simply do a free hour that is designed to sell you into more work. You need to decide what you need but asking up front what the costs will be will save any awkward conversations at the end. HINT: if it better if they charge you a fee upfront, there is no such thing as a free meeting so if you are prepared to pay something that will usually mean that you get something tangible rather than an attempt to sell you into another service.
How can I educate myself before I see my lawyer?
When you go to see a lawyer you need to be aware of some of the terms and areas that you may cover in that meeting. There are lots of great tools that you can use to educate yourself on what other lawyers see as important for your legal matter. Importantly though you don’t want to tell your lawyer that you know what need to be done and that you just want them to confirm that position. You need to spend time understanding what it is that you will need to then have a discussion with your lawyer about those maters in an intelligible manner.
At Business Legal Lifecycle we know that dealing with a lawyer can be difficult, it can seem daunting and costly. That is why we have designed our Legal Risk Assessment Tool and Education Course to help you to understand the law without a law degree. It is often difficult to understand the costs that you will save by taking a proactive approach (by its very nature a proactive approach saves you money that you would otherwise spend) but trust us that the savings are huge.
By working together with the Business Legal Lifecycle lawyers can help their clients to prevent legal risks within their business and prevent so many problems that commonly afflict small to medium sized businesses.
Get your Business Legal Lifecycle Legal Risk Assessment by clicking here now.
Still unsure check out the legal foundations for your business with our free “workbook” (to be written)
