Although large companies are more expensive to run, they have two major advantages: 1) they usually have all the legal skills you need “under one roof” and 2) they have a lot of influence in the local, regional and (perhaps) national legal community. An evil letter from a “powerful” law firm with offices in 30 states is far more intimidating than an evil letter from an individual practitioner who is not licensed to practice in the accused`s state. Also, connecting with a large, well-established law firm can have intangible benefits – they may be willing to introduce you to funding sources or use their name as a reference if you`re looking for partnership agreements. If you`re running a fast-growing business that plans to one day go public (or sell to a large company), you`ll need to work with lawyers whose names are recognized in the investment banking and venture capital communities. After being a partner in two U.S. Law 50 law firms for nearly 20 years, Tiano founded Legal Decoder because he found that clients lacked the analytical tools and data to manage the cost of external consultants. He asked High Performance Counsel to draw on the experience of investors. “About six of my investors in Legal Decoder really inspire me. They have started businesses themselves and understand the emotional roller coaster of entrepreneurship very well by providing invaluable support, advice and encouragement. Lawyers are adept at knowing how businesses can reduce their tax burden.
They know all the deductions you can make and can help you with an audit. 5. Intellectual Property. If you`re in a media, design, or other creative business, it`s certainly a “plus” if your lawyer can help you register your products and services for federal trademark and copyright protection. In general, however, these tasks are carried out by specialists who only do legal work in the field of “intellectual property”. If your lawyer says he or she “specializes in small businesses,” then he or she should have a close working relationship with one or more intellectual property specialists. But if you`re a business with two or more owners, you should definitely hire a lawyer. The same goes for commodity companies.
So the question, how to find a good one? We`ll cover that here. (LINK: I am convinced that I need a lawyer – How can I find a good one?) The main reason why lawyers can usually make less sense is because of the cost. If you have unlimited capital, you can save time by hiring a great lawyer (just like you would hire an expert on everything else like SEO, marketing, design, sales, etc.). Most new businesses that start up require most or all of these contracts: Most new businesses overlook the impact on brands that exist from the start. When you register your business, it must not infringe another company`s trademark. Just because your name was available in your state doesn`t mean it doesn`t infringe a trademark. First, a caveat. My goal in this guide is not to prevent someone who intended to hire a lawyer from doing so. That`s about 1 in 4 companies. These are the other 3 out of 4 companies I want to train – the ones that probably wouldn`t have hired a lawyer anyway. Say, “If you don`t do it anyway, here are a few things you should think about, maybe you should do it sometimes, but sometimes it`s probably okay not to hire one.” When the American Bar Association voted this summer to reaffirm its longstanding policy that only lawyers are allowed to own law firms, critics warned that the decision thwarted innovation and made legal services inaccessible to low- and middle-income consumers. As lawyers, we are formally trained and sworn to act ethically and to the best of our ability.
This is a standard that companies that are not owned by lawyers can never meet. In its report, the ABA identified innovative lawyer-led programs to expand access to legal services. These include online dispute resolution, litigant assistance, advanced virtual court services, and simplified litigation procedures. These programs prove that when lawyers are innovative, they can solve the most difficult problems – and do so with the ethical foundations of the profession as a guide. But this goes into the concept of the “rules of the game”. For the vast majority of companies, the rules are much easier to learn and identify what is true. For some of them, the rules may be 100 times higher than others. My boss Noory Bechor was a lawyer at a leading Israeli law firm when he experienced first-hand the pain of manually creating and reviewing daily contracts.
Convinced that the process could be automated, he founded ai contract review platform LawGeex in 2014. LawGeex has raised $9.5 million in financing and gained clients, including leading U.S. names in retail, finance and insurance. Bechor told me about a redesign for a lawyer: “To give two examples: for lawyers, any risk must be mitigated, for an entrepreneur, taking risks is second nature. Second, for lawyers, everything is confidential, but as an entrepreneur, the more you share, the more advice you get, the better off you are. “So, first of all, you want to know why the law is important in the first place – if the legal was negligible for businesses, then it would almost never make sense to hire someone or spend time on it.