The Strategic Business Lawyer

Good article. While it has high aspirations for us lawyers in the trenches, it ignores many realities of the practice of law, particularly litigation work, where the client often wants a "no holds barred" litigator to take the case from point A to point B. This is particularly true of many larger companies or companies that are often targets of litigation. There is usually team of well-educated and litigation savvy in-house folks who are hiring you to address a particular problem, a particular lawsuit, and would be quite offended to be getting business advice from their "hired gun." The paradigm suggested in the article would have more applicability to smaller (or mid-size) businesses that do not have the full complement of in-house expertise, but only those that have the resources to hire the strategic lawyer. Plus, in my experience, small business owners (even the succesful ones) usually wait until they have a problem before they go to a lawyer because they perceive using the lawyer at the inception of whatever deal they've created as not cost effective. Perhaps we need to do a better job of educating the client about the strategic services we can offer. But then, again, they need to use us. You can lead a horse to water, .....

Thanks for your comments, Joe. I agree that often you are engaged to be a hired gun. I would imagine, however, even in such situations, opportunities exist for creativity and proactivity that are often overlooked by attorneys. In chicken and egg style, lawyers embrace the image of being a hired gun in response to what they perceive the client wants or needs and the client determines that what the client needs is a hired gun based on the client's perception of what lawyers bring to the table. I also agree that the people who run businesses do not contact their attorneys early enough. For small businesses, this is often due to a perception (created I believe by the use of billable hour billing) that contacting an attorney costs money and is to be avoided except as a last resort. For larger businesses, unfortunately, the attorneys are often perceived as deal-killing naysayers. Neither situation is optimal. That is why the concept of strategic lawyering is appealing.

Down in Florida, many small businesses have found that having an attorney for all their routine legal issues can be done with Legal Insurance. Like at this site my attorney frined runs: Florida Small Business Lawyer ...

Down in Florida, many small businesses have found that having an attorney for all their routine legal issues can be done with Legal Insurance.

I've read quite a bit about legal plans for small businesses, but always come back to the same nagging questions. First, if I were a small business owner, I would be concerned about the quality of the representation I was receiving. Sure, a free telephone call to a lawyer is great, but how does the business owner know he's getting the right lawyer or someone who is not-so-right and starving for business (hence the listing on a legal plan network)? Second, as a small business owner, I would want my lawyer to know me and my business and be a partner in preserving or growing my business. An assigned lawyer, anonymous to me, would seem to be counterproductive to that objective. After all, clients hire lawyers they know and trust. Seems to me that a small business owner who uses a pre-paid legal plan may be penny wise and pound foolish. But I could be wrong.

Is it possible, or how likely is it to break a business Lease with the "interfering with my right to do good business" clause?

Chryssa, who is the lease with?