How to Vet Lawyers for Yourself and Your Business

You can help your business thrive by simply asking the right questions of potential legal advisors.

At Story LLP, we believe you are best served by having the least expensive lawyer with the appropriate level and type of expertise working on your matter. Some matters really benefit from more experienced lawyers — but not all. If you’re doing something routine and simple — think “science of law” — you can go with the cheapest person who knows how to do it (or even an automated service). But, when you need a creative solution or approach, or when you have unusual circumstances to manage — think “art of law practice” — the right lawyer adds immense value for your business, provided you have budget for that.

Most of the time, you get what you pay for with lawyers. Someone “cheap” generally isn’t that good and my take 2x-10x as long to do that thing (poorly) as someone twice the price would take to do it well. At Story LLP, we pride ourselves on supporting expert lawyers from diverse backgrounds to take home more per hour by charging clients less. Along the way, we’ve identified a few best practices to help you vet any lawyer, and we want to share them so that founders with less experience around lawyers never get bamboozled.

Are you a solo founder incorporating a software startup just to see if any investors or customers are interested in what you’re doing? You get zero benefit from using a big fancy law firm over a competent service that incorporates you with form documents (but beware, these services leave significant gaps you’ll pay to close if you are successful — especially securities filings with hefty late fees).

On the other hand, if you’re an enterprise software company that sells to hospitals and clinics, you will get a LOT of value in your business from working with a lawyer experienced in healthcare, privacy, and commercial contracts as soon as possible. You will also probably create a lot of problems and liability from copying and pasting some random contract form you found online to avoid paying a lawyer.

Paying a lawyer is only right for you if you can afford one, but if you are going to pay a lawyer, we’re here to help you understand what you’re paying for, and how to pay the minimum possible for good advice and work product from lawyers.

Here are some questions you should always ask lawyers before you hire them:

1. How many of this type of deal/litigation have you done before? The more they’ve done similar tasks, the more they will know “off the top of their head” that will help you and the more efficient they will be. Plus, if they’ve done a lot of this type of deal, they are more likely to be good enough at what they do that clients keep recommending them to others. This can make each of their hours much more valuable to you.
2. Based on what I’ve told you about my goals, are they viable? This lets the lawyer know you’re rational, and flexible if your idea won’t work. it will allow them to propose alternative routes instead of just pricing your idea. Lawyers waste a lot of time talking to clients who insist on doing something that should be expensive at a low price because they don’t understand what’s involved and/or don’t want to hear why it’s a substantial legal risk.
3. If my goals are viable, what process should I expect to execute on them, and what costs? Here, you want not just the lawyer’s estimate, but an understanding of any filing fees or other third party expenses that might be involved. Plus, understanding how the process will go will help you make better strategic business plans and budgets.
4. What can I do or prepare to help you work more efficiently? Most lawyers appreciate this question, and will almost certainly tell you things you can easily do to make their bill lower and their work better — if they know you’re open. Only the worst lawyers out there WANT to be working and billing hours for grunt work.
5. Who at your firm would work on this matter, and why? You want to know if the expert lawyer you’re talking to now is actually doing the work, or if someone more junior is learning to do the work under them. You’re entitled to ask if the expert lawyer can do all the work herself — though she may not agree to. Firms will often try to “sell” this model by telling you that their more junior associates are less expensive, but this only actually helps you where the junior and senior person need to spend the same amount of time to do a thing, and the junior’s work doesn’t need the senior’s supervision. Think tasks like filling in forms — which raises the question of why you’re paying anyone $800/hr to fill out forms with info you supply. In almost every case, the $1600/hr senior lawyer is more than twice as fast as the $800/hr junior lawyer, and you’re better off working just with the senior person. It’s worth asking the senior person whether they can do your work themselves, and asking them why they can’t (or shouldn’t) if they push back. Remember that senior partner lawyers usually make more money with less of their time if they put their associate on your matter.

Here are some other things to keep in mind when you’re vetting lawyers:

Beware sneaky conflicts of interest! Did the other side of the contract recommend this lawyer? If so, you should be asking why. The other side loses if your lawyers are better, so be sure you know why someone is making a recommendation before you take it if you’re on opposite sides of a deal.

I see this come up most often with lawyers recommended to startups by their investors. Remember that the company and its investors are on different sides fo the table, no matter how much we all think we share common goals. When I started working in BigLaw, I was surprised to find that so many of our startup clients were sent to us by an investor who had a strong, long-term relationship with the law partner who got the business. I noticed that our firm’s “standard startup form” documents contained provisions that were more investor-friendly than company-friendly. When i asked why, I was told that “the investors prefer this” — even if no investor hd yet asked for this. Technically, your lawyers are supposed to be on your side, period. If your investor is driving your lawyer’s paycheck, they’re probably not entirely on your side.

At Story LLP, we vet lawyers on behalf of our clients, and only recruit Attorney Allies who are recommended in their specialty by other lawyers. We want to empower founders to vet any lawyers well, but if you still need help, reach us at help@storyllp.com.