Advice For Clients-And it's Absolutely Free
from July/August 2007
When in doubt, pick up the phone. There are times when it may not be clear whether or not your company needs to bring in outside legal help. If you even think you might need an attorney, you probably do, says Wachtell Lipton’s Martin Lipton: “Don’t wait until the last minute to call the law firm.” While you’re dithering, you may be committing further blunders that a seasoned lawyer would have steered you clear of, and will now need to devote billable hours to undoing.
Draft a quarterback. Along with details about the legal matter at hand, your lawyer is going to need information about a lot of ancillary aspects of your business, from insurance coverage to accounting procedures. That knowledge is likely to reside in the heads of multiple employees across various divisions. Don’t make the lawyers navigate your organization chart and track down everyone and everything they need on their own. Instead, designate a single point person inside your office who has both the know-how and the authority to serve as an effective liaison with outside counsel.
Recognize that you get what you pay for. When your company finds itself in need of specialized legal expertise, “don’t auction the matter off to the low-fee bidder,” Lipton cautions. It isn’t surprising that he’d say that—he is, after all, one of the country’s best-paid lawyers. But there’s no getting around the fact that the same cost-to-quality ratio that holds for all other goods and services applies to attorneys as well.
Don’t assume that your lawyers are trying to screw you. A corollary to the preceding rule, this one is proffered by Irell & Manella’s Morgan Chu, who urges companies to weigh the relative merits of haggling over every item on their legal bills. It’s not that good attorneys won’t be happy to look into any questionable charges. But if you don’t fundamentally trust your counsel, odds are that you won’t be able to establish the kind of healthy working relationship necessary for the firm to really flex its muscle, and you probably need to find different representation.
Be ready for anything. A smart client, says Skadden Arps’s Robert Bennett, “anticipates that at some point there will be a crisis that will require legal advice.” And when you put together a crisis-management plan, he adds, it’s important to consider hard-to-anticipate problems along with the more obvious calamities. For example, a pharmaceutical company should know how to respond not only if one of its drugs makes people sick, but also in the event that one of its top executives is charged with an impropriety. That kind of preparedness will allow your lawyers to hit the ground running during the first days after a problem arises, rather than squander some of that precious time groping around for direction and vital information.
