It has been our experience that some clients seem to believe that the best way to get the most out of their lawyers is to only call them when it is absolutely necessary, and then pressure them to get the requested work done as quickly as possible. In fact, in the long run you will almost certainly save more money on legal fees by keeping your lawyer well informed of what is happening with your business so that potential legal issues can be identified and addressed early.
The first reason keeping your lawyer informed is cost-effective is that it is always cheaper to do things right the first time, rather than pay to fix mistakes later. Of course, no client deliberately puts off resolving a potentially costly legal problem, but often the magnitude of a problem, or even its existence, is not obvious even to an experienced business person. By keeping your lawyer apprised of what your business is planning, you give him a chance to spot potential legal issues before they become problems.
The second reason keeping your lawyer informed is cost-effective is that by doing so you can leverage the wealth of experience of the firm’s attorneys. By making your lawyer aware of a potential legal issue before it becomes a crisis, your lawyer has time to see whether someone else has previously faced and solved a problem similar to yours. This process can take time because busy colleagues may take a while to respond to a query, but this isn’t time that gets billed to the client so if the query turns up empty you haven’t spent a dime. If, on the other hand, someone has the answer to your problem, you get that answer for a fraction of what it would have cost for your lawyer to research the questions. By contrast, if you wait to raise an issue until the last minute, there may not be time to see if the answer to your question is available in the firm’s collective consciousness, so your lawyer may be forced to re-invent the wheel.
If you’re worried that the cost of spending just five minutes each week updating your lawyer will outweigh the potential savings, keep in mind that when a problem does arise you will need to bring your lawyer up-to-speed on precipitating events, but if your lawyer is already well informed about what has been happening with your business this will take less time. Second, if you call your lawyer once a week to give him a five minute update on what’s happening at your company and what might be on the horizon, there’s a decent chance you won’t get billed for some of those calls. If, however, you call your lawyer only when you have a problem and spend 20 minutes giving him the background he needs to get up to speed, you can bet you’ll be billed for every minute.