A simple thing entrepreneurs can sometimes do to help reduce legal costs is locate “precedents” their lawyer can use when drafting a document. This is particularly important if the work is being done at the lawyer’s hourly billing rate, instead of for a fixed fee.
Precedents are documents similar in substance to the document the lawyer is being asked to draft that the lawyer can modify to fit his client’s needs. If the lawyer has good precedents to work from, he doesn’t need to spend time crafting original language when Copy + Paste will suffice. The best precedents are those closest in substance to the document being drafted. Even if the lawyer has some general precedents in his own files, the entrepreneur can often provide precedents that are more specific to the company’s line of business and, therefore, more helpful.
A common situation where it is easy for entrepreneurs to find precedents is in preparing privacy policies and terms of use for a website. If your company’s website needs a privacy policy or terms of use, you can help your lawyer out by locating precedents from the websites of your competitors and other companies with a similar business model or similar product features. Send a few of these to your lawyer and, if you want to save a bit more lawyer time, tell your lawyer what you like or dislike about the precedents you located and how you see your business as different from the other companies. Your lawyer can use the examples you found as a basis for drafting your terms of use and privacy policy, or at least he can use pieces of your precedents and work them into his own form. Either way, you’ve reduced the time the lawyer needs to spend drafting, which saves you money.