Legal advice is expensive but vital to business growth. The rise of legal expenses and the rise of a complex regulatory environment can squeeze a company’s overhead costs. However, there are ways to obtain the timely legal advice needed to legally operate your business without hurting the bottom line. The following are three easy ways to find cost-effective legal advice for your business.
Law Firm Blogs
A little-known fact is that expensive, high-quality law firms regularly share legal information and updates on their websites and blogs for free. If you have a legal question but can’t afford to ask a licensed attorney directly, check to see if a law firm has published an answer on its blog already. While their blog and website posts are not legal advice, they often share enough information for you to get what you need to understand what you need to do to be compliant. Unless your business is genuinely disruptive, you may have a few legal questions that an attorney has not already answered for their clients a hundred times over. You’ll often need to pick up the phone and chat through your legal question or issue with an attorney, but it is much cheaper first to check whether your legal question can be answered for free.
Government Agency FAQs
Another source of anxiety for business owners is complying with government regulations coming from government agencies. Another little-known resource is the actual government agency’s website. Most government agencies produce memorandums explaining what actions they consider to violate the regulations. All for free. Most of the time, if you ask an attorney, they will visit that government website to find the answer you could have, had you thought about it.
Further, many government agencies allow their constituents to submit questions about compliance to be answered. Here, you get a free direct answer from the agency about your compliance question. Going directly to the source saves money by reading the website yourself instead of paying an attorney to do it.
Come Prepared
Lastly, the most underutilized way to save money on legal fees is to come prepared when you have hired legal counsel. Often this looks like having your documents organized and labeled when you share them with your attorney. The less time counsel spends going through your document dump, the less time they bill you for it, so make it easy. Being organized when presenting evidence or documents to your counsel can save you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.
Another way to save funds while discussing legal matters with your attorney is to ask questions that will produce an answer you can use in the future. By that, I mean ask for contract templates, not just a contract you need now. If you repeatedly need a sales agreement for the same product, receiving a deal-specific contract will only ensure you’ll need to hire an attorney for essentially the same services in the future.
Further, you can ask them for guidelines, factors that matter, and broader questions you can save for your internal team to use as a guide. That way, your one discussion with counsel can be disseminated to your team, empowering them to answer their questions without contacting an attorney again. Think ahead and come prepared.
Conclusion
Legal advice can be costly, especially for smaller businesses and startups. Avoiding legal advice can also be expensive by way of litigation and regulatory fines. However, using the above few tips can help you need hourly counsel less and have you hire counsel from a more informed and organized position that increases the value of your discussions. These little cost savings add up. Your business will pay less for time billed by the attorney and spend more time growing your business.
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