What Does a Good Business Lawyer Do?
What does a good business lawyer or good commercial lawyer do?
Negotiating a business deal; formalising it in writing with a tight contract; determining business goals and strategising on how to best achieve them; resolving a dispute between people doing business; studying complex laws applying to business and simplifying them for business owners; identifying risk and protecting businesses from it. These are the things a good business lawyer does in a typical day.
To put it simply, a good business lawyer helps business people with the laws that apply to their business. It is the role of the business lawyer to guide and protect their clients, who are business owners or managers, so that they can get on with what they do best, run their business. It is often with the intimate involvement of a business lawyer in a business that the business owner will have the greatest chance to succeed.
The relationship between lawyers and business owners varies. Sometimes, a business owner will only see their lawyer when there is a problem in the business. Or sometimes only when an issue, such as the need to prepare a contract, becomes urgent. However, the best relationships are when the lawyer and the business owner work together to avoid problems occurring and deal with issues before they are ‘urgent’ and therefore rushed. This type of representation is referred to as ‘proactive’ or ‘preventative’.
Therefore, it is important that a good lawyer be viewed as part of the management team of the business. For this to occur, the business lawyer must do more than just understand the laws that apply to business. They must understand a great deal about their client and their client’s business and industry. It is also crucial that the client is comfortable talking to their commercial lawyer about everything concerning their business. There must be no barrier to communication.
The factors outlined above are more than ‘what is a business lawyer’. It relates to what is a ‘good’ business lawyer.
Let’s look at an example of the legal work I did for one business owner over a year. Let’s call this client ‘Secure Sally’. Secure Sally owns a public relations business. At the beginning of the year, when I began to act for Secure Sally, I went to her offices in New Farm to see her business operations first hand. This gave me a much greater insight into her business than if she had come to see me at my offices. She showed me around, explained the work that her company does and introduced me to her partners, staff and even a client who was there at the time. She made me a coffee and told me some great stories about how she had made it to where she is today and what her goals are for the future.
It has to be understood that most of the time business owners feel most comfortable in their own environment. Because of this, and because I was very interested in what she had to say, she told me more about her partners, her employees, customers, suppliers and competitors.
All this information helps me do my job properly. Secure Sally was a nice lady: very ambitious and hardworking. I was able to show her the value of a good business lawyer to her business. Doing things right the first time and taking precautions against unnecessary risk could cost her thousands of dollars in legal fees, but she could see that if all this effort saved her from one dispute this would probably more than make up for it.
So what did I do for Secure Sally over that year?
- I looked at her business structure with her accountant to make sure she did not pay more tax than she had to and to keep her assets safe in case someone should sue her;
- I prepared a partnership agreement between her and her partners;
- I advised her on a lucrative contract she won from a company and negotiated some changes she wanted;
- I advised her on the laws of employment and whether she could ‘sack’ an employee for continually coming in late to work;
- I prepared an employment agreement for her that was signed by her staff;
- I prepared a policy for her business that deals with issues concerning anti discrimination, harassment and bullying in her workplace;
- She needed to disclose confidential information to a consultant so I prepared a confidentiality agreement making sure the information is protected;
- I also prepared a consultancy agreement with her IT specialist setting out what he must do and how much she was going to pay him;
- She had a customer that didn’t pay their bill. I chased it for her until it was paid;
- She was accused of misleading and deceptive conduct under the Trade Practices Act (now the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) and its Australian Consumer Law). She had made an incorrect statement in an ad for one of her customers about their competitor. I defended her.
These are some examples of the types of things a good business lawyer does and ways in which I regularly help my clients.
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Joe Kafrouni, Accredited Specialist in Business Law, Kafrouni Law
Disclaimer: This article is general information only and is not legal advice. Before acting on it, get advice on your own circumstances. To the extent the law allows, Kafrouni Law accepts no liability for any loss arising from reliance on it. This article is the copyright of Kafrouni Law.
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