Philosophy

General

Legal services are both like and very different from other services.  They are similar in that they should meet a real need and be cost effective.  They are different in the depth of the duties owed to you by your lawyer, duties of loyalty, trust and professional ability.  Your lawyer should have the requisite subject area knowledge, experience and maturity of judgment to handle your work effectively, know when to send you elsewhere, tell you the truth even if its not popular and know when the cost/value equation is getting out of balance.  We need to develop a relationship of personal trust in order for the lawyer/client relationship to work as it should.  Most of my clients are long-term clients, not clients for a single transaction or project.  This does not preclude my representation for specific project or transaction related work, which I enjoy enormously, but the most beneficial lawyer/client relationships are ongoing and invite the lawyer to be a strategic contributor to the client’s business by understanding it fully and participating meaningfully.

Ethics

There are some things in life which are non-negotiable.  Integrity is the foundation.  I’ll tell you what I believe is the truth, even if it means it is the last thing you have me tell you.  Sometimes the client IS the problem; I’ll let you know.

Lawyers are bound to well defined ethical and professional obligations to vigorously and effectively represent their clients and to be loyal to their clients interests.  These professional obligations are found in a variety of places, but the most concentrated are the California Rules of Professional Conduct.  If you have interest in the other places where laws exist which govern the lawyer – client relationship, please call or email me. I would welcome any of your questions concerning how these obligations apply in our relationship.

Referrals

Sometimes the best representation a lawyer provides is to diagnose the real need of his client and refer the client to another lawyer or other professional who can best meet the client’s need.  With over 25 years of broad general corporate and business law practice, much of it as a consumer of legal services, I have relationships with highly skilled lawyers and other professionals across the United States and in many other countries to whom I refer clients.

Preventive Law

Old wisdom is often still wise advice.  Ben Franklin said “A stitch in time saves nine.”  Still a good idea in the legal business. Even more ancient advice is even more to the point: “ The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.” Proverbs 27:12. Often for want of simple corrective action taken before a problem erupts, or at least when the first signs of trouble are observed, much progress is lost and the problem triggers a  huge and disproportionately expensive effort to put things back together again, IF they can be put back together.  A major emphasis of my career has been on the identification and prevention of problems before they occurred, and the cure of problems not dealt with early enough.  A close analogy is a safety program for a manufacturer. If you keep your workplace safe it reduces the risk of injury and death to your employees, a huge benefit for those spared personal catastrophe, an economic benefit to your business because of lower workers compensation premiums, less lost time, higher efficiency and better morale.  But it requires investing time and money initially to get these benefits. Preventive law work is the same, but even less tangible and therefore harder to justify.  It's difficult to count the times you don’t get sued because you are in compliance with the law, or don’t breach the covenants of your loan agreement or other contract. 

Preventive lawyering is easy to explain because it’s logical, but it’s hard to quantify the benefits and its even harder to make the decision to pay the price in time and dollars to do it. 

I’ve developed a preventive law review designed to examine the areas where businesses most often fail to comply with the law or sound practices for managing legal risks.  It is much like a financial audit review, it takes stock of your current situation as well as the processes by which you handle legal matters.  More information on the review is on this web site.

Perfectionism

One of the driving forces in the legal business is the quest for absolutely accurate and certain advice, the perfect deal, the ultimate agreement which protects against any and all contingencies.  Having practiced law in-house for most of my professional life, and managing a multi-million dollar annual budget for hiring lawyers, I believe in the principle that “good enough” is in fact good enough.  Let me explain, it is generally accepted wisdom that for each incremental degree of quality in a manufactured product the cost increases.  As the quality increases nearer to perfect, the cost for each incremental improvement rises at a steeper rate.  Practicing law is the same.  Many situations do not require the degree of certainty or “perfection” which they are ascribed.  If the legal issue is one where 80% certainty is enough to make a reasonable decision, then 80% certainty is what you should get; if the legal issue is a "bet the company" issue, a higher level of certainty is mandatory.  Let me explain it with another example.  If you want to enter into a certain transaction and your lawyer tells you he is 80% certain it is illegal for you to sell weapons to a terrorist nation, that is probably sufficient advice to not do the deal.  If you are about to pay $50 million to buy an exclusive license for  a patented process, you should want more than an 80% certainty that the patent is valid and enforceable.

“It’s the principle of the thing!”

If you are the one hearing or uttering these words, be careful; most of the time when I hear them the issue is really money or power.