As a business grows, it will inevitably need legal assistance. Businesses often avoid seeking professional legal advice, treating it as an unnecessary added expense. This usually backfires: by failing to ensure that actions are grounded in good legal advice, businesses are setting themselves up for expensive and time-consuming legal troubles. By investing in proactive legal services and advice, your business can receive outside general counsel that can evaluate and instigate preventative measures that can be taken to reduce the possibility for your legal issues to become legal crises.
High Quality, Affordable Service
No legal issue is routine, but it is usually too expensive and time-consuming to find, contact, and hire an attorney to review each and every legal question or document that you come across. Even if this was the more financially viable option, any attorney who is not intimately familiar with your business and its goals will not be able to make decisions that accurately reflect your needs. Instead, using general counsel will allow a law firm to familiarize itself with your business and your needs, providing customized services at an affordable price.
Understanding
Outside counsel should be knowledgeable in every aspect of your business—not only on a surface level, but with an in-depth understanding of your operations, culture, and goals. Nothing in law is one-size-fits-all, and a comprehensive approach allows you to receive personalized advice suited to your business. In the event that there is some legal matter that your counsel is unable to deal with directly, your counsel should be able to assess when to bring in and work alongside other trusted advisors more well suited to your unique needs.
Efficiency
Having permanent in-house counsel can be unnecessarily expensive if you do not require full-time legal assistance for anywhere approaching forty hours per week, but searching for an attorney and explaining to them how your business operates each time a problem emerges can be just as expensive and unnecessarily time-consuming. It is much more affordable and convenient to have a law firm serve as outside general counsel. A firm that regularly provides counsel can get to know your business, giving legal assistance in all aspects of day-to-day operations.
Supplemental Counsel
Outside counsel can also benefit companies who do have full-time in-house counsel, by handling any overflow work that may arise when your in-house counsel is busy or otherwise unavailable. Additionally, an outside firm may provide supplemental support through a concentration in an area that your in-house counsel would need assistance with. In cases like this, it would be simpler and less expensive to hire outside counsel than to expand your in-house legal department.
Affordability
Though all of the above reasons are compelling, it is often true that the bottom line when choosing between two different options is just that—the bottom line. Hiring outside counsel is, in most cases, much more affordable than having an in-house legal department. It is also more affordable than not seeking any sort of legal assistance, even if this may not seem to be the case before problems have arisen. The financial risks of operating without good legal advice far outweigh the costs of acquiring it. By helping you to understand the hidden legal implications of your business practices, outside general counsel can reduce the chance that your business will face an unexpected, and unexpectedly expensive, legal crisis. Good outside counsel is an investment, not an expense.
How We Can Help
At Bailey Law Firm, we provide business counsel services to businesses of various sizes. We represent businesses in the reviewing and drafting of documents, compliance, negotiations, maintaining corporate records, and more. Please contact us with any questions by clicking here or by calling our office at 832.510.2900 to schedule a complimentary consultation.