What are the top things to look for in a law firm?
An attorney is like a doctor for your business, so it's important to pick one you can trust. Unfortunately, the legal industry is a maze of specialties and jargon, and it can be hard to navigate unless you already have a law degree. The following considerations are a good place to start.
What are your needs?
Just as you don't go to only one doctor for all your medical needs, you should have multiple law firms in your rolodex. Where medicine has family doctors, allergists, surgeons, registered nurses and full-service hospitals, the legal industry can be broken down into areas such as real estate, venture capital, finance, intellectual property, class action lawsuits, family law, and many different kinds of regulatory compliance. To get the best care, you should shop around, but this can be a frustrating process.
Clarity steps in as your virtual in-house legal department to provide personalized service on a day-to-day basis. Just like a thoughtful family doctor, Clarity attorneys consider client needs carefully and take care of the most common needs in-house. For everything else, we navigate the thicket of providers on your behalf in order to provide coordinated, timely care.
What are the trade-offs between cost, quality and specialization?
Cost is often the first thing that people think about when choosing a law firm. Considering that some partners at large firms bill over $1000 per hour, this is a legitimate concern. In the legal community, as in the medical community, cost is determined by two things: quality and specialization. It's important to consider what you are paying for and why.
If you have a billion-dollar international merger, for example, a full-service law firm can do everything under one roof, from international tax law to antitrust filings with the U.S. Department of Justice. Large law firms are staffed with a broad spectrum of specialized departments. These firms are the legal equivalent of large hospitals packed with surgeons, anesthesiologists, radiologists and an army of support staff.
Because the size and expertise of large firms can come at a high cost, many companies control their costs by segmenting their legal needs. At Clarity, we never compromise on quality, but we are able to keep our costs reasonable because we are generalists rather than specialists. Where it makes sense for us to perform a task, we do it. Where it makes sense to outsource, we supervise more specialized law firms in order to ensure that our clients get responsive and efficient care for all of their legal needs.
Are you currently under-lawyered or over-lawyered?
Law is a spectrum of service. If your business is spending a large proportion of your budget on legal services, you could be paying for unnecessary services or inefficiencies, which is an inherent danger of paying by the hour. On the other hand, if you are not spending very much on legal services, you could be exposing your business to dangers that you are not even aware of. History is full of people and businesses who lost tragic amounts of money due to inadequate legal protections. We recommend examining your legal spending carefully every year to determine whether you are investing appropriately according to your company's current needs and future prospects.
Who actually answers your calls?
Within any law firm, it matters very much which individual attorneys actually handle your case. Do you hire a senior partner but find yourself speaking with junior associates? Do you feel like your attorneys take the time to get to know your business?
At Clarity, we aim for stability and long-term relationships. We have structured our flat-fee subscriptions so that clients do not pay every time a lawyer picks up the phone. Speaking with our clients is the best part of our job.
To give each client the level of attention that they deserve, we have done away with the traditional law firm pyramid and staffed our firm almost entirely with mid-career attorneys. Mid-career attorneys have several years of experience and are capable of working independently. Chances are, if your company is thinking about hiring an in-house attorney, you are looking at the résumés of mid-career attorneys. At Clarity, we agree that these attorneys provide an unbeatable combination of quality and value, so we never hire straight from law schools.
Since law firms are so expensive, should you create or expand your in-house legal department?
Possibly. Adding attorneys to your payroll is an attractive option due to the well-defined costs and institutional loyalty of staff attorneys.
However, in addition to actual salary and bonus, direct employment relationships have the added costs of recruitment and relocation fees, training expenses, taxes, insurance benefits and potential severance costs.
A bigger question is the difficulty of predicting your legal needs. If you hire an attorney to manage your software licensing agreements, will he or she also be able to provide human resources support and manage the company's next big financing? Do you have to hire three attorneys to cover all your bases?
At Clarity, we have worked hard to put together a spectrum of legal capabilities so that our clients can easily outsource their in-house needs to us. By using Clarity as a virtual legal department, our clients access a broad-based portfolio of legal skills without ever paying for recruiting or training costs. If your business only has enough legal work to justify one part-time staff attorney, Clarity offers primary legal care at both hourly and flat-fee subscriptions. If your business already has a small legal department, and you would like to augment its range and capacity, our VIP Program could be a great way to capture the flexibility of outsourcing while maintaining the cost certainty of an employment relationship.