2. For Lawyers: Why Do Clients Need You?

10/03/22 • 26 min

SeedJura: Decoding Law

In this episode directed primarily to lawyers, Phyllis discusses how to ensure your clients know why they need you.

Problems with today’s legal industry that causes clients to not understand why they need lawyers:

"They should know our value” mentality
Nobody actually knows what lawyers do
Lawyers = messy and expensive (everything becomes more complicated)

Solutions:

Know their business/background
Understand what others in their business (with similar background) do and need in legal process
Don’t be reactive (don’t just ask –what can we do for you?)
Help them evaluate at what point they actually need lawyers (use: GMCD method - listen to EP01. For Clients: Why Do I Need Lawyers?)
Give them clear steps based on their current business path and show them their legal needs from this point forward → have an honest discussion with them of when they actually need lawyers throughout those steps (investment)

Please subscribe to SeedJura: Decoding Law on your favorite podcast player!

Visit SeedJuraGroup.com

SeedJura on LinkedIn (company/seedjura/)

In this episode directed primarily to lawyers, Phyllis discusses how to ensure your clients know why they need you.

Problems with today’s legal industry that causes clients to not understand why they need lawyers:

"They should know our value” mentality
Nobody actually knows what lawyers do
Lawyers = messy and expensive (everything becomes more complicated)

Solutions:

Know their business/background
Understand what others in their business (with similar background) do and need in legal process
Don’t be reactive (don’t just ask –what can we do for you?)
Help them evaluate at what point they actually need lawyers (use: GMCD method - listen to EP01. For Clients: Why Do I Need Lawyers?)
Give them clear steps based on their current business path and show them their legal needs from this point forward → have an honest discussion with them of when they actually need lawyers throughout those steps (investment)

Please subscribe to SeedJura: Decoding Law on your favorite podcast player!

Visit SeedJuraGroup.com

SeedJura on LinkedIn (company/seedjura/)

Previous Episode

1. For Clients: Why Do I Need Lawyers?

An introduction to SeedJura and hosts Geneve DuBois & Phyllis Shuster, plus a discussion of why (and when) businesses need lawyers.

After hosts Geneve & Phyllis briefly introduce themselves and introduce their company SeedJura, Geneve dives into the topic of why and in what circumstances your business needs a lawyer, using a 4-point “checklist” to determine whether the situation would benefit from legal counsel.

The 4-point checklist is abbreviated as “GMCD” – to help you remember this abbreviation, you can think of Driving a GMC truck to your destination (where your destination is legal protection)!

GMCD:

Giant – when you need a Giant in the marketplace to represent you (=credibility & not being bullied)
- Small companies facing lenders/venture capital companies (who is the other side?)
- Foreign companies
- Advocacy + Knowledge
Money/Lives – when you are dealing with other people’s $$ and/or Lives (= high risk situations)
- Highly regulated industries
Challenge – when what you do can be challenged (or is being challenged) by officials/governments/other entities (= formal legal procedures concerning taxes/estate tax/ litigation/ investigation/ownership)
- - Situations in which not getting procedures and formalities done correctly will have serious legal impacts or invalidity
Domino Effects – an action will have domino effects on your business (= need overall planning and strategies
- e.g. Corporate and tax structures
- Buying property (think about sale in the future – e.g. you maybe OK with some issues when you buy, but would the future buyer be OK?)

Please subscribe to SeedJura: Decoding Law on your favorite podcast player!

Visit SeedJuraGroup.com

SeedJura on LinkedIn (company/seedjura/)

Next Episode

3. For Clients: Why Are Lawyers So Expensive?

In this episode directed primarily to clients of lawyers, Geneve helps to explain why lawyers and legal services always seem so expensive.

(A note from Geneve & Phyllis: we are not trying to justify that lawyers should be expensive, but this area is the biggest gap between lawyers and clients, so we need to look at this from both sides' perspectives.)

In this episode, Geneve & Phyllis first discuss common perceptions about lawyers and legal fees:

They charge you for everything, even a phone call
They charge everything based on hourly rate
Hourly rate is all over the place – some lawyers are $300 per hour and some are $1,200 per hour
They spend so many hours on everything (and how would clients know how many hours a lawyer should spend on a specific task?)
Bottom-line: the perception is that lawyers are expensive (and that the charges ≠ value)!

Geneve explains how this perception is an industry problem:

What lawyers do is often invisible and not easy to understand
Lawyers are not salespeople – they're usually not good at explaining their value in exchange for what they charge
Law firm structure – based on billable hours and have many ethical boundaries (this means little flexibility)

Next, Phyllis explains the different ways lawyers can charge you (there's more than one!) and how you can explore different options that fit your business model and that are within your lawyer's’ law firm and ethical parameters:

Flat fee
Hourly rate by hours worked (most common)
Cap fee
Contingency fee

Finally, Geneve and Phyllis discuss the value that lawyers do actually bring their clients, specifically, the 6 Layers of value that lawyers can bring their clients.

The 6 Layers of Value: