When learning the ropes of legal practice, business lawyers like Ephraim Michael and myself spent 1000's of hours as young lawyers preparing agreements for clients--often badly at first--but always expensively. Today, I am an experienced lawyer in the areas needed by my business clients and I don't add value for clients by demonstrating to them my skills in agreement composition. In fact, I feel that at a minimum, I am being wasteful if I give them a newly created document. Often when I am reviewing the work product and bills of other law firms, I wonder if the attorneys realized that they were stealing from the client, because that's what it looked like when you see $1000's in fees for drafting from scratch a standard commercial agreement that is widely available for free on the Internet.
There is a practical reason for seeking out the work product of others before I start work on an agreement for a client: better lawyers than me have provided a veritable smorgasbord of quality documents for use by my clients. Arguably, I would be doing my clients a disservice if I did not partake of this treasure trove for the benefit of those who have engaged me for my legal advice.
A few critical elements are necessary to enable me to streamline my client service model in this manner. I, as well as my Lean Legal co-founder Ephraim, have many years of experience within corporations and in law firms where we not only created, but also negotiated and even litigated agreements on behalf of multiple clients. This has given us context and knowledge that someone with less experience does not possess when they review documents prepared by and other clients for use in a present situation. Those without such depth may not recognize that just because an agreement uses impressive legal language and found itself online from a public filing of a Fortune 50 company that used expensive lawyers doesn't mean a document is well-drafted. Agreement drafting, and the attendant requirements to understand a client's business goals and competent negotiation with the other party, require an expertise that is not gained from collecting the results of a Google search.
In Lean Legal practice, the proverbial "devil is in the details." Ephraim and I can save you a whole bunch of legal expense by (legally) appropriating the work of others, but we still need to apply our deep and relevant skills to make sure you are getting the best agreement possible to meet your business needs. We believe it makes more sense to spend our time on value-added legal service than drafting new work product from scratch. Like the best craftsman throughout history, we effectively "glean" from others and make it better for our customers.
We can assure you that we can both write beautiful and effective legal prose. Previous clients paid dearly for our training when we were younger lawyers. If you want us to prove it, you can pay us to draft you an agreement from scratch. Our expectation, however, is that you would like to gather the benefits by obtaining a high quality legal agreement at a fraction of the cost your competitors are likely paying by working with the Lean Legal Team to make every minute count.
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