Six lawyer lessons

I once spent two weeks living inside an armoured vehicle with a guy who was destined to be a lifelong friend, despite (much to my disgust) he later became a lawyer. The week we spent together was in 1990, and since then we catch up roughly twice a year for lunch and a discussion that generally has the theme of the “whole universe is stupid except for us”. You know the conversation…

Anyway, one of our lunch discussions could have been titled “Why don’t we teach people at business school about the law in real life?” Now most academics would of course say that we do. I myself have suffered through hours of Contract, Law, Business Law and Company Law. But that isn’t what I mean.

Ian, my armoured vehicle friend, and now Barrister, pointed out to me that about only 1% of legal disputes actually end up in court.

Therefore the other 99% are getting resolved by effective negotiating. And unfortunately, negotiating with law firms doesn’t get taught in any MBA course in Australia.

So here’s six pointers I have learnt along the way:

1. Don’t get scared by nasty letters. In fact, most of the time you can safely ignore them and the deadlines they contain, especially if they are arbitrary – eg. “you have seven days to respond”.

2. Conversely, don’t send scary letters to people. They are mostly a waste of time. I prefer to sue as fast and as hard as I can. It was once said to me “never threaten, just punch the opposition as hard in the back of the head as you can”.

3. Never offer any additional information to a lawyer you are not paying for. It just creates more opportunities to get yourself in trouble. I like “yes”, “no” and “maybe” as answers.

4. Never assume that a lawyer has commonsense. Lawyers have great knowledge of the law and see plenty of deals going bad, but their experience is vicarious, not first hand.

5. If the other guy is the instigator of the action, make sure meetings are at a location of your choosing. You want the other guy to be paying $300 an hour plus for his lawyer to travel about. Funny how this can add up.

6. If you tell a law firm “sorry I didn’t read you letter, but we don’t have a commercial relationship so I assumed it was marketing cr*p from your firm” – it generally makes lawyers angry. Guess how I know this?

Strange isn’t it. We don’t actually teach in business school the skills that are used most of the time.

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Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club, Flinders Pacific and L2i Technology Advisory. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia and Vietnam. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.