As Our Clients See Us

In his promising new blog, Brian Ivanovick , gives some advice to small business people on dealing with their lawyers.  I found his advice on billable time the most interesting:

Lawyers make their living by tracking something called billable hours. That means every interaction with the client is billed. If you just want an opinion about some non-legal facet of your deal - seek out the advice of friends and colleagues first. Your network should be able to give you some guidance when it comes to how to solve non-legal issues. As mentioned above, a mentor is another perfect place to turn. Treat your lawyer as a specialist - not as a sounding board. Remember that you’ll pay for literally every minute of their time.

When you’ve decided to enter a contract with another party, I would suggest that you come up with a detailed agreement in principle before you get the lawyers involved. Then employ your lawyer to codify your intentions in legal speak. A lawyer is absolutely necessary - but only involve them when you and the other party understand exactly what you want to accomplish.

Pretty sad that our predominant business model discourages our clients from talking to us, isn’t it?  (BTW, I had some problems with the direct link to the post.  It is broken, go to the blog and scroll down for the Lawyers and Contracts post.)

Comments

[Cori]

Matt,

I use something called XPunch Enterprise. If you're interested you can find out more at http://xpunch.com

If you're internet-entabled, it will let you keep track of billable hours on your PDA or Windows-enabled cellphone. If you're chained to your desk, this product works right in your browser. It has features for tracking time and billable hours. It will even track what tasks you were doing and when.

It also has a ton of other features, but I won't go into those since you didn't mention you were looking for them (employee scheduling, time tracking, etc.).

If you're looking for basic time tracking, the product is FREE (XPunch Personal). If you're looking for something a little more advanced, you can subscribe to the XPunch Enterprise version for a small fee (that's the version that I use). Their customer service is amazing--I sent them an email and they had a response back to me in under an hour. I'd highly recommend them.

I suppose what I like most about the product is that there is no syncronization--because they house the data, I can get my hours from any computer or PDA.

[M. Sean Fosmire]

The key, of course, is to make yourself available to clients for conversation and ideas, and creative input, at little or no charge. Then the client will be more likely to come to you when legal workmanship is needed.