Before You Need One

The best time to find a lawyer is when you don’t need one. Here’s why that’s harder than it sounds — and what it looks like when you get it right.

The SEO Argument

Early in my career, I worked at a small firm where the founding partners were strong believers in search engine optimization. They wanted the firm to be findable — to show up when someone in Atlanta typed “business attorney” into Google and hit search.

I understood the logic. I didn’t share the enthusiasm.

My instinct, even then, was the opposite. I didn’t want to be found by someone who had to Google for a lawyer. Because if someone is searching for a business attorney online, it usually means they don’t already know one. And if they don’t know one, they probably don’t know a CPA who could refer them, or a banker, or a fellow business owner who has been around long enough to have a relationship they can vouch for.

That tells you something about where they are in building their professional network. And it usually also tells you something about timing — that something has gone wrong, and they are looking for help right now.

That last part is the problem.

The First Call

When someone finds a lawyer for the first time in the middle of a crisis, almost everything about the interaction starts badly.

The client is in some version of fight-or-flight. They’re talking fast, leaving things out, trying to minimize time on the phone in case the clock is running. The lawyer, meanwhile, is drinking from a firehose — no context, no history, no sense of what this business actually does or what normal looks like for it. The lawyer also has a subtle incentive not to say “I’m not the right person for this” — because if the client called them, the assumption is they must be the right person.

Nobody knows whether the introductory call is billable. The client doesn’t ask. The lawyer doesn’t say. Both of them are performing a version of the conversation rather than actually having it.

And underneath all of it, the hourly rate is sitting there — driving a wedge between the client’s instinct to share information and their anxiety about what sharing costs.

This is not a good way to solve a problem. It is, unfortunately, how a lot of problems get approached.

The Care and Feeding of Lawyers

There is a separate issue that rarely gets discussed, which is that working effectively with a lawyer is a skill — and not everyone starts with it.

Most people’s experience with lawyers before they need one for their business is limited to what they’ve seen on television. Which means their mental model is a combination of courtroom drama, last-minute revelations, and attorneys who work through the night to produce miracles by morning. Real life isn’t Suits.

A business owner who has never worked closely with a lawyer often doesn’t know what’s reasonable to expect. They don’t know what’s worth a call and what isn’t. They don’t know how to describe a problem in terms a lawyer can work with. They don’t know why the bill is what it is. And so the lawyer ends up spending a meaningful portion of the relationship managing expectations that should never have existed in the first place.

That’s a drain on both sides. And it’s almost entirely avoidable — but only if the relationship starts before the crisis does.

Muscle Memory

The clients I work with most effectively are the ones I’ve worked with for years. Not because they’re smarter or more sophisticated than new clients — but because we’ve built something together over time that makes every conversation more efficient and every problem easier to solve.

We’ve talked through dozens of issues that weren’t crises. We’ve negotiated contracts together, thought through hiring decisions, worked on deals that came together and a few that didn’t. I know how they think. They know how I work. We’ve established a cadence, a communication style, a set of ground rules that nobody had to articulate because we arrived at them naturally.

So when the real call comes — the one that starts with “I have a situation” — we’ve already practiced for it. Not that specific call, but calls like it, across different topics and different stakes, over time. The muscle memory is there. We can skip the orientation and get directly to the problem.

But there’s a second layer to this that most clients never see coming.

Not every problem is best solved by the lawyer who knows you best. Sometimes the situation calls for a subject matter expert — a specialist in an area I don’t handle day-to-day. When that happens, bringing in the right person is straightforward. What’s not straightforward is the two hours that specialist would otherwise spend getting up to speed on a business they’ve never encountered.

Because I already know the business, I can compress that orientation dramatically. What might take two hours of introductory calls — the history, the structure, the key relationships, the context that makes the current problem make sense — I can distill into fifteen minutes. The specialist gets to the answer faster. The client pays for expertise, not backstory.

That value is real. It’s also almost impossible to measure, which is why it’s almost never mentioned. But clients who have experienced it — who have watched a problem get solved in an afternoon that might otherwise have taken weeks of ramp-up — tend not to forget it.

Fit Is Not a Consolation Prize

There is a tendency in the legal industry to treat skill as the only variable that matters in selecting a lawyer. Find the most qualified person, the argument goes, and the rest will take care of itself.

I’d push back on that.

Take two lawyers with identical credentials — same schools, same years of experience, same areas of practice, equally sharp. Put them both in front of the same client. The lawyer whose personality and approach mesh naturally with that client is the better lawyer for that client. Not in the abstract. In practice, where it matters.

Law schools spend three years teaching future lawyers what kind of law to practice. They spend almost no time on what kind of client to serve, or on what a genuine working relationship between a lawyer and a client actually looks like. The implicit assumption is that clients and situations are interchangeable — that a good lawyer is a good lawyer for everyone.

They’re not. Communication style matters. Temperament matters. Whether the client feels heard, whether the lawyer asks the right questions, whether the advice lands in a way the client can actually act on — all of that is a function of fit, and none of it shows up on a resume.

The only way to find out if the fit is right is to have real conversations before the stakes are high. Which is, again, an argument for starting the relationship before you need one.

Choosing on Your Terms

When you find a lawyer before you need one, you get to choose.

You can take your time. You can ask for referrals from people whose judgment you trust. You can have a conversation with no agenda, no clock, no crisis driving the discussion. You can evaluate fit alongside skill — which you cannot do when you’re in triage mode and need someone on the phone today.

The best professional relationships — with lawyers, CPAs, bankers — are built during the quiet periods. That’s when you have the luxury of paying attention to how someone thinks, how they communicate, whether they actually get what you’re trying to build.

By the time the loud period arrives, it should already be handled.

If you’re building something and don’t have a lawyer you’d call first — that’s worth fixing before you need to fix it. I’m always happy to have that conversation. No meter running.