How to Find an Attorney
Looking for legal counsel? Look here first for some strategies and tips that will help you make the right choice.
BY KEVIN FEATHERLY
The business of the business executive is business. Not law. Manufacturers are expert in such concepts as centerless buffing and grinding, and they know better than anyone how to run a long steel bar through an eight-spindle auto screw. But ask a business’ upper executives how to license another company’s patent, or whether they can get a stereolithography prototyping machine tax-exempt, and they probably would be perplexed.
Particularly for small companies and startups, legal questions are quite vexing. Say your company needs to acquire some real estate, or that it’s time to update employee noncompete contracts or intellectual property provisos. Perhaps your company has run up against environmental regulations, or has—heaven forbid—been sued. In each of those cases, and too many others to mention, you will need legal help.
Ann Ladd, an attorney at Fredrikson & Byron in Minneapolis who specializes in intellectual property transfers, says she sees many company executives so focused on business issues that they neglect their legal needs. “People will say to me ‘That’s just a legal issue, we’ll let the lawyers solve it,’” she says. “And I’ll say, ‘There are no legal issues—there are just business problems.’”
Therefore, just as you need to hire just the right marketing manager, you need to find the right lawyer. That presents a problem. If your company CEO doesn’t understand law well enough to get the word “oyez” right on a crossword puzzle, how can he or she hope to find the attorney best suited to resolve your legal issues when they arise?
It can be done. Here are a few ideas how.
Compile the list
It may seem all too obvious, but there really is no better way to start the search for a lawyer than to ask around, says Ladd. Say your company is in the position of having to litigate a breach of contract. What would be a better step than reaching out to a friendly competitor that has gone through the same thing and finding out who handled their case?
“Word of mouth is really important,” Ladd says, “because otherwise it’s really hard to tell that an attorney has the right knowledge and skill set for you.’”
Lloyd Kepple, a partner and chair of the commercial real estate and finance group at Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly LLP in Minneapolis, agrees. “The best recommendation is from somebody who has actually worked with that [attorney],” he says.
Some attorneys actually assist in this process. As part of their marketing efforts, these lawyers furnish lists of representative clients that they refer potential new clients to, facilitating background checks. You may find those prior clients don’t want to talk to you—there is such a thing as attorney-client privilege—but this is an option worth exploring.
Still, while word of mouth may be the most efficient route, it has its limits. You might want more candidates than a few colleagues can supply. A lawyer active in your trade association is a naturally a good one to check out, and there is always the Yellow Pages. Even better is the Web, which largely has supplanted the phone book as a resource.
Go to — where else? — the Web
A comprehensive list of valuable Web resources would fill much more space than is available here. Here is a short list:
- The Minnesota State Bar Association maintains an online Lawyer Referral System (www.mnfindalawyer.com). Lawyers who participate in the system agree to give an initial 30-minute consultation free of charge. The state bar also maintains a business law page (www2.mnbar.org/sections/business-law/index.htm) and a directory of its members’ phone numbers (http://smtp.statebar.gen.mn.us/search/search.asp).
- The American Bar Association (ABA) maintains a similar site (www.abanet.org/lawyerlocator/searchlawyer.html).
- Commercial online referral services also exist. Among the best is FindLaw (www.findlaw.com), which includes searches for attorneys indexed by city and state, and by legal discipline. The site details law firms’ background, areas of practice, works published by staff attorneys, and other matters.
- The Minnesota Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board maintains a searchable database (www.courts.state.mn.us/lprb/index.asp) of disciplinary actions taken against lawyers. For a fee, you can request to search the ABA’s National Lawyer Regulatory Data Bank to find out if disciplinary actions have been taken against out-of-state lawyers. Go to www.abanet.org/premartindale. html.
- Lexis-Nexis Martindale-Hubble (www.martindale.com) maintains a database of lawyer peer reviews that includes the vaunted “AV Ratings,” which indicate whether an attorney has reached “the height of professional excellence.” Arguably even more rigorous in its vetting process is the locally based Super Lawyers magazine franchise, which uses a 12-point grading system to bestow “Super Lawyer” status on attorneys rated by their peers as ranking among the top 5 percent of lawyers in their jurisdictions. Super Lawyers covers in 31 states and regions nationwide.
There is one more thing do to before you boot down the computer. Go to the law firms’ Web sites. “Law firms are really getting with it,” says Super Lawyers publisher Bill White, “and they’re saying, ‘OK, we’re going to put first-rate biographies of our lawyers [online] that are really complete and not puffery.’”
Get down to business
Now you’ve got your candidates. It’s time to conduct interviews. Job one is to keep in mind who is in charge of the discussion. “I think most people go in and they sit and listen to the lawyer,” White says. “The lawyer takes charge, and they can sound pretty good. It’s not that difficult to sound good."
Kepple recommends approaching the lawyer search the way you might seek out a physician for a knee surgery. “The discriminating buyer of legal talent will want to ask questions,” he says. How much experience does the attorney have in your field? What percentage of the attorney’s time is devoted to your area of practice? If yours is an intellectual property concern, what is the attorney’s technical background? Has the attorney published in any law journals? Do he or she have state certification as a trial specialist, real estate specialist, or in some other relevant discipline? Is the attorney a continuing legal education (CLE) instructor?
White thinks this last question is important, because an affirmative answer means you’ve got a top-quality attorney in the room with you. “[CLE] is mandatory for lawyers,” he says, “and for the people who are teaching other lawyers about their area of practice, that is a real feather in their cap.”
Virtually everyone approached agrees that the questions an attorney asks are just as important as those answered. “If a lawyer doesn’t come in and ask you a lot of questions, they aren’t likely to do as good a job for you,” Kepple says.
After all, he adds, if the issue you one day face is, for example, a real estate acquisition, the attorney’s ability to ask questions and absorb answers will determine whether your company conducts the most thorough property search or negotiates the most favorable lease.
The characteristics that you’re looking in an attorney for will, of course, be dictated by your needs. Kevin M. Kramer, an associate at Gibbons PC, in Newark, N.J., thinks medium and small-sized manufacturers and tech companies might do best by zeroing in on a medium-sized law firm, rather than going super-size. A mid-sized practice will have at least a small battery of lawyers that can be drawn on if your own attorney needs help. Yet the firm won’t charge premium legal fees.
White takes a different tack. His own publishing house works with a lawyer from a big local firm, Faegre and Benson LLP, and it has gotten great service, he says. A more important consideration than the firm is the skill set of your particular attorney. “You’re not hiring law firms,” he says, “you’re basically hiring a lawyer. And does that lawyer have support for the things he or she does is the relevant question.”
Perhaps the most important question to ask yourself after the interview is one that Ladd says too often gets short shrift: Do I really like this person? “I personally think it’s wrongheaded when people say, ‘I want to hire the junkyard bulldog, I want my lawyer to be able to beat up on other people,’” he notes. “There certainly may be situations where that is what you want. But it would be a bad mindset to say you want to hire someone with that mindset all the time.”
An attorney’s likeability represents more than just pleasant chats and jokes in your conference room, White says. “You want somebody who can get along with other people,” he says. “I mean a lot of times you’re going to have to deal with opposing counsel.”
While there will always be legal posturing between lawyers squaring off over legal matters, but in the end, you will probably want an attorney who isn’t likely to go nuclear. “Quite often,” White says, “you’re going to end up negotiating things out. Hopefully you’re not going to go to war.”