In today's video, I talk about the types of consulting projects where consultants should hire a lawyer.

IMPORTANT: The content on this video is provided for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice of any kind.

TRANSCRIPT:

As a consultant, do you need to have a lawyer review all of your agreements and proposals?

Hey, it's Michael Zipursky from ConsultingSuccess.com and this is a question I received recently from a consultant in the community. I'll share my response with you but I just wanna say, to be very clear, that this is not legal advice. I'm not a lawyer. I'm only sharing my own experience and the experience that I have and the observations that I have of working with hundreds of consulting clients personally and in training thousands of others over the years. So again, this is not legal advice but this is how we handle it and what we see in terms of being a best practice.

So number one, in the vast majority of situations and cases, you will not require a lawyer to, you know, to write or to vet your consulting proposal slash agreement. And that's because a true consulting proposal should not require you to have tons of legalese and a lot of stuff that would slow down the sales process. The moment that your contract and agreement has, you know, very heavy kind of legal details, then most buyers, what they will do if they're smart, is take that and then put it to their lawyers or their legal department and that slows down the process.

So our recommendation is always, you know, make sure you're going in with a very trusted relationship, a partner that you want to work with and that you feel good about, set out very clear terms and responsibilities but ultimately, right, in most consultant situations, they're not gonna go through the trouble of legal processes if something didn't work out in the project. It's most often just better to go, you know, to work with the next client, focus on building your business, rather than getting all, you know, sucked in and pulled down into legal issues.

However, number two, right? This is kind of the point of the differentiation or the distinction I should make, which is that if you are working on a more complicated deal, a multi-million dollar project, if you're working on a percentage type of deal, a percentage of sales, a performance related deal, an equity deal then yes, you should speak to a lawyer or attorney. And in most cases, you don't need to have them draft, or, you know, create some massive document but at least taking what you have and drafting it up or, you know, spending a little bit of time with them asking them some questions can really help you to cover bases and to see things that you haven't seen before or that you wouldn't be able to see yourself because you don't have that legal experience.

And it's important to talk to someone who understands your business, who understands your industry, who is located in your area or at least understands the laws of the area that you will be operating in because every jurisdiction, every state, every province, you know, every region can be different, and every country, of course. So it's important that you get the advice from the right kinda person who understands your business and understands your operating area.

But for most projects, a lawyer is not required. You can use, like, we provide to our clients as part of our momentum program and our clarity coaching program, we have trainings around approving a consulting proposal that is generating millions of dollars for people who have used it over the years. That does not require a lawyer, however, if someone was to use that and the project they're going into has elements of equity or elements of a performance deal or is a more complicated structure or even let's just call it a multi-million dollar deal, then it would make sense to at least speak with a lawyer or an attorney to make sure that your bases are covered, to make sure that you're not missing anything critical.

But it's always good, even at that level, to try and keep the document as simple as possible because the more that you complicate it or the more terms that are, you know, written in legal language, the more potential confusion there is, the more that slows down the sales process and that's exactly what you don't want to do, right? You wanna keep things as simple as possible.

So again, not legal advice here but that's how we've approached it over the last 19 years of building consulting businesses and what we have seen with many of our clients who have, you know, been doing this also for 10 plus years in terms of, we've worked with consulting clients for the last 10 years. So the work we've done, that's the same advice that we've offered to our clients and has served them very well.

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