Advice

Lawyers have a terrible reputation for saying “but on the other hand…”

In our opinion, that’s not good enough. It’s confusing, and it leaves clients feeling like they’re doing all the work.

After all, we are paid to advise. We believe that a client should not be presented with a series of facts and summaries of documents that are nearly as long as the document itself. That’s just reporting – not advising. Our clients are presented with facts, options and advice. Our advice is not only founded on the legal issues, but formed with an understanding of the industry and the commercial issues involved. That way, we don’t need to seek our clients’ instructions on every single point and clients can get on with what they need to do (without the client, in effect, being asked to do our job…)

So we will try to give the following types of advice:

• yes or no answers
• “if it were me, I’d do X”
• “Don’t worry about that, it doesn’t matter”
• “You don’t need to read that, it’s fine”