Managing the relationship

Tips on maintaining a great long term relationship with your fractional lawyer.

How you manage the relationship is very important and too many advisor relationships don’t live up to their potential, leaving people underwhelmed or disappointed. Advisors often treat the relationship as the responsibility of the company to “call me when they need me”, but producing a successful engagement should be the responsibility of both sides. Putting some work upfront and having a regular process to review the relationship should be discussed and clarified up front.

Participate as much as possible

Advisor can often be out of the loop with the latest information about the business, making it more difficult for them provide valuable advice. This can lead to the team spending most of the calls with business updates vs. getting advice and tangible action items. To avoid this so try to design in ways that you can provide updates about key developments in the company on a regular basis. Allowing the lawyer to participate in company meetings or having access to a company update or Slack channel can help you develop rapport and familiarity. This may be tough if you are short on time, but the idea incorporate the lawyer as you would a strategic advisor who needs to be kept up to speed all of the time.

Respecting boundaries and maintaining scope

Some founders will want to push past the time that lawyers have committed. Be sure to be respectful on their boundaries and the commitment, and make sure you discuss estimated time requirements of any tasks you may have upfront. Always try to manage expectations, and when things begin to creep beyond the original commitment, try to buck the trend early and either (1) create a new expectation and new engagement, or (2) get back to the original scale and scope.