Dealing with Attorney Issues

[Melissa Mckinney]

So I'm wondering what frustrates RE investors about the legal field or what your biggest needs are from an attorney? (Flipping, landlords, wholesale, etc.) I'm trying to figure out who I can help and what the biggest needs are in the community. I also would love to hear about things you don't like or love about an attorney you worked with, ie: he read contracts to you or communicated mostly through email/whatever you preferred. Horror stories are welcome. I just want to see how I can better service y'all! Thanks :)

[Zachary C.]

@Melissa Mckinney,

Before I answer your questions I just want to throw out that I have worked with a lot of attorneys, my dad is one, my first business revolved around them, and I have used them in my other businesses and deals. For the most part I have dealt with professionals.

The easiest ways for an attorney to frustrate me: 

1. Not teaching me or letting me learn about whatever issue we are dealing with- I expect to gain more insight into a topic when I hire a professional to help deal with an issue, this helps me make better decisions through knowledge and experience later on. Just let me deal with this, thats the way it is, etc. sound like when your mom tells you "because I said so" and is completely worthless to me.
2. Assuming that because I am younger and don't have a law degree I am not smart, can't understand, don't need good answers, or can't figure out if they are blowing smoke, etc.
3. A general lack of professionalism; not following up with something discussed in a meeting, handing me a generic document without minor modifications for the situation, gross typos, poor response times, etc.
4. The biggest needs are the opposite of 1-3

Here are two real life examples to demonstrate what I am talking about:

1. I had a meeting to set up a company and we discussed what the firm would handle and where I needed to follow up. In the meeting there was not an all inclusive list of the follow up items for me to take care of so I asked for an email that listed what I needed to do with which government department, to ensure that my new company was set up properly with the government. I never got the email so I called the attorneys office and talked to him for probably 3-4 minutes and just wrote down a list from that of what they did and what I needed to do (still that wasn't thorough). Later I got a bill in the mail charging me for the smallest unit of time they could bill for which was 15 minutes. I consider that double charging for not following through on what was already paid for in the meeting, I sent a check and never used the attorney again.
2. I had a meeting to set up another company that was a partnership. We discussed the unique things we wanted to add into our paperwork; whether it was the articles of formation, the operating agreement, an addendum, etc. When I got the documents there were almost none of the discussed items; it kinda looked like a generic LLC formation document that you could just pull off the web for free. I then sat down with my dad to get his take on issues and then went through later with different colored highlighters to note either things I wanted further explanation on, errors that impacted how the document was interpreted, generic statements that were counter to what we had discussed, grammatical errors that needed to be corrected, etc. When I take that kind of time to comb through over 30 pages of legal jargon and make corrections, point out issues, and identify questions I expect something in return. When I got the next draft the grammatical errors had been fixed.

I hope this is insightful and along the lines of what you were looking for. I didn't realize that "y'all" was used in Michigan.