How One Simple Monthly Habit Can Cut Your Legal Costs by 80%
Hiring a full-time attorney isn’t feasible for most small or midsize companies. Yet, legal problems can quickly become expensive if not caught early. Aaron Hall, an attorney working with entrepreneurial businesses, shares a simple routine that can dramatically reduce your legal spending—and all it takes is 30 minutes a month.
Why Small and Midsize Companies Overspend on Legal Help
Many growing businesses work with attorneys only after an issue arises. This reactive approach leads to higher costs, whether it’s due to contract disputes, employment issues, or intellectual property concerns. Hall’s experience shows that 80% of these legal expenses could be avoided with earlier attention.
A Smarter Approach to Legal Planning
Instead of waiting for problems, companies can adopt a preventative mindset. The key idea is to build a recurring habit into your leadership meetings: a legal issue review.
What to Do Each Month
Spend just 30 minutes during your monthly or quarterly strategic meetings to ask a few targeted questions:
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Are we launching new products or services?
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Are we changing vendors or suppliers?
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Are we forming new partnerships?
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Are we hiring new key personnel?
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Are there any upcoming major contracts or deals?
These are common areas where legal risks can emerge. By flagging them early, you can decide which ones should be reviewed by your attorney before moving forward.
Train Your Team to Spot Legal Risks
Even without a legal background, your executive team can learn to spot potential risks. Hall recommends a training program called the “Legal Operating System” that helps business leaders think like attorneys when it comes to major decisions. This gives your team a practical way to reduce dependence on outside counsel and avoid unnecessary bills.
Invite Your Attorney to Strategic Meetings
If you’d rather not rely on your own judgment alone, another option is to include your attorney in occasional board or planning meetings. They don’t need to attend the whole session—just a short recap at the end is enough. This keeps your attorney informed and allows them to catch potential problems early.
An Example: Software Development Pitfalls
Say you’re creating custom software for a client. Who owns the code? Where is the code coming from? Without a clear agreement, disputes can arise over ownership, reuse, and licensing. Addressing these questions early prevents expensive legal battles down the road.
The Payoff
By incorporating a short legal review into your regular business meetings, you reduce the chances of being blindsided by legal issues. Hall often consults with companies once or twice a year to do just this. The result? Clear strategies that your local attorney can implement more efficiently and affordably.
Start Small, Save Big
This habit isn’t about overcomplicating your workflow. It’s about putting a routine in place that helps your business avoid expensive legal mistakes. Whether through training or brief check-ins with your legal counsel, small adjustments can lead to major savings.
To explore more tools and insights from Aaron Hall, visit legaloperatingsystem.com or AaronHall.com .
Video Transcript
Legal Budget Savings for Mid-Sized Companies
Aaron Hall: This little tip can save midsize companies tens of thousands of dollars in their legal budget every year. I am Aaron Hall. I work with entrepreneurial companies as an attorney. Typically, they have from 10 to 250 employees. These companies are too small to just have a full-time attorney. So they usually work with a law firm.
Maybe they have a solo attorney or a small team that they work with as different needs come up. You might be in that situation. Maybe you use an employment attorney from time to time, a contract attorney, or maybe trademark. And what I found is companies like you, who have 10 to 250 employees, end up spending a lot of money dealing with stuff after the problem arose.
The Wish for Preventative Legal Insight
And you might think to yourself, “I wish we had an attorney on staff, or maybe even better.” rather than having an attorney who second-guesses everything and is always talking about risk aversion. It would be even better if your officers of the company had legal training or had some background as a business attorney.
You may be thinking that would be ideal. And as I have thought about how can I help companies avoid these problems and prevent all the legal issues and all the legal expense, or at least most of it, there is one technique that we have implemented that has made a huge difference. And so I want to talk about what that is and how you can implement it in your company.
A Simple Habit With Big Payoff
It is really not hard. It does not take much time. There is a very small amount of expense, but the payoff is typically tenfold. In other words, you may save $10,000 by paying a thousand dollars, or you may pay $10,000 with your attorney. So I am not suggesting you have to switch attorneys, but by spending $10,000 upfront, you end up saving roughly a hundred thousand dollars.
Step One: Add Legal Check-Ins to Your Routine
So here is the approach: Step number one is put into your monthly or quarterly meetings a very brief moment to review, “Do you have anything new coming up that you should run by your attorney?” This would be a new product offering, service offering, new strategic partnership, a new relationship, a major supplier or vendor change. Any major change in relationship is typically an issue to talk with your attorney about.
So whether you meet monthly or quarterly, thinking about when you talk about these big initiatives or big changes, flag the issues to discuss with your attorney. Likewise, if you have any new brands or you are hiring any new high-level people. Flag the issue to talk with your attorney.
Implementing Issue Spotting
Attorneys call this issue spotting, and the idea is implement into your company’s operating system a regular review of any legal issues that you need to flag or issue spotting. So what this looks like with my clients typically is either I am having a regular conversation with them, and I ask them the questions about, “What do they have coming up? What are the cool things they are exploring? What are they doing now? Any new changes in what you are offering or any new divisions or shifts in the marketplace that you guys are leveraging?” And when we talk about that, It helps me spot the issues that are coming up.
Executive Team Participation
So one way to do this is, as an executive team, make sure you flag those issues. Now you might be saying, “We do not always know what those issues are.” You can just look at them from a business standpoint and say, “Hey, we are doing this. Let us just run that by our attorney.”
Training and Involving Attorneys Early
But there are two other options here. One other option is to actually get training. We have the legal operating system training, and you can go to legaloperatingsystem.com and find out more about getting that training. So you and your executive team has the training to spot those issues yourself.
Invite Attorneys to Strategic Discussions
And then the second option is either if you do not want to bring those issues to your attorney, invite your attorney to some of those strategic planning meetings so that the attorney can hear what you are talking about, even if it is just a little recap at the end of your board meetings or strategic planning meetings, so you can say to the attorney, “Hey, here is what we are thinking about. Here is what we are doing.”
Practical Example: Software Development Legal Risks
This might even be something big you are doing for a client or a customer. For example, say you are developing some new software for a customer. One conversation I have is, “Where are you getting the code for that customer, and who is going to own the rights to that code? Both the code that you use to generate for the client, as well as once you have generated that code for the client, do you have contracts that say, ‘Who owns that?'”
Reduce Risk and Disruption
So just spotting those issues ahead of time can save tens of thousands of dollars later in preventing fights, litigation, contract breach negotiations, arbitration, and all those nasty legal disputes that are so distracting for your creative team and for your executive team by building in, in advance into your routines, a little habit of spotting the business issues that may have legal implications. By spotting those and then identifying what do we need to do legally to address that, that can save your company tens of thousands of dollars.
80% of Legal Costs Can Be Avoided
In my experience, about 80% of the expense for legal that company spend can be saved if we deal with issues on the front end. You might be wondering, “Do I do that?” Yes, I do this on a regular basis. Sometimes it is with my regular clients. Many times I will just do one or two meetings a year with a company.
This is to have this conversation for an hour, sometimes two separate one-hour conversations, maybe a month or three months apart. So that we spot these issues, we get together a plan, and then you use your local attorney to implement that plan. You do not need somebody at my level to implement the plan, but usually you need somebody who has been around the block and has some experience and some entrepreneurial background to spot those issues, have an efficient conversation, and then pass along that plan to your local attorney, who can get a trademark for you or draft a contract or set up whatever needs to be set up. Once the issues are spotted and a strategic plan is put in place.
Where to Learn More
If you would like to learn more, simply subscribe to this YouTube channel or go to legaloperatingsystem.com, where you can get more information on the legal operating system that I put together. You can also visit me at aaronhall.com.
I am Aaron Hall, an attorney for entrepreneurial companies and business owners.