Day5/21: Have Yourself a Good Corporate Lawyer

Dear Entrepreneur. I hope you have an effin’ good corporate lawyer…or cry long and salty premium tears...

There’s something that trauma does. It affects your memory or blocks out parts of the experience your mind cannot or doesn’t want to continue to bear.

As I was writing today’s piece, it was a bit of a struggle initially, because I couldn’t for the life of me remember our former corporate lawyer’s name. Go figure!

Not that I even wanted to mention names, but to realize I couldn’t recall the name of the man we entertained every Friday afternoon, as he took us through our company’s legal records, apprising us on whether we had our paperwork in order; helping us read through contracts and breaking down any legal jargon we didn’t understand while advising on pending items we needed to get done with to ensure the longevity of our company, was quite startling.

Here’s the backstory. We met through a mutual party. He walked into our ‘corner’ office on second floor looking sharp, like a razor. The scent of cologne wafting behind him, and the space. He was extremely well spoken, and succinctly presented his personal and company credentials. To a legal simpleton like me, all looked very good on paper.

From our first meeting, we hit it off and my partners and I agreed to take him on as our corporate lawyer. We didn’t really have many options though, as we urgently needed to start setting up properly in an industry that I personally was not at all familiar with.

Being a professional copywriter and digital marketer, it’s no surprise finance talk was not quite up my alley.

For the sake of this post, let’s call him Benji. For almost 12 months from the day we put him on a retainer, Benji drove into our offices religiously every week at 12 noon, in his 2002 grey Mercedes E class ready to break down legalities surrounding our business. We had many a positive conversation with regards to the growth trajectory of our company as week on week, our bank statements and balance sheet continued to paint a good picture of our overall health and helped inform him of our strategic vision as he on his end advised us on all matters, legal paperwork.

I think maybe once or twice did we skip that Friday meeting. It was very important to us. At least for me I knew I needed it to ensure everything we were doing was 100% above board.

I must admit though that a lot of things discussed in those meetings still went right over my head because again, I’m a marketer not a lawyer nor a finance expert. But I was confident in Benji, who we ensured was compensated fairly and in return, did well to let us know all was (always) good.

Well, that relationship ended unceremoniously the day I called him in a state, to announce we were being auctioned and had cracks within our business. And thereafter when I called yet again in distress to seek counsel on how to deal with the behavior of our one of our partners. I don’t think I’ve seen the back of Benji’s head since. That was 5 years ago.

Years later I came to terms with the fact that his interest lay more in his monthly paycheck than in ensuring the survival of our company. A lot of advice he had been giving us, was actually extremely bad advice and cost us quite a bit. We discovered when eventually we got to consult with a real corporate lawyer.

I’m not even sure Benji knew what he was doing. If he had sabotaged our company deliberately by giving us poor counsel. Or it was just accidental oversight and professional negligence on his end. But because he was of an amiable personality and I choose to view the glass as half full, I want to believe it is the latter.

Moral of the story.

Depending on the nature of your business, having a good corporate lawyer on your payroll is extremely important. So important that if you were crazy enough to sell an organ to raise funds to afford one, because they don’t come cheap, I would support your decision.

For clarity. A good corporate lawyer should help you follow and make decisions based on relevant laws and regulations. They are responsible for understanding the rights of a company, appraising business operations, assisting with legal decisions and verifying business transactions and more importantly where directors are involved, have a good enough understanding of corporate governance.

They need to have the technical know-how, especially when it comes to commercial awareness and readiness to make the extra effort to ensure their clients are ‘safe’. This sounds pretty basic right? Yet to date it’s one of my biggest regrets that we didn’t have a good enough lawyer to cover us, when the rain started beating.

So…If you’re a young ambitious entrepreneur. I hope you’re listening.

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