Finding the right lawyer

But, perhaps most importantly, ask yourself what success looks like. What would make you happy when this is all said and done?

To help remove your emotional response, try describing the issue with generic labels instead of names. Saying that Joe wants to sue Mary isn’t very useful. But saying “a lessee wants to sue a lessor for breach of a commercial lease for a specific property” conveys a surprising amount of information about the nature of the dispute and the attorney you need — in this case, a commercial real estate attorney with knowledge of a specific set of land-use laws. Now we’re getting somewhere.

The Scope of your attorney’s experience

Now that we’ve taken a good, hard look at what we’re trying to achieve, let’s say something about the lawyers themselves.

From a basic perspective, the lawyers that are helping to serve your business from a non-criminal perspective generally fall into three groups.

First, you have the litigators — the fighters who help you address some wrong that has occurred.

Second, you have transactional attorneys — the lawyers who draft your contracts to help make sure the deal you get is the deal you wanted.

And third, there are in-house attorneys — those who join your company full-time to make sure that all of your continuing legal needs are addressed in a timely manner.

If you are looking for a litigator, look for experience in the particular forum. If you are going into tax litigation, use a tax litigator. If you are going before a regulatory agency, seek out someone who is familiar with disputes in that agency. If it’s a typical civil litigation, make sure your lawyer has experience in the applicable federal or state court. Procedural aspects of litigation differ from court to court and can be dispositive, so familiarity with local rules can mean the difference between winning and losing. But before you even get to court, make sure your approach to the dispute matches up with your attorney’s (more on this below).

If you are looking for a transactional attorney, look at the type of transaction. Lawyers in more complex areas will generally have a narrower focus. A tax attorney or a securities lawyer may not do much else given the complexity of those practices, while a small business attorney may do some basic finance work, partnership agreements, incorporation and some commercial contracts. Make sure their competence matches your need. Unfortunately, as in any profession, some lawyers may overstate their comfort with a particular practice area. Ask questions. The more specific the question, the better; and the more reflective their experience is of your current dispute, the better.

And don’t forget to make sure that the attorney’s geographical qualifications line up with your need; local, state, federal and international law may apply to your problems, so make sure the lawyer has the knowledge of the applicable regulations and the agencies that are in charge of enforcing those regulations.

If you are looking for an in-house counsel, it may be that more areas of basic knowledge are more helpful than few areas of deep knowledge, unless you have a specific area on which you’d like to focus. Remember that your in-house counsel will be acting like a general contractor and hiring outside lawyers as subcontractors for any exceedingly complex problems, so the ability to spot potential problems can be more important than the ability to solve them on the spot. Comprehensive knowledge of the applicable cannabis regulations is an important component of this.

Before we get any further, let’s talk about the self-described “cannabis attorney.” What that attorney means is, “I am an attorney that knows something about one or more regulatory structures that govern a state-legal cannabis market.” In the cannabis industry, a working knowledge of jurisdictional regulatory issues specific to the cannabis industry is necessary — and should be combined with everything else I’ve discussed in this article. I cannot emphasize this enough. State-level cannabis laws can change how traditional legal concepts are applied. Your lawyer needs to know how the underlying traditional law is applied and how the cannabis laws alter that application.

Making sure your personalities match

They call us counselors for a reason. While a lot of what we do is writing agreements and arguing with your counterparties, the balance is advice. You should trust your lawyer, and your lawyer should trust you. They should bring you options, give you advice and leave the ultimate decision on how to proceed up to you. But make no mistake, this is a symbiotic relationship — if either the lawyer or the client feels the fit is not right, the engagement will not last. And a short engagement means wasted time, effort and resources.

This is particularly important in the realm of litigators. There are myriad options for litigators to elicit a response from your counterparty, and virtually all of them are strategy-based. My dad is a litigator, and he often drafts a complaint before he sends his first demand letter, so he can file a suit the next day if he gets an unacceptable response. One of my best friends is a litigator, and she sends a letter dripping with honey, asking for an amicable resolution before even considering her first cause of action.