From time to time, all businesses need some legal counsel.  Just this last summer, this business, School for Startups, had some legal issues that could have been all consuming.  I will tell you that story another day, but today I want to tell you what you as a small business person should do if you face a legal situation.

So, on the Friday before last Memorial Day weekend, I got some hate mail from a lawyer.  I was at my family vacation house, and told my entire family the story over breakfast.  My brother said he had read something similar in BusinessWeek recently, and might even have an article in his car.  This started step one, extensive research.  I spent most of the 3 day weekend on the internet researching stories similar to mine.  The amount of data was immense, especially once I found a starting point.  The popular media gave me several names of attorneys that were working in the relevant space.

Step two, get free advice by playing dumb, something I am good at!  I called each attorney, and several in town, and asked for a free consultation hour, to see if I wanted to hire them.  They all said yes, and I spent several hours, for free, getting great advice.  Some of each call was repetitious, but you have to ask some dumb, starter questions at first.  Soon, we had amassed enough knowledge to deal with the issues.  However, let me make one point very clear: we decided NOT fight this particular battle.  So, we never went to court, when we certainly would have needed real help.  But, I would bet that if we went to one lawyer in the beginning and paid him to get to us the same conclusion, it would have cost $10,000 at least.

I told a friend of mine about this, part of a couple adopting a 1 year old baby, child of a drug addict and multiple time felon.  The couple went to many lawyers and got several hours of free advice, one hour at a time.  They think they saved thousands too.

Another way to bootstrap…..