This Is Not A Do-It-Yourself Project

Have you ever tried to do a do-it-yourself plumbing project when you don't have much experience doing plumbing?  If things turn out great, you save some money and your floor is dry.   If things turn out okay, then you spend 8 hours doing a 2 hour job and your floor is dry.  Things go south from that point: your floor gets wetter and your pocket gets emptier.  Some people love to do DIY legal projects.  There are many things that you can easily do on your own without a lawyer's help.  For example, you can file a copyright registration form, you can file a simple certificate of incorporation and you can file a request for an employer identification number.

What happens, though, when you venture beyond the simple into the slightly more complex?  Olivia came to her lawyer because she had a falling-out with Priscilla, the co-owner of her business.  "I guess my first mistake," she said, "was doing our agreement using FormsCo".  (FormsCo is my invented name for any company engaged in the business of selling legal forms.  There are plenty of them; you can buy legal forms online, in hard copy at the stationery store, in lawyer-in-a-box software and so forth.)  Olivia and Priscilla owner had created a company that split everything 50-50, and now they were at odds with one another.

FormsCo actually wasn't their first mistake.  Their first mistake was agreeing in principle to a 50-50 split of money and authority without considering how disputes would be settled.  The FormsCo mistake came later, when the judgmental error was committed to paper.  These two were obviously trying to save on the expenses of forming a business.  They were friends and they got along well, so what would have been the point of spending some lawyer money up front?  The point would have been to remind them that the agreement isn't for when the two of them are getting along; it's for when they're not getting along.  Indeed, a good lawyer would have told them to spend a bunch of money up front, with each of the co-owners getting separate advice on how to create this entity and how to conduct its business.

The do-it-yourself plan resulted in a big mess down the road.  Whatever money saved at the front end was more than made up in losses at the back end, both because the lawyer has to sort through the legal, financial and psychological mess as a precursor to solving the problem and because the options become more limited the deeper we are into the mess. 

My examples are illustrative and modified for public consumption.  No real names are used; no real conversations are quoted; no confidences are revealed.  I will sometimes tell stories about the experiences of others that I have learned over the years.  Give me the latitude to teach by example.