Avenir Law is a law firm that evaluates your legal needs and then organizes, manages, and participates in, a team of professionals to satisfy those needs.
We can be thought of as both the architect of your legal project and the general contractor who also swings a hammer.
Avenir Law organizes, manages, and participates in, custom legal teams designed for each client and their specific engagement. First, we analyze your project to determine precisely what expertise you need. Second, we identify the appropriate expert based on their level of skill, price, and availability. Third, we strive to set a fixed fee. And last, we manage the project.
For a look at a typical engagement please see this illustration.
Q: Okay, I get it. But why are you organized this way?
A: A few reasons. Our founder, Jonathan, is a former general counsel of a large asset management firm, and division counsel to the corporate finance department of a bulge-bracket financial services firm. In simpler terms, he’s spent a substantial portion of his career as a buyer of legal services. In those capacities, he learned how effective it is to hire lawyers and not law firms. This liberated him to choose lawyers based on their expertise, cost, and availablity, rather than their affiliation.
Pricing is another motivator. Without big city rents and large firm administrative costs, the work done at Avenir Law bears very little overhead. And as we collaborate with other lawyers, we seek those who enjoy similar efficiencies.
Q: So with whom do I enter into an engagement letter?
A: There are two possibilities:
1) If our collaborating lawyers in your custom legal team want to have direct engagement letters with you, there will be an engagement letters with Avenir Law and one with the collaborating lawyer.
2) If our collaborating lawyers don’t feel they need to have an engagement letter directly with you, they will want an engagement letter with Avenir Law. In this case, you will only see an engagement letter from Avenir Law.
Q: I know that Avenir Law is committed to fixed fees, but they feel like a trick to me. If I don’t see your time records to back it up, how do I know you’re not ripping me off with an inflated fee?
A: The very fact that you’ve asked the question is a testament to how little trust our profession has garnered for itself. While every legal project is unique, our years of experience have given us an ability to accurately assess the amount of work required for the services we offer. We are also well positioned to assume the risk and burden of services that reveal themselves to become more complex as they unfold. When you engage with Avenir Law, our clarity and transparency aim to amend even a little of the mistrust of lawyers accumulated through the years.
Perhaps another analogy will help. When you go to the dentist, you pay the flat fee for the service you’re purchasing, right? You’ve never been charged a premium because a filling took three tries and 20 minutes to fit perfectly. This is because the dentist has taken the risk of a difficult fitting. She fills teeth daily and the patient hopefully gets fillings rarely. The dentist has a broader perspective on the vagaries of the time required to do fillings across all patients. We can assume she prices that in as she determines the fees she charges. Imagine if she charged by the hour.
Q: So you’re a temp agency?
A: No. A temp agency supplies lawyers that you then have to organize and manage. Unsurprisingly, we haven’t met a client yet who wants to do the extra work of structuring, sourcing, and managing a team of lawyers.
If you’re hungry and you call a temp agency, they send a baker. If you call Avenir Law, we deliver the bread.
Q: So you’re one of those “ask the lawyer” websites?
A: No, we’re not. The success of a client’s experience with an “ask the lawyer” service will turn heavily on the client’s ability to know all the relevant facts and questions and pose them in an efficient but thorough manner. This is a diagnostic skill that requires a professional, like Avenir Law. As a former Secretary of Defense so aptly demonstrated, the unknown unknowns can really bite you.
Q: I thought most legal needs can be met with forms that we can buy at LegalZoom or Clerky.
A: Buyer beware. To us, using legal forms found online is like helping yourself to prescription drugs. Make the wrong choice and the consequences can last forever, especially for newly founded businesses. Legal services are more than documents. Avenir Law offers the judgment that comes from decades of experience.
There are also key benefits for a client that only a lawyer can confer. The code of ethics in the state of your lawyer’s admission exists, in large measure, for your protection. Among those are the right to the protection of privilege in your communications with your lawyer and others she brings in to assist her in serving you. The professional liability insurance your lawyer carries benefits her clients.
Q: But they’re so cheap!
A: Perhaps, but you typically get no more than you pay for. Plus, there are some great law firms who offer for free the same incorporation, formation and initial documentation services as LegalZoom and Clerky. One of the best, Goodwin Procter in Boston, hosts this wonderful resource: http://www.foundersworkbench.com
Q: Well, then, why not just go to one of the big law firms?
A: You could. But we believe that Avenir Law offers the best that our profession has to offer without the constraints of a traditional law firm. Consider this:
Q: Why should we work with Avenir Law?
A: Quality, cost, and service.
Q: Could you build it out a bit?
A: Sure.
We strive to achieve three key outcomes:
Quality: When we identify the right experts for your project, we are not limited to any one firm, city or even country. With this “borderless” approach, we focus on finding the right adviser at the right price and with the right availability.
Cost: We strive to quote fixed prices for all of our work. With our years of experience on both sides of the lawyer-client relationship, we believe those prices are a fair statement of value. Avenir Law’s fixed fees are the natural outcome of how we organize our work, how we are organized as a firm, the extremely low overhead in which we operate and our profit expectations.
Service: If you’re in business you live in a world of unknowns. As a client, your experience of working through a legal engagement should be as predictable and transparent as possible. At the beginning of each engagement, we publish a plan with a description of the project, the deliverables, the timing, the staffing and any third-party fees or disbursements. We also tell you what we expect of you in terms of time and materials.
We collaborate with just the right number of lawyers for your project. At present, while Jonathan acts as the sole project manager, he has other managers on call. Please remember that neither our practice nor our cost structure is based on housing tremendous numbers of lawyers in elaborate global offices. At Avenir Law, we scale ourselves to meet your needs in this specific engagement and at this very moment.
We are always the right size for your project.
After all:
Q: How many lawyers does it take to shingle a roof?
A: It depends on how thin you slice them.
