Bennie had a lot going on, more than he felt he could handle. Things seemed to be spinning out of control lately, and Bennie wasn’t sure what was his problem. He wanted to chalk it up to bad karma, but he wasn’t Hindu or Buddhist. Bennie instead figured he had something he could learn to keep things more in order. And then the realization hit him that several of his problems were legal problems. One way or another, Bennie wasn’t managing his legal rights, responsibilities, risks, and interests in the proactive way in which he could. And so he went in search of a comprehensive guide to get a better handle on his legal affairs. One thing was for sure: Bennie wasn’t going to let legal issues keep running him over.
Guidance
My first client at the start of my law career forty years ago was about half my age, just a teenager. I don’t think he’d finished high school. Yet in one sense, he was already twice as wise as me. He knew that if he could get alongside a decent lawyer and maybe an accountant, banker, and real estate agent, then with his abundant energy and ambition, his life and business would both soon take off. As a brand-new lawyer, I had little clue of law’s power and authority to promote a vital life. You might have thought that after seven years of schooling, three of those years in one of the nation’s top law schools, I’d have known better. I quickly learned, though. My teenage client owned one ancient piece of business equipment for which he still owed the kindly seller who had foolishly extended him credit. Yet with the professional help that he so consistently sought and accepted, my client was before long so soundly organized, authorized, positioned, managed, planned, prepared, financed, and insured, and so well respected by his friends, competitors, and even his few enemies, that he became a resounding personal, family, financial, and business success. My first client knew and respected the authority of law to guide a business and life. My hope is that you do, too. Let this guide be your tool.
Desire
Another reason to consider this guide’s seasoned advice is because in doing so, you are expressing your desire. A good life is a lot about caring. You want to suffer and be miserable your whole life? Exhibiting a bad and careless attitude with no desire will definitely do it for you. But you want instead to prosper and live a good life? Then you’d better care about things while exhibiting a good attitude. Seeking counsel is a sure way to express your desire and a good learning attitude. When you seek strategic advice, you are looking to improve your situation and outlook. You aren’t wallowing in your mud, moaning about how hard or unfair life is. When seeking counsel from professionals having hard-won wisdom, you are also looking to draw something useful from the very hardship you’d prefer escaping. Strivers succeed, moaners don’t. Strivers who seek and accept wise counsel don’t just succeed; they thrive until they, too, can share wise counsel.
Patterns
The best counsel is strategic, not transactional. Strategic advice shares the patterns, not just the solutions. When you call in a plumber, you just want the plugged sink fixed. When you call in an electrician, you just want the lights back on. But keeping your legal affairs in proper order so as to live a better life, indeed the good life, isn’t about flipping a switch. Keeping your figurative house in good order is more about living aligned with the patterns that organize and rule the world. Strategic advice reveals those patterns to you. Strategic advice might not instantly get you out of a hole you’ve taken a while to dig for yourself. But it’ll show you the shovel you’ve been unwittingly using to dig yourself a ditch, so that you can toss that shovel aside. And strategic advice will show you how to look up out of your hole and begin to climb out of it. Strategic advice will also lead you around, rather than into, the holes others are digging for themselves. Let strategic advice show you the beneficial patterns and principles that guide and shape the world.
Purpose
Another reason to seek sound advice on your legal affairs is that by doing so, you discover, confirm, and pursue your purpose. To desire a better life or a good life is one thing. To discern your purpose in life is another thing and may be the key to a good life. You can try to do well for yourself and your family. By all means, do so. You may achieve a good life by direct pursuit. Yet when you discern the even deeper purpose in your life that makes you desire a good life for yourself and others, and you pursue that deeper purpose, you may be more successful in achieving the good life. You may not be able to achieve happiness by trying to be happy. Striving after happiness can soon make you self-centered and sad. But strive after something that makes meaning out of your life, drawing chaotic and conflicting circumstances into proportion, pattern, provision, beauty, and beneficial order, and you’ll find happiness. So sure, get your legal affairs in order so that you can live a better life. But also get your legal affairs in order because doing so brings you closer to realizing the meaning of your life. Then you’ll know the good life.
Audit
Folks tend to go looking for a lawyer later than they should, when some crisis finally makes them realize that they need a lawyer or they’ll be in even bigger trouble. That’s often the case with bankruptcy, criminal charges, business breakups, boundary disputes, and even marital breakups, employment disputes, and claims for civil liability. A little better planning on the front end, or even a little bit of sound advice along the path, and the path might not have led to a crisis. The trouble, though, in seeking strategic advice when you’re not in crisis is to know what to look for and what to ask. It’s hard finding and disarming the landmines when you don’t know the enemy that’s planting them or the field in which they hide. A legal audit is the answer to that problem. Organizations audit their financial interests all the time, precisely for that reason to discover the looming financial issues before they become financial crises. We get an annual physical exam for the same cautionary and preventive purpose. Why not a periodic legal audit? With a comprehensive look at your legal affairs, your legal interests and issues may be clearer and more easily addressed than your financial and health issues. This guide is your personal legal audit.
Roadmap
So here’s a roadmap to this guide’s legal audit, so you can see where we’re starting, where we’re going, and where we’re ending up. Your personal conduct implicates a bundle of legal interests and issues. We may as well start there. Your education involves a second bundle of legal interests and issues, covered in a next chapter. We all go to school. Your housing, transportation, and employment each involve other substantial legal interests and issues, each covered in other chapters. You may own or wish to pursue a business at some point in your life, and so another chapter addresses that subject. You are part of a family and may lead your own family, and so we better devote a chapter to the legal interests and issues you may face there. Your finances are worth another chapter, and your property is worth another chapter. We would do well to end the chapters on your legal interests with a chapter on your freedom and a chapter on your legacy including your will and estate. A preliminary chapter outlines these interests in greater detail, after which a full chapter covers each of those interests. The guide opens with a few other introductory chapters on what a legal interest is, why legal interests matter, and what undermines legal interests. The guide concludes with chapters on legal trends, legal pitfalls, a method for improving legal affairs, and measures of legal success.
Use
To help you make the best use of this guide’s audit of your legal affairs, and to reinforce its advice, chapter sections ask you to evaluate where you stand on the legal interests the guide just covered. Read and respond to each of these brief audits, even if only in your mind, although making some notes along the way may help. Doing so may help you incorporate the advice, recognize what it truly means to you, and adjust your thinking to align it with the advice where you need to do so. Otherwise, you might just skim the whole guide without drawing what you could from it. Some of the chapters end with reflection questions for the same purpose. Put the guide to its best use. It’s just trying to respect your interests and time.
Experience
This chapter mentioned above that strategic advice is most reliable when it comes from individuals who have learned from hard experience. I’m not claiming that my life, first as a horse trainer traveling the country and then as a trial lawyer and law professor and dean, has been especially hard, although I wouldn’t say either that it’s been especially easy. But many of my clients and not a few of my students had hard lives of great challenges and terrible losses. I learned from my own errors and hardships but learned more from the harder lives and worse hardships of my clients. I represented clients in awful wrongful death and personal injury matters, abusive divorces, discriminatory and retaliatory job terminations, and bankruptcies from basic mismanagement and traitorous embezzlement. I may have learned even more, though, from helping a couple thousand homeless and disadvantaged clients, while providing them with free legal service in homeless shelters, soup kitchens, churches, and immigrant centers. If time and space were no object, I could share actual illustrating accounts behind most if not all of the advice this guide shares. Trust the advice.
Reflection
What specific legal issue, if any, drove you to pick up this guide? As you read through this guide, don’t lose track of your specific purpose in seeking strategic advice. Do you face other legal issues and have other legal interests you should be keeping in mind as you read this guide? Keep a list of your legal interests and issues that come to mind as you read this book. Consult that list periodically in the next weeks and months to see if you’ve addressed those issues or are in a better position to do so. See, in time, if you can cross some of those issues off your list as safely settled. Do you have lawyer acquaintances in your neighborhood, school, workplace, church, or other circle? Would having coffee or lunch with them to chat about the legal issues of the day make them more available to you later if you needed a consult? Can you gather a circle of mentors and informal advisors around you that includes a lawyer, physician, accountant, counselor, pastor, and others who help people stay on track or get back on track? Make a list of your advisors or potential advisors.
Key Points
Strategic advice can make a big difference in one’s life over time.
Your desire to seek strategic advice indicates a healthy attitude.
Strategic advice shapes your thinking and behavior to useful patterns.
Strategic advice may help you discern and pursue your deeper purpose.
Treat this guide as an audit of your legal affairs, like an annual exam.
This guide addresses your major life interests, chapter by chapter.
Reflect over the audit sections in each chapter to get more out of them.
Trust the legal experience behind this guide’s strategic advice.