9 Essential Questions To Ask Your Potential Lawyer

essential questions to ask your potential lawyerYour first meeting with a lawyer is like an interview; you are the main interviewer. That’s when you should decide whether to hire the lawyer in question. Even if you don’t know the details of your case, asking some important questions will help you understand if the legal representative is appropriate for you. 

These are basically interview questions, and you have every right to interview your potential lawyer. Because you’d be paying hundreds of dollars for their service. Several people feel intimidated on their first visit and forget to ask essential questions. 

Well, you shouldn’t be. Here are simple questions to ask your potential lawyer at the interview stage!

1. How Long Have They Practiced? 

The length of practice isn’t proof of proficiency. However, asking the lawyer how long they’ve practiced is a great ice-breaker. It sets things in play and could ease you into the conversation, making you less nervous. From here, you can delve into simple questions like the school they attended. 

Sometimes, new lawyers have way more experience than people who have been in the profession for years. 

But from here, you’ll get into more profound questions like: 

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To Be Or Not To Be A Sole Trader

General LegalLegal Advice To Be Or Not To Be A Sole Trader

When you are starting a business there is a multitude of decisions that you need to make with everything from the company name to your choice of commercial lawyer on the list of options that you need to finalise.

Another decision you need to make is exactly what sort of business entity you are going to operate as. By business entity, we are not referring to the business sector or niche you are going into but rather the legal status of the business you are creating. Depending on the size of the business you are creating and the initial capital you are investing you have a number of choices.

These include a corporation for larger-scale businesses, a limited company, a partnership, or it could be that you setting out in one of the simplest forms of business you can start and that is as a sole trader.

Starting as a sole trader has its pros and cons and it is by weighing these up that you can decide whether it would be the most appropriate for your situation or not. Obviously, we would recommend you speak to your commercial lawyers for more detailed advice, but for now here are some of the basics you need to know about running a business as a sole trader in Australia.

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How To Prepare For Your First Meeting With Your Divorce Lawyer

General LegalLegal Advice How To Prepare For Your First Meeting With Your Divorce Lawyer

Going through a divorce can be a highly emotional and stressful experience, however, there are several ways you can reduce the angst. One of those is hiring an experienced and accomplished divorce lawyer and helping them as much as you can to make the best possible case they can for you throughout the negotiations, and at court, if the need arises.

Now, it is unlikely that you will have kept a divorce lawyer ‘on hold’ as it were and paid them a retainer just in case your marriage ever went awry…at least we hope you didn’t. It can seem like a cynical world sometimes, so we assume you wanted your marriage to work, rather than expecting it would not, by having a divorce lawyer on standby.

Once you hire a divorce lawyer, one of the most important meetings you will have with them is the first one. This is important for several reasons, but one that is key is that it will confirm, or not, that you are comfortable discussing your marriage and other aspects of your personal life with this particular divorce lawyer.

Depending on how amicable or not the split is, or how likely or not a negotiated settlement might be, there is always the possibility that the divorce will end up in court. If it does, your ex-partner’s lawyer will quite rightly do all they can to make their case, and that could involve bringing up elements of your personal life that you might find uncomfortable.

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