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Full Service Law Firm | Michael Best & Friedrich LLP

Specializing in the Intersection of Business &amp; Government

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<p>I hear this a lot. Usually in the first five minutes.</p><p>And I get it. You do have an attorney. You’ve used them. They handled something for you, it went fine, and you’ve got their number saved. That’s a real thing.</p><p>What I’ve learned, though, is that “I already have an attorney” and “I have <a href="https://www.michaelbest.com/people/adam-witkov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">what Adam offers</a>” are almost never the same sentence. Most of the business owners who eventually become my clients said the first one before they understood the second.</p><p>Here’s the distinction I wish more people knew earlier.</p><h2>What “I already have an attorney” usually means</h2><p>When most business owners say this, what they’re describing is a transactional relationship. Someone they call when something comes up — a contract that needs reviewing, an employee situation that got complicated, a dispute that needs handling. The attorney does the work, sends the bill, and the relationship goes quiet until the next thing.</p><p>That’s a legitimate, functional arrangement. A lot of good attorneys work exactly that way, and I’m not here to tell you that relationship is wrong.</p><p>What I am here to tell you is that it’s a specific kind of legal relationship — and it’s not the only kind available to you.</p><h2>What a transactional relationship actually looks like from the inside</h2><p>There’s a recognizable shape to how transactional legal relationships work. You’re not calling until something is already happening. Your attorney handles the matter in front of them. Nobody is reviewing your agreements proactively. Nobody flagged the clause in your operating agreement that became a problem two years after you signed it, because nobody was looking at your operating agreement on a Tuesday when nothing was wrong.</p><p>That’s not a failure. That’s what transactional legal relationships are built to do. They respond. They don’t anticipate.</p><p>The gap — the space between what you have and what you need — usually stays invisible. Until it doesn’t.</p><p>I’ve spent fifteen years in litigation watching business owners find out where that gap was. The disputes I’ve handled weren’t mostly caused by bad actors or bad luck. They were caused by agreements that hadn’t been looked at since formation, by operating structures that made sense at $2M and created real exposure at $20M, by decisions that nobody thought to run past an attorney because nobody had an attorney whose job it was to know the business well enough to ask.</p><h2>What the outside general counsel relationship actually looks like</h2><p><a href="https://www.michaelbest.com/insights/what-does-outside-general-counsel-actually-mean-102n4v1/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Outside general counsel </a>means one person who knows your business — not just your current legal matter, but your operating agreement, your key relationships, your growth trajectory, the risks sitting in your structure right now that you haven’t had to think about yet.</p><p>What I do on a Tuesday when nothing is wrong: I know enough about your business to flag something before you ask. When you’re thinking about a new partnership structure, adding a location, navigating a key employee departure, or starting to think about what an exit might look like — that conversation happens before the decision, not after it creates a problem.</p><p>The litigation background isn’t incidental to this. I’ve stood in a courtroom defending agreements I didn’t write, watching what happens when the document doesn’t hold up to the moment it was written to handle. I write agreements with that in mind. I review structures with that in mind. Prevention is measured in thousands. Litigation is measured in hundreds of thousands. I know which side of that equation I’d rather my clients be on.</p><h2>The questions most business owners can’t answer</h2><p>Here’s what I’d ask you to sit with.</p><p>When did someone last review your operating agreement — not because something forced it, but proactively? Do you have one attorney who knows your business well enough to call you about a risk you haven’t asked about yet? If something happened to your business partner tomorrow, do you know exactly what your buy-sell agreement triggers — the valuation method, the timeline, what it requires of the business’s cash position?</p><p>Those aren’t hypothetical questions. They’re the specific gaps that show up in disputes I’ve handled. Business owners who were certain their legal foundation was solid until the moment they found out it wasn’t.</p><p>If you answered those questions confidently, that’s genuinely good. You may have exactly what you need.</p><p>If you hesitated — even a little — that hesitation is worth paying attention to.</p><h2>This isn’t about replacing your attorney</h2><p>I want to be clear about something. The outside general counsel model isn’t about asking you to fire whoever you’re working with now.</p><p>Some of my clients have specialists they use for specific matters — a particular area of litigation, a niche regulatory question, an industry-specific transaction. That doesn’t go away. What the outside general counsel relationship adds is one person whose job it is to know your business well enough to coordinate all of it, to flag what doesn’t require a specialist yet, and to tell you honestly when it does.</p><p>Most growing businesses review their financials every month. The legal foundation of the business? Almost never. Until something forces it.</p><p>That’s the gap the outside general counsel relationship closes. Not by replacing what you have — by being the thing that was missing.</p><p>If you’re curious whether what you have is actually working, reach out and we’ll talk.</p><p>No form. No scheduler.&nbsp;<br>Just a direct conversation about where your business is and whether there’s a fit.&nbsp;</p><div class="passle-featured-image passle-featured-image-position-bottom"><img src="https://admin.michaelbest.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/passle-image-22406-1788296647.png" alt="Featured Image" /></div>

“I Already Have an Attorney.” So Does Almost Every Business Owner Who Calls Me.

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