Managing legal consequences in advance

Legal practice is not always all about litigation. We focus on preventive and proactive strategies to minimize the risk and avoid litigation.

When doing a legal risk assessment or a cost-benefit analysis, it is helpful to know what legal principles and rules apply in a given situation and what courts and regulators have done in the past. However, in the practice of proactive law in the business arena, this is not enough. If we want to help businesses succeed and avoid legal trouble, we need to be involved with what has happened in the past, and what should we do in the future. Proactive lawyering is not about applying legal rules to facts that happened in the past, but about applying sound legal practices to create future facts and to plan a future course of conduct. In the words of Edward A. Dauer, a pioneer of preventive law: “Litigation law is mostly law. Preventive law is mostly facts. And the critical time for preventive lawyering is when those facts are first being born. 

 

​​Preventive Legal Approach

• managing conflict & avoiding     litigation

• handling problems & managing risks

• minimizing costs and losses

• professional legal care​​

 

Proactive Law Approach

• balancing risk and reward

• achieving desired outcomes

• eliminating causes of problems

• shared care and team approach

• lawyers supporting clients’ self-care​​​​​​​