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Courses/Business/Business Performance and Improvement

How To Manage Lawyers & Legal Fees

This course provides loads of tips to help you manage lawyers better and reduce legal fees, delays and frustrations.

Created byStephen Priddle
4.5
(63 reviews)
BeginnerUpdated Jan 14, 2025
How To Manage Lawyers & Legal Fees

What You'll Learn

check_circleReduce legal fees, delays and trouble with lawyers.
check_circleDeal with lawyers’ risk-averse mindset wisely.
check_circleUse the lawyer as a reviewer, not a drafter, and shorten what they write.
check_circleLearn what tasks you may be able to do instead of a lawyer.
check_circleDiscuss challenging lawyers and their bills.
check_circleHear tales from experiences with lawyers and the lessons learned.

About This Course

Accountants and business people are often involved in engaging, selecting, supervising, and working with lawyers from law firms, and in large organizations, inside counsel. This is often expensive, frustrating, and slow.

This course, taught by veteran CFO and course presenter Stephen Priddle, CPA, CA, CMA, provides dozens of tips to help you in this domain and should help reduce legal fees. It even helps in dealing with internal lawyers, where you are not worried about a bill but must overcome delays. There are dozens of examples of real-life lawyer work situations and the lessons you can learn from them. Reducing legal fees from lawyer-drafted materials is possible and will be explained. And yes, there will be a few lawyer jokes!

Note: A portion of this course content is the same as in Stephen Priddle’s course, Practical Tips for Controllers & CFOs Part 2, which over 11,000 have attended, as well as the NFP and Government Accountants versions of this course.

AGENDA

  • Dealing with their risk-averse mindset wisely
  • The lawyer as reviewer, not drafter
  • Rewriting what they wrote without getting in trouble
  • What things you may be able to do instead of a lawyer
  • Challenging lawyers and managing projects
  • Selecting lawyers and firms
  • Shortening the meetings
  • Questioning their bills
  • Knowing when to exclude them
  • Tales from experiences with lawyers and lessons from them

PAST FEEDBACK

  • I overall enjoyed the tips around the lawyers and contract drafting
  • This will help me at work, especially when I have to deal with lawyers
  • Great course. So many good tips on lawyers & legal fees
  • I liked how you dealt with different types of negotiators (lawyers, etc.), and the creative ideas you shared
  • I did enjoy the course and practical examples (and jokes… lawyer ones!)
  • I thought the course was good info. Anything we can do to help minimize costs of going to the lawyers all the time!
  • Really enjoyed how to deal with lawyers· You gave me confidence in my approach, and I thank you for that
  • I like when you translated into legalese
  • All true, I was a lawyer (and a CPA)

Your Instructor

Stephen Priddle
Stephen Priddle
menu_book31 courses
star6,567 reviews

Stephen Priddle, CPA, CA, CMA is the President and Founder of Practical PD, Courses for Accountants. Stephen is also the Vice-President, Finance & CFO of Fidus Analytics Inc.  In addition, he is a Board member, co-owner and Corporate Secretary of the SureWx group of companies, a global aviation business, which he was the CFO for 12 years previously. An engaging and experienced instructor, Stephen Priddle weaves practical tips together with stories from his business experience and input from participants. Seasoning the mix with a dose of accounting humour, he serves up useful and dynamic courses which have been attended by over 36,000. When speaking, he is candid about errors he has made in his career and the lessons that can be learned from them. Someone said: “humans are hard-wired to learn from stories” – Stephen is in part a business/accounting storyteller, who draws out the lessons from the stories. Stephen’s teaching experience includes presenting courses for over 70 accounting bodies and organizations in Canada and abroad. He has been a Session Leader in the CPA Professional Education Program, and has taught at the University of Toronto and Carleton University. He has moderated in the legacy CA, CMA and CGA program. Stephen is a prolific author. His published business, accounting and finance cases are used by many organizations. Stephen has nearly 40 years of varied business experience. After working with KPMG for five years, he moved into industry, where he has worked for public and private companies. He has gained a wide range of experience in financial reporting, treasury management, merger & acquisition and other business matters. Through his courses, he interacts with hundreds of financial leaders a year and thus stays on the leading edge in terms of best practices and hot topics. Stephen obtained his CPA, CA and CMA designations following graduation from Carleton University with an Honours Bachelor of Commerce degree, accounting major.

Credit Information

What Students Are Saying

4.5
Student's Choice
63 reviews

Frequently Asked Questions

We are a registered provider with 327+ associations and regulatory bodies worldwide. We operate across 29 global markets including Canada, the US, Australia, and the UK. Every course page clearly displays its specific accreditations. Upon completion, you receive a professional certificate that can be validated online. Our certificates include all necessary accreditation details, credit hours, and completion dates, and are formatted specifically to meet the submission requirements of most global regulatory bodies.