Customer Reviews

The Complete Guide to Contract Lawyering: What Every Lawyer and Law Firm Needs to Know About Temporary Legal Services

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is an excellent resource for a rapidly developing area of legal practice. It describes the history and context of contract lawyering, discusses ethical, tax and malpractice concerns, and includes charts, graphs, worksheets and five useful appendices. It even offers summaries of relevant state, local and national ethics opinions. Anyone contemplating becoming or hiring a contract lawyer should read this book.

What I liked about the book is that it dealt effectively with the questions about lawyer temping that I wouldn't have thought to ask and proceeded to answer them all. I also liked the step-by-step guide for marketing yourself as a contract lawyer. Best of all, tho, it's got sample forms and contracts and covers issues like malpractice insurance, independent contractor status and all the ethical issues involved with being a contract lawyer.

There are significant risks and benefits with contract lawyering arrangements. For those practitioners who are, or who may become involved in such arrangements, this book is an extremely useful and cost-effective tool in developing an awareness of several critical issues. The book is readable, without jargon, and does not fail to address a variety of problem areas, namely conflicts of interest, client consent, billing and professional malpractice liability coverage.

This is an excellent and thoroughly-researched resource for anyone considering entering into a temporary legal relationship, either as a contracting attorney or hiring attorney. It's well-organized and thoughtfully written, and one of the chapters even includes sample letters of engagements and retention agreements, a handy starting point for newcomers to the world contract lawyering.

This is a posting from the new addition, which applies here too:

BE WARNED! Of the 15 people who give the book 5 stars half are anonymous, and the other half have only written reviews of this book, they have never written a review for any other book. These reviewers have sought out every copy of this book to write 5 star reviews. Reviewer "Law Practice Management Magazine" wrote 5 glowing reviews of this book.

I would bet money that the author or someone close to the author wrote all of these glowing reviews, especially since there are so many reviews from legitimate people which state this book is pure trash. I have seen it before, and reported it to Amazon in the past.

I also contacted Law Practice Management Magazine letting them know that one of the reviewers here is using their magazine's name.

I just started my own firm and am doing lots of independent contractor work. I had no idea what to do! This book explains everything in an easy-to-understand fashion, and it even includes a sample independent contractor agreement, which is what I needed most. Overall, it's a good resource for any contract lawyer.

Overall, a useful guide. However, it suffers the failing of books that are locked into a specific timeframe. Law firm practice has continued to evolve greatly, and some of the advice and examples are very dated. Get the newer edition (2003), and you will be better served.