There are many reasons to engage a law firm or a solicitor to assist you with a legal matter that you may be experiencing. This article will describe the top 10 reasons why seeking legal advice can benefit you.
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Letters sent from law firms have more impact.
When you are involved in a dispute with a person, a company, a government body, or any other entity, you may feel like you don’t know how to phrase your position or persuade the relevant party to see your point of view. You may have already written to them or spoken to them by phone, but all of your arguments are not being considered. They may be ignoring you or they may have raised their own arguments against you. You may feel powerless in this situation.
When a solicitor becomes involved, one of the best courses of action to resolve a dispute is to send a letter to the relevant party. Legal letters are written in a particular style and are almost always written on the law firm’s letterhead, which carries with it a significance that a personally written letter does not have. It is a common occurrence for minor matters to be resolved relatively quickly once one of the parties to the dispute engages a solicitor. However, there is also a possibility that engaging a solicitor will force the hand of your opponent and they too will engage a solicitor to respond. While this may result in the dispute being prolonged, there is also the possibility that once your opponent consults with their own solicitor, they are informed of their low prospects of success and they quietly concede their position. Being upfront and honest with your own solicitor at the outset of a matter will usually result in your own prospects of success being established early on, leading to the best outcome overall.
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Solicitors can see the matter objectively.
When you have been involved in a dispute or any other legal matter, it can often affect you quite personally on an emotional level. You may feel like you have been personally wronged, and you may feel that there is some principle that must be upheld. Once you consult with a solicitor, they will approach the matter objectively, dispassionately, or otherwise free from emotion. This will result in you receiving an objective opinion of the matter, without all of your own personal views which may be influencing your judgement.
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Solicitors can summarise the issues that are actually in dispute.
When you provide your instructions to a solicitor, they will usually prepare a letter of advice, or another document that notes down all of the relevant details that you have given to them, or that they have identified, in addition to outlining issues that are actually in dispute. Disputes can often involve many minor disagreements, and a solicitor will be able to accurately assess which of those are most important and which are most relevant to succeeding in Court. Personal grievances should be set aside so that only the legal issues can be focused on.
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Solicitors can calculate the losses actually incurred.
There may be times when you feel that you have been wronged as a result of entering into a contract, or by some other dispute or disagreement, however, you just aren’t sure how much you have actually lost. You may feel like you have been left with much less than what you thought you would end up with, but you just aren’t sure how exactly to go about quantifying how much you lost, or how much you are entitled to in the first place. In order to resolve the dispute, a solicitor will quantify the losses, whereby they will first work out the rights and obligations of the parties, and then calculate how much each party should have received in comparison with what they actually received. If those calculations require the assistance of another qualified professional such as an accountant, solicitors can engage with those professionals and present them with the facts in a clear manner, providing them with the framework that is derived from the relevant contracts or law.
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Solicitors can refer you to or engage the right professional to resolve your legal issue.
There are often several elements to legal disputes, and one professional may not be sufficient to resolve the matter. For example, engaging an appropriate barrister to present your case to the Courts can be one of the greatest sources of value that a solicitor can provide. There is a significant benefit to be derived from the ability to produce documents outlining your legal matter, providing them to a member of Counsel, and then discussing the matter to resolve it. If you were to try to resolve a legal matter on your own, it may never reach the level of sophistication or in-depth legal analysis compared to when your own solicitor briefs Counsel and they progress the matter on your behalf. Engaging a barrister to present your position to the appropriate Court, or to represent you in a mediation, can have a significant impact on the outcome of the case.
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Solicitors can persist beyond when you would have given up.
Due to the objective nature of engaging a legal professional to assist you with a dispute, they are not going to give up just because the other side has raised some defences or otherwise not immediately given in to your demands. Being personally involved in a legal dispute can be mentally and emotionally draining, which is why solicitors can provide more than just a monetary benefit because you can offload all of that concern and worry onto someone who will deal with it just like any other day in the office. Solicitors will keep a list of current matters and will not be deterred just because a matter has not been resolved in several months or years. Retaining a legal professional who is determined to resolve the matter for you can often result in a positive outcome due to their persistence, eventually leading to a resolution of the matter.
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Solicitors can help you achieve the best outcome.
The goal at the outset of any matter is to provide the highest level of benefit to the client, although this may not be possible in every matter. It is a wonderful result if the client can either receive the non-monetary outcome that they were seeking, receive a payment from a dispute being settled, receive a payment as a result of a Court order being obtained, or otherwise receive a payment to resolve the matter. Without the involvement of solicitors, the client may not have achieved their aim or received any payment at all. This is a fundamental aspect of commercial litigation, the potential benefits to be received should be worth more than what is expected to be incurred in legal fees.
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Solicitors can provide non-monetary value.
The benefits of engaging a law firm to handle your matter can be worth much more than just how much money they can obtain for you. The burden of dealing with a legal matter can be draining and time-consuming. Paying a professional to handle the matter for you allows you to take a break, de-stress and take a step back from the issue. This alone is worth its weight in gold and is one of the key sources of value in engaging a legal expert. Solicitors can provide a sense of relief in that you have taken all reasonable and necessary steps to resolve the matter before it is too late. You might be able to sleep better knowing that you aren’t going to receive any unwanted emails or phone calls related to the matter, as they are all being directed to your solicitors.
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Solicitors will give you an honest review of your prospects of success.
Often when clients are involved in a legal matter, emotions can become mixed up with facts, leading them to see a matter differently from how a third party might view the situation. The benefit of engaging a solicitor is that they will be able to objectively give you an honest account of the facts that are relevant, in combination with their assessment of what the outcome might be. This advice is valuable as it provides clients with an early indication of whether this might be a matter that is worth incurring further legal fees or whether the matter should not be pursued further.
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Solicitors can provide a piercing view of the matter, providing solutions to problems that you didn’t even know you had.
Solicitors can identify legal issues and provide solutions so as to give you the best prospects of success. This could involve legal advice regarding the admissibility of evidence, the reliability of witnesses, the invalidity of contracts, misrepresentations, causes of action that you may have, or otherwise just providing the value of having a person who is experienced and accustomed to the rigours of legal matters provide their opinion.
It is a common occurrence for a client to engage a solicitor for assistance with a particular legal matter, only to be informed that their focus should be elsewhere entirely. This happens particularly often with financial matters. Clients can become attached to one outcome, having been involved in a dispute for some time, with their focus only being on overcoming the other side, without considering that there may be more direct alternatives that would benefit them more. The sunk cost fallacy is when a person cannot realise that they have already incurred a loss, and the best option going forward may be to disregard that loss, and to instead focus on another path instead. Engaging a solicitor to assist you at the earliest stage will allow you to develop a plan to achieve your goals and keep you protected from potential pitfalls, allowing you to focus on the really important things.
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Please contact our experienced solicitors now to discuss your options in a no-obligation consultation with the experts. We will guide you step-by-step and ensure that you obtain the best possible outcome for your circumstances. Please call our Brisbane solicitors at (07) 3009 8444 or our Sydney solicitors at (02) 9307 8900 to discuss your matter further.
This blog published by Rostron Carlyle Rojas Solicitors is intended as general information only and is not legal advice on any subject matter. By viewing the blog posts, the reader understands that there is no solicitor-client relationship between the reader and the blog publisher. The blog should not be used as a substitute for legal advice from a legal practitioner, and readers are urged to consult RCR Solicitors for any legal matters.
