All clients expect their lawyer to be a legal technician and to provide answers to their legal questions. However, many clients welcome their lawyer also acting as a trusted counselor who provides solutions to their business, as well as legal, problems. In this sense, a counselor is an experienced attorney who can provide a client with practical counseling and guidance because he or she has an intimate understanding of the client's ownership structure, industry, business and strategic plans of their business.

At Barley Snyder, our attorneys combine strong legal experience with a deep understanding of each client's business needs and goals to bring a common sense approach to each client's legal needs and to provide the service, answers and value that support - rather than impede - our clients' business goals. In our role as counselor, we learn our clients' businesses, employ sound legal and business judgment and harness years of experience in many different industries to enhance the advice and guidance that we offer. In this role, we step back from a problem and look at it from many angles, rather than delivering our legal advice in a vacuum. Perhaps our most valuable "deliverable" is the judgment we employ in analyzing matters. Our role as counselor to many of our clients is one of the ways in which we differentiate ourselves from other law firms.

Many companies need legal help on a broader scale, and on a more consistent basis, than the typical outside attorney can provide, either to support the client's existing inside legal resources or to function as "outside general counsel" when companies do not have inside legal resources. For these clients, we act as "special counsel", a role which can take many forms. For further discussion of our role as special counsel, please click here.

Being an effective counselor to our clients requires that our legal services be designed to provide the right level of legal support and guidance to meet each client's needs and budget. To help clients determine what mix of services they need from us, we often utilize a "legal review", a simple, but comprehensive, process designed to identify a client's business and legal needs and/or potential risks. The services we provide include:

• day-to-day counsel on business, employment, collections and other specified areas to appropriate personnel within the company;
• specific work in specialized areas such as employee benefits, immigration, litigation, intellectual property law and others; and
• managing or overseeing legal matters being handled by other law firms when expertise does not exist in-house (or in-house counsel needs added support) to do so.