Having gone through this myself, I agree with #1, it’s sometimes hard to find the right lawyer. But I guess that means start looking now.
Your #2 reason is tricky because individuals who need the advice to seek out a lawyer already don’t understand the value of having a lawyer, so they have no way to gauge the financial cost of hiring one. That makes a lawyer seem very expensive, when in reality sometimes the risk of not having one is much greater than the cost.
A few years ago I had a side project I wanted to turn into a company, but not enough money to do it full time. So I applied for a job. The employment contract they wanted me to sign had a non-compete that was vague enough that my side project would be in conflict with my job.
I was very worried about spending $2k to hire a lawyer to write an exclusion clause into my employment contract. It seemed like a lot of money to me. But I did it, and for the money I got a single paragraph of text that excluded my company from ever being considered “competition”. (Actually the real value was not the text, it was that my employer knew the text was written by an employment lawyer, so they accepted it and didn’t push back.) Later I left that job to start my own company, and then sold it a few years after that. Without the clause, I could have risked the entire thing. In retrospect, it was some of the best money I ever spent, worth every penny.
Your #2 reason is tricky because individuals who need the advice to seek out a lawyer already don’t understand the value of having a lawyer, so they have no way to gauge the financial cost of hiring one. That makes a lawyer seem very expensive, when in reality sometimes the risk of not having one is much greater than the cost.
A few years ago I had a side project I wanted to turn into a company, but not enough money to do it full time. So I applied for a job. The employment contract they wanted me to sign had a non-compete that was vague enough that my side project would be in conflict with my job.
I was very worried about spending $2k to hire a lawyer to write an exclusion clause into my employment contract. It seemed like a lot of money to me. But I did it, and for the money I got a single paragraph of text that excluded my company from ever being considered “competition”. (Actually the real value was not the text, it was that my employer knew the text was written by an employment lawyer, so they accepted it and didn’t push back.) Later I left that job to start my own company, and then sold it a few years after that. Without the clause, I could have risked the entire thing. In retrospect, it was some of the best money I ever spent, worth every penny.