You don't have a legal problem. You have a business problem with legal consequences

A client came to see me once, genuinely furious, wanting to sue a supplier who'd let him down badly. He had a decent claim — I'd have backed him to win. He also depended on that supplier for around forty percent of his stock, with no alternative lined up. Suing them would have felt magnificent for about a week, then quietly strangled his company as the supply dried up.

We didn't sue. We used the strength of the claim as leverage, renegotiated from a position of power, and he came out with better terms and a supplier who suddenly treated him with real respect. That's not a legal outcome. It's a business one — the law was simply the tool that got him there. Charge straight at the courtroom because that's where the law lives, and I'd have won him a judgment and lost him the business.

This is the most important thing I know about working with lawyers, so let me give you something you can actually use: a way to frame any problem before you pick up the phone, so you get advice pointed at what you want instead of at the nearest legal argument.

Four questions to answer before you call a lawyer

Run these four questions first — on your own, or on the back of an envelope. They take five minutes and they change the entire conversation that follows, because they force you to define success in business terms rather than legal ones.

1. What do I actually want here? Not "to win" — the real thing. To get paid? To keep this customer? To exit cleanly? To make a competitor stop? To be able to sleep? Name it, because it's the target everything else should serve.
2. What is it worth? Put a rough number on the outcome. A £4,000 dispute and a £400,000 dispute deserve completely different amounts of your money, time and attention — and a lot of legal misery comes from spending £400,000-effort on a £4,000 problem.
3. What's the relationship worth? Is the person on the other side a one-off, or someone (a customer, supplier, co-owner) worth more to you over the next five years than this single issue? The answer often flips the right strategy from "fight" to "fix."
4. What's my walk-away? What happens if you do nothing, or accept a modest settlement, and move on? Knowing your realistic alternative is what stops you being dragged into an expensive fight by pride rather than sense.

Bring those four answers to your solicitor and you'll get far better advice, because you've told them what winning looks like. Skip them and you've handed a technician a legal question — and a legal question is all you'll get back.

Three situations where the legal answer is the wrong one

Let me show you how this plays out, because the pattern repeats constantly.

The debt you shouldn't chase

A customer owes you five thousand pounds and won't pay. Legally it's easy: you have a claim, go get judgment. But run the four questions. Does the customer actually have the money — or will you win a judgment you can never enforce and throw good money after bad? Is this a one-off, or a good client having a genuinely rough quarter who'll be worth ten times that over five years? Sometimes the answer is a firm letter, sometimes a quiet call and a payment plan, sometimes — honestly — writing it off, tightening your terms, and moving on. The law says "you can sue." Only the business context tells you whether you should.

The dispute you should settle

You're in the right, they're in the wrong, and every fibre of you wants your day in court to prove it. I understand completely — and it's often the most expensive feeling in business. A dispute carries costs that never appear in the legal budget: the months of your attention it eats, the relationship it burns, the grinding distraction of it while your competitors build. Weigh all of that against what you'd actually recover, and a swift settlement is frequently the commercial win even though it feels like a moral defeat. Being right isn't always worth what it costs to prove it.

The clause that's really about the relationship

Two founders come to sort a shareholder agreement and get twitchy about the leaver provisions — what happens to a founder's shares if they walk. On the surface, a drafting question. Underneath, it's a conversation they've been avoiding about trust, commitment and what happens if this doesn't work out. The valuable thing I can do isn't just draft a clause — it's help them have the honest conversation the clause stands in for, so the document reflects a real agreement rather than papering over a silent disagreement. The legal work is the easy part; getting two people genuinely aligned is where the value is.

Technician or adviser — and how to tell which you've got

This is the difference between a legal technician and a legal adviser, and you're choosing between them every time you instruct a firm.

A technician answers the question you asked. Can you sue? Yes, here's how. Useful when the question is the right one — but it puts all the thinking on you and optimises for a clean legal result you may not want.

An adviser answers the question behind the question. They know a dispute costs more than its fees, a customer is worth more than one invoice, the goal is the outcome and not the argument. So the advice comes out differently: you're told when a fight isn't worth having, the commercial option sits alongside the legal one, and someone is weighing what you'd weigh if you had their expertise.

Here's how to tell which you're dealing with, quickly: mention the commercial context — "this customer matters to me," "I can't afford a public row," "I want out but not at any cost" — and watch what they do with it. An adviser seizes on it and reshapes their advice around it. A technician nods politely and answers the narrow legal question anyway. Now you know.

The one-line version

You don't have a legal problem. You've got a business you're trying to protect, grow or get out of, and a situation with a legal edge to it. Define what you actually want first, and the law becomes a tool in service of it rather than a runaway train. The lawyer worth having is the one who never loses sight of which is which.

Got a situation that's more tangled than it looks? Let's talk it through — bring your four answers, and we'll work out how the law can get you what you're actually after.

This article is one solicitor's view and general information, not legal advice — always take advice on your own situation before acting. Buzz Solicitors is a trading name of AD Solicitors Limited, a recognised body regulated by the SRA (no. 8011228).

Robert Festenstein

Solicitor · Head of Legal, Buzz Solicitors

A solicitor with more than two decades' experience in commercial law, dispute resolution, insolvency and judicial review. Robert acts for businesses, directors and individuals on the matters that carry real consequence — and leads Buzz Solicitors.