Attorney Rachel Young Interview

This week I had the pleasure to interview attorney Rachel Young and learn more about being an attorney, working with an attorney, and an overall better understanding of contracts. Rachel currently has her own law office, located in San Diego, CA, which handles legal matters ranging from Family Law to Entertainment Contract Negotiations, which is the precise area she will be able to help my business with.  She has been practicing for about 8-9 years and from the looks of things she is doing very well. I asked Rachel some questions during our interview and two questions that gave me some great feedback for my own business when creating a contract; what are some key elements to making the contract good? And secondly, has she dealt with liability issues before?

When creating a contract Rachel pointed out everything that we want to go into the contract should be written and discussed by both parties before initial negotiations begin. She said this would be important for my business so we are sure to provide our clients a clear and precise vision of the services we will be providing them. Rachel explained to me about a simple case she had in which an event planning company was hired to provide a DJ for a family reunion. The event planning company hired the DJ and the day of the reunion the DJ was present but did not perform to the family’s expectations. Rachel explained to me that because the event planning company was only hired to provide the family with a DJ and this was the only service in the contract the event planning company was not held liable for the faulty performance of the DJ. Although this did not look great for the company, the liability fell solely on the DJ and his pay had to be renegotiated based on his actual performance. In the end it was good the event planning company specifically said in the contract what service they would provide and moving forward they would include in their contracts what would happen in case of situation like this, or they would only refer services to clients and require a finders fee.

This example Rachel told me about was the perfect example of a situation I might encounter with my business, so I now know how I can avoid a potential situation like this, and if it does happen how to handle it appropriately. Rachel’s suggestion of only doing the referring and charging a finder’s fee was a great suggestion that I had not thought about, which will open up more service opportunities for my business.

At the end of our interview I ask Rachel if she would consider doing consulting with my business on our client contracts and replied, “yes of course, but then I will have to charge you for my services and recommendations”.  To which I replied, “ yes of course, just don’t hurt my pockets too much”. We both laughed at the comments and ended the interview laughing. If you are in San Diego and need an attorney I would suggest hiring Attorney Rachel Young.