Where a lawyer’s job ends, and what is left open
A lawyer’s work ends where a question can no longer be answered by the law, and the same is true of the tax adviser with the figures, the notary with the form of legal acts and the doctor with anything medical. Each of them answers one precise question with authority, and must do so before anyone else. What lies outside their fields is what you do with those answers, or why something keeps repeating when every piece is in order. That is where the work of Lex Fati begins: once those professionals have acted, alongside their continuing work, and never in their place.
In brief
- Any legal, tax, notarial or medical question belongs to a professional, and that professional comes first.
- Within their field, each professional speaks with authority; outside it, their opinion weighs no more than any sensible person’s, even when it sounds like expert advice.
- When our part begins, everyone keeps theirs: your lawyer says whether a contract is valid, your doctor answers anything medical, and you decide whether to buy or sell.
- What remains open once everyone has done their job well is usually a whole that does not hold together, a repetition, or a decision that never quite gets made.
- Declining what belongs to another field is part of our work, and we say so in the first conversation, even when the person is willing to pay.
In this article
- What each professional answers
- Why does the professional have to come first?
- What is left open when everyone has done their job well?
- Alongside, never instead
- Every question has an owner
- What should you do when your advisers disagree?
- How do you know whether it is still a matter for your lawyer?
- Saying no is part of the work
- Frequently asked questions
What each professional answers
When an important situation becomes complicated, there are almost always several professionals around it. Each has a precise field and one question they answer better than anyone else. It is worth being clear about this, because the boundary of our work is drawn exactly along the edge of theirs.
The lawyer
Your lawyer tells you what the law allows, what it forbids and what it protects. They read the contracts, the articles of association, the shareholders’ agreements and the wills, weigh the risks of each route, know the deadlines and, when necessary, act for you against the other side. Their loyalty is to your position, which is precisely why their view is partial by design: they see your situation in terms of what can be claimed, lost or defended.
What lies outside their brief is telling you what you want. They can explain exactly what happens if you sell your stake, sign that agreement or leave things as they are. The choice between those possibilities remains yours, and a good lawyer is the first to say so.
The tax adviser
The tax adviser puts figures on each decision: what it costs to sell now or later, to hand assets over during your lifetime or let them pass on your death, to restructure a holding company or leave it alone. They turn what you experience as options into numbers, and they often find that the obvious route carries a cost nobody had looked at.
Those figures are indispensable, but they do not decide. A transaction can be the most efficient on paper and the least desirable for you, and no calculation will tell you which of the two matters more.
The notary
In much of continental Europe, the notary gives formal shape to many acts that are meant to last, such as a gift, a will, or the formation or restructuring of a company. The notary is bound to impartiality, represents neither side and must make sure that those signing understand what they sign. Readers from common-law countries will know a much narrower role under the same name; on the Continent, the notary’s deed is often what gives such acts the form the law requires.
That is why the deed comes at the end, even if the notary’s advice on form is often sought earlier. By the time you sit down in the notary’s office, the decision should already have been made: the notary is there to see that it is done properly, not to make it with you. Whether anything you signed before then already binds you is a question for your lawyer.
The doctor
Anything medical belongs to your doctor, who comes before anyone else, ourselves included. In that area, the doctor’s judgement is the only one that counts.
When a professional steps outside their field
Each of these professionals answers well because their field has limits. When they step outside it, like the lawyer who advises you to sell because “it is about time” or the tax adviser with views on who ought to run the company, their word carries no more weight than that of any other sensible person. Yet it still sounds like expert advice. It is a quiet risk and worth recognising: a professional’s authority stays in their voice, even once they have strayed well beyond their expertise.
Why does the professional have to come first?
Because without established facts there is nothing solid to think about. As long as a question can be answered with a document, a figure or a visit to the doctor, it must be answered by whoever is trained to answer it, and before anyone else. Anything built on an open technical question will shift the moment someone answers it.
Much of what feels like a blockage has a technical cause. A share sale that will not move may hinge on a pre-emption clause in the articles that nobody has reread; an estate that will not divide, on forced-heirship rules that nobody has worked through; a building project that stalls, on a permit application that nobody has checked in full. Until that cause has been looked for where it belongs, nobody can tell whether anything else remains, not you and not us.
Then there is the law’s own clock. Deadlines run regardless of how you feel, and it is your lawyer and your tax adviser who know which ones apply to you and when they expire. Calm reflection is valuable; calm reflection while a deadline passes is an expensive luxury. When a request reaches us with a deadline attached, the person needs their lawyer before they need us, as we explain in why haste is a signal.
A good share of the requests we decline are exactly that: situations that have not yet been through the professional they belong to. An estate that will not divide, and that no lawyer has yet examined, is a case for a lawyer. A medical concern never raised with a doctor is a case for a doctor. We say so plainly, even when the person is willing to pay, because accepting at that point would mean taking a place that belongs to someone else.
What is left open when everyone has done their job well?
Suppose the order has been respected. The lawyer has read the documents, the tax adviser has run the figures, the notary has formalised what needed formalising and the doctor has said what they had to say. Often that is enough, and it is what we would wish for anyone. Sometimes something still remains open, and it tends to take one of these forms.
The first is the whole that does not hold together. Everyone is right individually, and the whole does not work. The lawyer has optimised for protection, the tax adviser for cost, the notary for form; each piece of advice is impeccable in its own domain and, taken together, they pull in different directions. Nobody has been engaged to hold the whole together, except you.
The second is repetition. Some people sign well-drafted agreements with sound figures and watch each partnership end the way the last one did, with different people and in a different sector. A good contract puts the consequences in order, but it does not explain why the same shape keeps returning. That question is no longer in the file, and we describe it in when a pattern repeats.
The third is the decision that does not come. The options have been costed, the documents are ready, and the signing date has been set and moved more than once. There is no shortage of information; if anything, there is too much. What is missing cannot be added to any report, because it is not technical.
The fourth is the weight of carrying it. Some decisions cannot be discussed with anyone nearby: the staff depend on you, the family is involved, your friends all know one another. Your lawyer listens with the file open, as they should, and what you feel as you sign is not part of that file. We have written about that isolation in no one to talk to.
And there is a fifth, harder to name: meaning. Selling the company can be right in every column of the report and still be, for you, the end of something. No professional has that question in their brief, and quite rightly so. It is exactly where our work takes place, alongside that of your professionals.
Alongside, never instead
When a situation reaches us after it has been through your professionals, they do not step aside. Your lawyer carries on with the matter, your tax adviser keeps working on the figures and your doctor remains your doctor. Our work runs next to theirs and concerns something else: not the file, but the person who has to decide.
What your lawyer has told you remains what your lawyer has told you, with its full authority. Their work and ours do not overlap, so there is nothing to review and nothing to qualify. If a legal, financial or medical question comes up in a conversation with us, such as a date, a clause or an amount, that point goes back to whoever is responsible for it before we continue.
You decide what you tell each of them. Whatever is useful, you carry from one conversation to the other yourself, and nobody’s permission is needed. We also summarise how our work sits beside that of your advisers in our answer to whether we work with lawyers and advisers.
This separation protects you. If our work could change what your lawyer says, you would have two contradictory voices on the same matter. Because we deal with something else, each voice keeps its weight.
Every question has an owner
The simplest way to see the division is to look at the questions rather than the professions. Almost everything a person asks in a difficult moment has a natural recipient.
- “Is this contract valid?”, “What happens if I do not sign?”, “What can I claim?”: your lawyer.
- “What does it cost me to do this now, or later?”, “Which structure makes sense?”: your tax adviser.
- “How do I put this in writing so that it holds and lasts?”: your notary, together with your lawyer.
- “Can I carry on at this pace?”: your doctor, before anyone else.
- “Do I buy, sell or hold?”: you, with your advisers’ figures in front of you.
That is why certain things always go back to where they belong: saying whether a contract is valid, commenting on what your doctor has told you, and recommending that you buy, sell or hold an asset. It is the right division, and we apply it every time. Anyone who answers those questions from outside their field is exposing you, however confident they sound.
That leaves one last kind of question, the kind with no recipient on that list: “Why is it happening again?”, “What do I really want to keep?”, “Why am I not signing when everything is ready?”, “How do I carry this when I cannot talk about it?” That no professional is assigned to them simply means they sit in nobody’s technical brief. They are the questions we work with, alongside everyone else and with complete discretion.
What should you do when your advisers disagree?
It happens often in large decisions: the lawyer recommends one route because it protects you better, the tax adviser another because it costs less, the notary points out a formal requirement and the bank has its own reading. Each is right within their own remit, and the person who has to decide ends up refereeing between disciplines they have not mastered. It is uncomfortable, and it is normal.
Before weighing anything, ask each of them to say in one sentence what their advice is aiming at: protecting your assets from a risk, reducing the tax bill, saving time, keeping peace in the family. Many contradictions disappear once it is clear that each piece of advice serves a different priority. What remains is a choice between priorities, which is something else.
If the contradiction persists, put your advisers round the same table, with you present. A technical disagreement should be settled between the people who understand the technical detail, and it is not your job to translate between the language of company law and the language of tax. If what remains is doubt about the quality of a piece of advice, the answer is technical too: a second opinion from another lawyer or another tax adviser.
Ask each of them, too, where their field ends. A good professional knows and says so without embarrassment, and the answer tells you how much weight to give their views beyond that line.
Once all of that is done, the choice between priorities is still there: protect or simplify, pay less or decide sooner, keep or let go. No report contains it, because it depends on what matters to you. It is one of the typical forms of what remains open, and often the one that stays on the table longest.
How do you know whether it is still a matter for your lawyer?
There is a simple test: look at how the question begins, the one that keeps coming back. If it starts with “Can I…?”, “Am I entitled to…?”, “How much…?”, “Is it valid…?” or “What happens if…?”, it still belongs to a professional, and the sensible course is to put it to them first. If it starts with “Why again…?”, “What do I actually want…?” or “Why am I not doing it…?”, it is of another kind. And if that question touches on anything medical, whatever its form, the first person to see is your doctor.
Before concluding that the technical part is done, check three things. Whether your adviser has seen all the documents, and not only the ones you chose to show. Whether you have read their answer in full and understand it well enough to explain it in your own words. And whether you have asked the questions you found awkward to ask: what it will cost, what happens in the worst case, whether a second opinion would be wise.
One honest question to yourself belongs here too. Sometimes a conversation like ours is sought precisely to avoid hearing a technical answer you dread: the price of an exit, the reach of a clause, what the doctor will say. That answer will still be there, and it is better to know it before deciding anything. If you recognise that impulse in yourself, the next step is your lawyer, your tax adviser or your doctor, not us.
If, after that check, a question of the second kind remains and your advisers are still looking after their part, a conversation with us may make sense. The three questions before deciding are a good way to set it out beforehand, alone and on paper.
Saying no is part of the work
All of this has a practical consequence: at Lex Fati we decline part of what reaches us, and we do so deliberately. Taking on a matter that belongs to another field would cost you time and money.
A professional who accepts every engagement is not being generous; they are simply selling. In an area like ours, accepting everything is the first warning sign, and referring someone to a doctor or a lawyer when the matter is theirs is one of the marks of serious work in this field.
Everything begins with a conversation over WhatsApp or by telephone with Tony Alcalá, who works in English, German and Spanish. Nothing is decided about your matter in that conversation, only whether it is ours. If it belongs to a lawyer, a tax adviser or a doctor, we tell you so and name the field. If it is ours, we agree, before anything starts, what we will do, over what period and for what fixed amount, as set out in what happens before we accept a case.
One thing does not change in any case: the division of roles. Your lawyer remains your lawyer, your tax adviser your tax adviser and your doctor your doctor, and the decision remains yours.
Frequently asked questions
Can a private consultancy replace a lawyer or a doctor?
No. Your lawyer, tax adviser, notary and doctor remain in charge of their fields before, during and after any conversation with us. Our work begins once they have acted and runs alongside theirs, concerned with something else: what remains open when the technical part is done. If your situation has not yet been through the professional it belongs to, we will tell you so in the first conversation.
Do I have to tell my lawyer that I am consulting you?
That is your decision, and either choice is legitimate. Our work does not interfere with your lawyer’s, because it deals with something else, and it does not depend on their involvement. If a deadline, a clause or a document comes up in conversation, we will ask you to take it to your lawyer before we go on. For our part, your enquiry stays between you and the two of us.
Can you tell me whether to sign a contract or sell my company?
No; those questions belong to your professionals and to you. Whether a contract is valid, and what follows from it, is for your lawyer to examine; what selling, waiting or holding would cost is for your tax adviser to calculate; the decision is yours, with those figures in front of you. What we can look at with you is something else: what stops you deciding once the figures are in, what keeps repeating, or what weighs on that choice beyond the numbers.
What should I do if my lawyer and my tax adviser disagree?
First ask each of them which priority their advice serves: legal certainty, a lower tax bill, speed. Many contradictions are really different priorities. If the disagreement is technical, ask them to discuss it with each other in your presence, or seek a second professional opinion. Once that is done, what remains is deciding which priority comes first, and that decision depends on what matters to you.
What happens if a legal or medical question comes up during a consultation?
It goes back to your professional before we continue. If a deadline, a clause, a figure nobody has checked or anything medical comes up, we say so, and the matter passes to your lawyer, your tax adviser or your doctor, who is the right person to look at it. We carry on with what belongs to us, and the professional takes care of the rest. The correct order still applies once the work has begun.
If your situation requires it, present it.
Request access