Most people will acknowledge that legal advice is expensive.  The most expensive legal advice, however, is the advice not followed.  Over the past couple of weeks I have had a couple of clients complain about the amount they were spending on legal fees.  Ironically, in both cases the amount was driven by their failure to follow the advice they were originally given.

In one case the party is in litigation.  At several points in the litigation we have been in strategically advantageous positions.  Contrary to our advice, the client repeatedly decided to have us freeze all work on the case while he attempted to negotiate settlement.  Each time we warned that the opposing party had not demonstrated any sincerity in prior settlement discussions and that stopping work on the litigation and restarting once settlement discussions failed would only add to the costs.  The client proceeded and - sure enough - when settlement failed, he complained about the costs of getting the case back to where it was prior to settlement discussions.

In a second case, the client asked about producing a product.  We advised that producing the product would likely result in allegations of infringement - even if there were good arguments about why the product did not infringe - and that the expense of fighting the allegations would be substantial.   The client decided to proceed with the project, but is now concerned about the expense of responding to the infringement allegations.

The most expensive piece of legal advice is that legal advice which is ignored.