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This week, I've been spending a lot of time with my lawyer. It's nothing serious (and nothing that would excite my mother, in her ongoing quest to marry me off) - we're just updating some of our client contracts, so I wanted to make sure we're not missing anything. But it did remind me of one thing: as a budding entrepreneur, I found few things more annoying than lawyers.

I don't want to sound like I'm picking on lawyers here. Accountants and bank managers and consultants can be just as bad at times. But I think there's something about lawyers that makes them the natural enemy of entrepreneurship. The thing is, they're trained to say no. They spend their entire time learning about all the things you can't do, and all the mistakes people have made in the past. In other words, they're basically professional cynics: they're trained (and paid) to pick holes in all of your best-laid plans.

When I started out, this drove me crazy. For me, there's nothing more damaging to an entrepreneur than negativity. If you're surrounded by people who keep telling you that you're going to fail, chances are that you'll probably end up agreeing with them – and we all know where that leads. From day one, I’ve tried to steer well clear of negative people – and this includes 90% of the lawyers I've ever met. 

It probably doesn’t help that small businesses are usually a pathetic source of fees. So unless your lawyer is far-sighted enough to play the long game, you either have to settle for a rubbish firm, or for the most junior people at a good firm. And since these people are usually straight out of law school, they wouldn’t recognise good business sense if it jumped up and bit them in the indemnity clause. They’re smart, and they know the law; they just don’t usually know how to apply it in the real world. They see everything in black and white, and refuse to acknowledge any shades of grey. And they’re far more concerned with telling you what you can’t do, rather than what you can do.

It always made me laugh in the early days when we’d send them contracts, and they’d send back a huge list of changes for us to demand. The fact that this was a huge multinational, which used the same contracts for everyone and was unlikely to have them re-written for a piddling little outfit like ours, just didn’t seem to occur to them. Or they’d warn us of the dire HR consequences of our latest plan, which never seemed to materialise (after we ignored them and went ahead anyway).

Actually I don't really dislike lawyers - just bad lawyers. We’ve finally found a great one, and suddenly I don’t know what I’d do without him. He never tries to blind me with science (my biggest pet hate), he understands how to balance legal priorities with commercial ones, and on the couple of occasions when it’s been necessary, he’s quietly and calmly defused potential powder-kegs. If I’d only found him four years ago, my feelings towards the legal profession would have been more like my mother's.