The business world runs on contracts.  From your partnership agreement or articles of incorporation, to your employment agreements, to suppliers, vendors and distributors, the parameters for "done right" for practically everything you do are spelled out in your contracts.  Fortunately, most of the time, most of any contract is irrelevant.  You order some supplies, the vendor delivers and you send a check.  Or your customer awards a job, you do the work and get paid on time.  It doesn't matter whether you have a custom contract drawn up by your attorney, six pages of boilerplate that you found on the Internet, or even just a phone call or a handshake.  If everybody gets what they expected, there's nothing to fight over.

It's the deals that don't go as planned where the time and money you spent — or didn't spend — on the contract makes a difference.  All that boilerplate you skipped over may end up setting the rules for your fight.  Even the "one hand tied behind your back" rule.  The technical requirements of the job that weren't spelled out carefully could wind up being the evidence that shows you breached the contract, instead of the other guy.  A carelessly-drafted contract can cost you much more in time and energy than the deal would have been worth if everything had gone right.

Unfortunately, it's not always possible to figure out beforehand which contracts will matter, and which won't.  That doesn't mean you have to have every contract vetted by a team of white-shoe lawyers, or that you might as well get a free form off the 'Net and just keep your fingers crossed.  Like many other things in business, you can improve your chances of success by careful risk-benefit analysis.  You can identify what might go wrong (what's likely, what's possible, what's unlikely), while your attorney can adjust the contract so that the things that are likely won't hurt as much, while the things that are unlikely don't soak up your legal budget.

In addition to helping you put together an affordable contract that still works for you, a lawyer can be invaluable in understanding the changes that the other side wants.  Why are they insisting on that arbitration clause? What does "choice of law" mean?  What is a stipulation about irreparable injury?  A lawyer's experience in negotiating contracts can help you read between the lines: what does the other side think might go wrong?  Do they have a careful, committed attorney, or just some hack running up their bill?  How messy are things likely to get, how expensive, if this deal doesn't work out?

Your business is built on the upside, and nobody does deals that they think will go south.  Your lawyer should help you hedge the downside, so even if worse comes to worst, you're not on the hook for more than you bargained for.