My Shingle : MyShingle : Solo and Small Law Firm Management and Marketing

I guess when you've been blogging as long as I have (four years  next month), it's inevitable that someone will criticize aspects of your blog (such as its name, MyShingle) as so last millenium.  Which is fine, because while I sometimes blog about solo trends and the coolness factor of solo practice, truth is, trends and coolness aren't my focus, never have been.  In a couple of days, I celebrate my 13th year as a solo, back in the era when solos were regarded as the untouchables of the legal profession and before dotcom entrepreneurs made working from home cool.  For me, solo practice was never a trend, but reality and a lifesaver; the only way that I could find to practice law and accomodate raising my daughters. 

I love running MyShingle, but I'll always be a practicing lawyer, first and foremost.  And that's why I favor the solo and practice blogs that aren't form over substance or full of jargon but those that teach me, by example, how to practice law and deliver legal services to my clients better, faster and less expensively.  Those that help me stay in business just another day so that I can provide an alternative to overpriced, low quality law firms and in so doing, expand access to law.  Maybe that makes me awfully stodgy in a third wave world, but that's My Shingle and I plan on sticking to it.

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The Maryland State Bar Association is sponsoring its 8th Annual Conference on Hanging A Shingle, November 11, 2006 at the BWI Marriott in Maryland.  The Saturday only component of the conference is $145 for non-MBSA members, which includes a full day of panels as well as breakfast and lunch, course materials and access to podcasts.

I'm on the panel entitled 60 Tips to Using Technology to Get and Keep Clients, with my focus on blogging (what a surprise!).  There's a preview of my presentation here with a link back to this one that I co-presented three years ago with Jerry Lawson.  So think about coming out to the conference, I'd be happy to meet up with all of you.

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Here's a story from CNNMoney.com/Fortune Small Business (10/25/06) on how one Portland, Oregon law firm, Ambrose Law Group bolstered its revenues by a whopping 85 percent, after participating in Fortune Small Business' Money Makeover Program and converting from the billable hour to flat fee arrangements.  From the article:

"Flat-fee billing is better for clients and better for us," he says. "Clients value the certainty of knowing up-front what their legal work will cost...For common items like document preparation and filings, there's been very little resistance to the idea." The firm still bills by the hour for most of its complex litigation work. "It's hard to predict how much time a big case will take," says Ambrose.

But the firm has started charging flat fees for tasks such as taking depositions and filing complaints. Revenues at the firm were up 85 percent over the first eight months of this year vs. 2005, according to Ambrose COO Jan Alexander. Staff turnover allowed Ambrose to hire more productive attorneys. But Alexander says that flat-fee pricing deserves a lot of the credit.

I wish that the article had provided more detail on the difference in cost between flat fees and billable hours.  It's not clear whether the flat fees enabled the firm to attract more business (thus accounting for more revenues) or whether flat fees in essence, enabled lawyers to collect more per hour (e.g., instead of charging $250 an hour for a 2 hour deposition or $500 total, lawyers would charge a flat fee of $1000 for every deposition regardless of length).  Or does the flat fee encourage lawyers to work more efficiently, so that work cycles through more quickly? 

I use flat fees wherever possible, since my clients don't ever dispute the amount owed and always have enough budgeted for the flat fee, since it's a fixed, rather than moving target.  For that reason, solos ought to consider using flat fees, even if your flat fee is nothing more than a firm prediction of your hourly costs. 

What's your experience with flat fees?  And how do you set them?  Do you pick a number out of the air - or do you tie the fee to your predicted costs?  Please enlighten me and my readers, below.

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One of the legacies of the first conference that I attended over a year ago is that I'm still reading other women's blogs that I'd have never encountered but for the conference.  And it's through one of those blogs that I learned about a franchise called Dinner My Way where you pay to cook your own meals to take home and freeze for meals throughout the next few weeks.  Dinner My Way pre-cuts all of the ingredients, provides recipes and utensils, but you still do the work.  The apparent appeal of this set up is that you retain control over the food, you prepare all your meals at once (so you save time) and get the satisfaction of claiming credit for a home cooked meal.

Reading about this insane idea (really, what it boils down to is that you are paying someone to do your own work), I marvelled at the way the idea has been packaged - and then wondered whether there was some way that lawyers could make this work for us.  Could we set up forms in our office for simple legal transactions and have clients pay to come in and fill them out themselves?  Would clients pay a few hundred dollars to draft their own uncontested divorce petition or simple will or any of the other documents that groups like We the People provide?  If something like this can work for food, seems that there should be a way to make it work for law.

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One of the best parts of being a shingler is that you can choose where you want to work.  And for many who start a firm, that means home.  Recently, there's been a spate of posts on working at home, including this guest post by Greatest American Lawyer at Grant Griffiths' Home Office Lawyer, various links to this Rocky Mountain News Story, The Good Fight about solo Curtis Kennedy, a home based lawyer who handles top dollar class action suits and other litigation against big companies (equally amazing to the fact that Kennedy works at home are his billing practices - he recently won an additional $36 million for his clients, but rather than fight for a cut, is merely seeking $40,000 in legal fees.  How's that for value billing? (not!)) Finally, though he's been blogging for  a few months now, Chuck Newton of Third Wave Law Firm on virtual law practice has plenty to say about home offices and starting a firm.

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As a member of the DC Bar's Law Practice Management Steering Committee, I wanted to post about our section's next event, a brown bag lunch on FRIDAY OCTOBER 27, 2006, (noon to 2 pm) featuring Sabrina Pacifici.  Ms. Pacifici created and publishes LLRX, the amazing, decade old, online journal dedicated to providing legal, library, IT information, as well as the popular weblog, Be Spacific.  Ms. Pacifici will be speaking on "Finding Information Efficiently and Cost-Effectively:  Legal Research Management Issues and Solutions."  The event will be held at the DC Bar Headquarters, 1250 H Street, NW.  To register, please fill out the registration form that's attached here (Registration.pdf).

This event is a terrific, cost effective ($25 for non-section members, $15 for section members) way to learn about all of the research available on line, and how you can use online resources to minimize the cost of costly commercial services.  Don't miss it!

Check the registration form for additional details.   

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My husband recently started a new position at a technology company that, like many others, eats its own dogfood, i.e., it uses the product that it makes.  For lawyers, our dogfood is our advice to our clients.  But how many lawyers "eat own dogfood" when we draft retainer agreements for our clients? 

This article, NY Panel Finds Fee Clause Violates Public Policy (law.com - 10/12/06) describes the decision in Ween v. Dow, a case that came about because the lawyer who drafted the retainer agreement with his client didn't eat his own dogfood.  On its face, Ween seems like a run of the mill collection action by an attorney against his former client for a $74,000 balance of attorneys fees.  But the client opposed the collection motion, arguing that the fees were unreasonable.  Further, the client challenged the attorney's claim for fees in connection with the collection action, arguing that the provision in the retainer agreement that provided for collection of fees violated public policy.

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Hey all of you DC law bloggers.  I'm putting together an event for the Bar's Law Practice Management Section on Blogs and Podcasts: Tools for Generating Clients, Money and Legal Stardom (or something like that).  I'm looking for some good bloggers to serve on a panel and tell how blogging has changed your career, brought you business or notoriety.  Email me at carolyn.elefant@gmail.com with a link to your blog and how it's changed your practice and I'll see if you're the right fit for the panel.  BTW, it's a lunch event, scheduled for January 23, 2007.  Looking forward to learning about all the great blogs out there in our Nation's Capital!

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As I've posted once before, solos and small firms have as much to benefit from outsourcing as  large firms.  Yet, I still know many solos who file their own papers at the court instead of using a messenger service or spend time on administrative tasks they dislike instead of bringing someone in who can do a better job.  This post from Escape from Cubicle Nation reminds us of all the tasks, ranging from accounting to scheduling, that you can outsource, at not much cost.  Moreover, remember that outsourcing does not stop at the office.  If you don't enjoy home repair or cleaning or prefer spending time with family and friends instead, you can outsource those tasks too.  Chances are that at your billing rate, you can pay for a weekly housecleaning with an extra billable hour of work.

Does this mean that you should outsource everything?  No.  If you derive pleasure from certain tasks - like blogging or cooking or even housecleaning - don't delegate them.  But if you can find a way to make yourself more efficient and free up time to focus on what you enjoy, outsourcing makes sense.

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This article, The Future of Client Acquisition, Ed Collar (October 6, 2006) extolls the virtues of OLM - online legal match services.  Trouble is, the article is probably 5 years out of date.  In my view, opportunity for legal match services has already come and gone, replaced instead by more sophisticated technology users who can find attorneys through Google ads or blog visibility.

Collar writes that that the $173 billion OLM industry has been around since 1999 and that:

Clients immediately embraced this useful electronically enabled innovation but attorneys were reluctant, and were a tad skeptical about replacing their traditional forms of client acquisition with the uncertainties of the Internet.

Today, these attorneys have a bit of a different attitude. With the proliferation of the Internet and as bar associations in state after state issue opinions (overwhelmingly coming to the conclusion that, when done within reasonable guidelines, online legal matching doesn't violate lawyers' ethics on garnering clients), lawyers and law firms from Albuquerque, N.M. to Yonkers, N.Y., from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Ore., are meeting with their accountants and running "cost-of-client-acquisition" numbers with a new variable inserted -- using intelligent e-commerce as a strategy.

And, perhaps more important: Millions of average people looking to hire a lawyer have found this new online avenue, and it's quickly becoming quite fashionable.

I don't buy this analysis.  First, the reason that many lawyers hesitated to participate in OLM was the cost.  Many online services hoped to build their success on the backs of lawyers, who were required to front considerable costs - sometimes as much as $15,000 a year - to gain a listing in an OLM service.  And the companies rarely offered guarantees, which meant that if you'd lose a sizeable chunk of change if your participation didn't yield clients.  In response, the OLM services contended that they could not charge on a "contingency" basis, i.e., where lawyers would not pay up front, but instead, OLM would collect a percentage of any fees generated through the service.  OLM said that the the bars (who else?!) considered this type of arrangement unlawful fee splitting, though truth be told, bar referral services frequently take a cut of cases referred to attorneys.  Moreover, there's nothing wrong with fee splitting if disclosed to the client up front.

And that's the real rub; though Collar makes a big issues of how the bars have come around on OLM services, they've only come around on the issues that don't matter anyway.  What we really need from the bars to make OLM work (or at least make OLM claims transparent) are rulings that cost sharing between OLM and lawyers is permissible.  If OLM could have implemented cost share programs,  it would have attracted more lawyers and the programs would have grown much more rapidly.  And, if despite bar rulings allowing cost sharing, OLM programs still required hefty sums from lawyers up front, the OLM companies' true motives (financing themselves through lawyers) would have been clear up front.

In my mind, that's the reason why OLM never took off: because cutting edge lawyers taking advantage of the internet were doing so precisely to save money, and were not willing to buy into a costly service with no assurance of results.  And in a fast moving internet world, when something doesn't work, another superior method generally comes along.  Here, that replacement is blogging.  Blogging gives lawyers visibility and an opportunity to strut their substantive stuff.  As the public grows more comfortable with the Internet, they're going to run google searches to find lawyers, rather than visit a "middle man" OLM site.  And because OLM doesn't offer a fraction of the search engine visibility that blogs do, lawyers will again question whether it's worth while to make a considerable investment in OLM.

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see OLM services succeed, because online referrals give clients yet another option for finding a lawyer. But the way I see the OLM market going, unless the bars change their position on cost sharing between OLM services and lawyers such that OLM services reach a reasonable price point, OLM will simply become another expensive advertising tool for personal injury firms (like the yellow pages and television) while other lawyers, will generate clients from their blogs and websites.  What a waste of a potentially useful technologies.

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The Law Office of Ruth Ann Azeredo The Law Office of Ruth Ann Azeredo with Co-counsel Brian P. Daniels of Brenner, Saltzman and Wallman  Brenner, Saltzman and Wallman LLP, represented John F. Lawrence, respondent, counterclaimant and third party claimant in an NASD arbitration where the claimant and third party respondents were Wilder Richman Securities Corporation ("WRSC") and its principals, respectively. WRSC requested that the NASD arbitration panel make a determination that it owed no further compensation to its former registered representative, Lawrence.

Lawrencecounterclaimed for compensation due him from investments made by his clients, large institutional investors, in Low Income Housing Tax Credit Funds, syndicated by WRSC's affiliated companies. On September 13, 2006, the NASD arbitration panel denied WRSC's claim in its entirety and issued an award of $1,4000,000.00 in favor of Lawrence against both WRSC and Richard P. Richman, the general securities principal and co-owner of WRSC. Of particular note, is that certain of the investments made by Lawrence's clients that Lawrenc sought compensation for occurred after Lawrence had left WRSC and become a registered representative of another broker dealer.

MyShingle wants to hear your good news.  Please send press releases and other announcements to us at carolyn.elefant@gmail.com.

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