MyShingle : Solo and Small Law Firm Management and Marketing

Yesterday marked the launch of JD Supra, a document database and attorney listing site that's important for solo and small firm lawyers for two reasons.  First, JD Supra gives practitioners access to an enormous database of filings, newsletters and memoranda prepared by other law firms.  While a good deal of the information that I've seen so far is fairly promotional, rather than substantive in nature, that may change as the site grows.  Moreover, even a law firm newsletter can help tip lawyers off to new developments.

Second, JD Supra gives solo and small firm lawyers to way to strut their stuff.  By posting documents, other lawyers can get a sense of what your work product is like.  And by uploading a document, you gain a listing in JD Supra, which is another way to gain visibility online.

So visit JD Supra and think about adding it to a list of your research resources.

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Go east, young lawyer if you want to start a law firm.  As this article reports, a recent study released by the Pope Center for Higher Education shows that North Carolina needs more lawyer in light of recent population growth and a strong economy.  The catch - only graduates of accredited ABA law schools qualify to take the North Carolina bar.  And while the bar accepts comity, waive ins don't come cheap - expect to pay $1500 for comity admission.

Have you moved to a new state to take advantage of the economy? In what circumstances would you consider it? And North Carolina readers - is the article true? When it comes to law practice, is North Carolina a better place to be?.

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Terrifying. Scary. Frightening. Those words describe horror movies, but you've probably heard them quite frequently from others in reference to what it feels like to start a law firm. And in part, that's true. Because  starting a firm is scary --  particularly when you don't have a single client, you don't know whether you'll make any money, can't figure out what practice areas you want to handle or you have no idea how to draft a complaint or how to get a motion on the court calendar.

And yet, at the same time, there's nothing quite like those first few months of getting a law firm off the ground: the heady feeling of building something that doesn't exist, the thrill you experience the first time you introduce yourself to "your client" and the wild optimism you feel once you take charge of your destiny. I've had my own practice fourteen years now so the memory of starting out has dimmed.  But  a recent meeting with two new shinglers took me back to the excitement of my firm's early months. Back then, I couldn't afford legal research services so I shepardized cases manually, I couldn't get legislation on line so I spent hot afternoons in the bowels of House Office Building Annex 2 to procure copies for clients or I drove around the seedy parts of DC with my criminal clients in their jeeps with shaded windows.  Today, I just don't do that kind of stuff anymore - I can pay for a legal search tool and criminal practice is no longer compatible with my business model or my family situation. I still enjoy my practice and welcome challenges, but sometimes, nothing parallels the excitement of those early days.

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My friend and colleague, Allison Shields of Legal Ease Blog is starting the next round of her course Lawyer Marketing on A Shoestring, which she teaches with Paramjit Mahli, of the Sun Communcations Group.  I haven't taken the course, but the syllabus shows that it's value packed.  Plus, I am a huge fan of Allison's blog and her body of work and included several pieces of hers in Solo by Choice. 

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I finished lawyer John Derrick's engaging and well written book, Boo to the Billable Hour several weeks ago (and in one sitting), but I'm just getting around to posting my review now.  As I'll describe in more detail below, Boo to the Billable Hour offers a great primer for lawyers who haven't even thought about getting rid of the billable hour as well as those who recognize some of the drawbacks but can't come up with a viable alternative. 

Boo to the Billable Hour is structured into three main parts.  The first section - and to my mind, the heart of the book - systematically dismembers the billable hour by showing its many drawbacks: its inability to capture the value (rather than price) of time spent, problems with the accuracy of record keeping, difficulties in fairly allocating time to avoid double billing, and (in the law firm context), the billable hour's incentive to associates to overbill or bill pad to meet a firm's billable hour targets.  However, I think that Derrick also overlooked another problem with the billable hour that is unique to solos.    Because solos can't leverage billable hours, they're salary is limited by the number of hours they bill.  If a solo bills 40 hours a week at $200/hr, they'll earn $400k a year (assuming 2 vacation weeks) - but they're also working not much less than large law firm hours.  Unless solos can find a way to get more "bang for the buck" out of their day, they remain slaves to the billable hour. 

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I don't cover technology here much at MyShingle.  It's not that I don't recognize its importance to solos - in fact, more than any other tool, technology has shattered barriers to entry.   It's just that others like Future Lawyer, Ross Kodner, Victor Medina, or Greatest American Lawyer cover technology so much better that I ever could - those sites discuss new applications and also describe how they use them in their practice. 

Still, I do follow trends - and recently, I've noticed a trend of articles and blog posts about using low cost technologies to start and run a practice.  For example, at Home Office Warrior, Grant Griffiths
shares a list of must have applications for a home office - from phone service to postage to contact management.  Similarly, Tammy Lenski at Mediator Tech discusses her low cost favorites for these tools as well.  And just yesterday, USA today carried this article about how small businesses are using low cost Google Apps for spreadsheets, sharing files and email (disclosure: my husband works on Google, but not on the Apps project.  Also, some folks have suggested that the Google Terms of Service give Google a license to use and distribute content produced by those who use Apps, but that's not how I read the TOS).  What I like about all of these articles is that they don't just tell about a particular piece of technology, but show how it is used in the context of a suite of products.

There are other freebies on the forms and research side.  Docstoc is a new site for legal documents where users can share their forms and download forms from others.  The site has a decent collection of legal forms, as well as standard contracts for tasks like web development or independent contractor agreements.  As with using any forms, take the time to make them your own and to ensure that they comply with the laws of your jurisdiction.

And finally, Bob Ambrogi reports on the launch of the Public Library of Law, free caselaw reseach sponsored by Fastcase.com and which offers law back to 1997 (in contrast to Lexisone.com which only goes back five years).  My gripe with both of these services is that they don't give access to federal district court reports.   And they're limited in scope so they're not great tools for legal research.  But they may prove helpful for those who can't afford to invest in a full blown service and don't feel like making a trip to the library to do research.

The last technology note is that I'll be speaking on two panels at the ABA Legal Tech Show in March.  Stop by and say hello if you're there.  

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I'm not squeamish about rodents.  As a youngster, I raised several dozen pet mice and even now, as an adult I find my daughter's Chinese dwarf hamster, Puck completely irresistable  Yet this morning, while out walking the dog, I screamed with fright when a tiny little field mouse scurried across my path.

Why does a loose wild mouse terrify me whereas I don't mind cuddling a mouse-like hamster?  In larg part, I think it's the context:  the mouse appeared unexpectedly and caught me off guard.  And seeing the mouse in the wild evoked visions of wild rats, which have creeped me out ever since I read The_Plague back in college.  By contrast, the hamster lives in a cute Habi-trail cage, he smells of the sweet sawdust where he makes his nest and he scurries happily on a little orange wheel.  Nothing scary about him.

When it comes to marketing, context matters.  The pitch that may work for a consumer client may fall flat when we approach a business.  A technique that stands out in one particular niche and distinguishes us may be so over-used in another area that it just gets lost in the noise.  As someone who practices in multiple pratice areas - I serve consumer clients, mom and pop businesses corporate clients and municipalities and law firms - I've been giving some thought to what type of approach fits best for a given context.  At the same time, I find that some of the marketing materials that I read don't take context into account, but instead, assume, a one size fits all approach. 

Do you think that there's a "killer app" when it comes to marketing a law practice, a single technique that can guarantee success?  Or are the types of tools that work in some fields versus others as different as mice and men? I'm happy to hear your comments below.

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When I sat down to write Solo by Choice, the context mattered most.  One of the my goals in starting MyShingle was to discuss solo pratice not so much as a category of law practice unto itself , but rather to view the role of, and opportunities for, solo and small firm practitioners in the broader legal profession.  The Epilogue to my book describes my view of this context, and how it's changing but here is the much more extensive version.   I'd be interested in hearing your feedback:

When I started law school  back in 1985, most of my classmates were headed to  Biglaw, where they could look forward to a coveted partnership after seven years of hard labor.   But the Wall Street crash of 1987 changed all that. Summer associate programs were cancelled, and students who had lined up jobs suddenly found themselves out of work.   When the economy recovered, those same classmates did find positions at large firms. But by then, the seven-year partnership track had stretched to nine years ... even 11. Soon after, the country suffered another economic blow ... a recession ... and some of the most talented or hardworking of my peers were unceremoniously downsized or informed they were “not fit” for the partnership track. Again, the economy rebounded, and again firms scrambled to hire attorneys, this time to handle a glut of IPO work, only to dump most of the new-hires in the dot.com bust of the early 2000's. And, so it goes, as novelist Kurt Vonnegut used to say.
   
In less than 20 years, what had been a fairly smooth path to partnership had become rocky and uncertain. But it’s just one of the many factors responsible for the new and growing popularity of law firm start-ups. 

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If you thought that large corporations had deep enough pockets to pay whatever fees their outside counsel demanded, you'd be wrong.  Turns out that corporate counsel are positively simmering over the way that many large law firms are ripping off clients with exorbitant mark-ups on contract law attorneys.  Indeed, corporate counsel are so steamed that they voiced their discontent publicly at the recent ALM Legal Tech Show, as reported in this story from Conde Nast Portfolio.

The upshot for solos here is ...opportunity.  For example, some corporate counsel take e-discovery inhouse, but they may still need to hire contract lawyers for review - and may be willing  to pay better after removing the biglaw middle man.  Or, corporations may have a need for more skilled outside counsel to help manage the inhouse discovery teams.  So if you've worked on massive  litigation projects at law firms, and decide to strike out on your own, you may find more opportunities for than you imagined.

Corporate counsel are looking to keep costs down in other area as well.  Although as this post at Law and More suggests that inhouse lawyers are looking for large discounts from brand name firms, if firms aren't forthcoming with lower rates, perhaps these clients will look to solo and small firms.

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In this latest installment of my Author's Cut/Pocket Part series, I'm going to address two of the questions about the book that I've been frequently asked this month:

1.  Why did you call the book Solo by Choice, particularly when so many people don't voluntarily choose solo practice?

When I started the writing process, my publisher cautioned that choosing a book title would prove a difficult task, and he was right.  I originally had a concept for a title, but that was back when my topic was much narrower than the final product.   More than two years into the writing process, my publisher proposed Solo by Choice, a title that immediately fit.   That's because I believe that irrespective of our circumstances, all of us lawyers always have a choice.  Some of us embrace solo practice joyfully and affirmatively.  Some of us come to solo practice as a last resort - an act of desperation or a last shot effort to get our money's worth out of a law degree.  Some of us start a firm to get back into the law after staying home for a decade with children so that we can raise them and actually see them.  But in any of one these scenarios, we all have a choice other than solo practice:  we can leave the law entirely, we can stay employed in a job that offers financial security but doesn't feed our soul, we can work part time.  Those of us who eventually become solos make a choice to stay in the law and to use our law degree to serve clients, make money or leave a legacy behind.  No matter what route took us here, ultimately, we stay because we are  solos by choice.

As my book moved towards completion, I realized that Solo by Choice was apt for another reason as well.  Because in virtually every aspect of the book - from deciding why to start a solo practice, to figuring out where to locate an office or what practice areas to pick or how to bill clients or market the firm - I don't offer definitive answers (except in very narrow, no-brainer cases such as "don't violate ethics rules").  I give examples of what I've done or what other solos have done, but ultimately, my book gives readers a discussion of available choices.  And that's because I've always believed that there is no right way to start a solo practice; for every rule, there are dozens and dozens of exceptions.  As I've always said, there are as many ways to start a solo practice as there are solos themselves.  What works for a gregarious young lawyer in a rural town may not apply to a shy older woman returning to the work force after twenty years of absense, and vice versa.  What works for an Ivy League grad with a biglaw corporate practice probably won't help a second career lawyer with a social worker background who hopes to start a collaborative family law practice, and vice versa.  Sure, some general principles apply, but the nitty gritty decisions are case specific.  Some don't care for books that discuss options; they'd prefer a list of "do this, do that and you'll succeed."  For me, however, making the choices and picking the ideas that work for me represents the most exciting and challenging part of the solo journey, and one that I wouldn't want to replace with a one dimensional check list.

2.  Where can I buy the book now?  A couple of glitches in the distribution process slowed the process of getting the book to Amazon - and when it finally arrived, apparently, it was already oversubscribed.  Another order is being shipped over right now.  However, the book is also (sometimes) available on BarnesandNoble.com and the NALP.org bookstore.  However, the best and quickest way to order now is to contact my publisher, Mark Jaroslaw by email at info@decisionbooks.com.  Or send me an email directly at elefant@myshingle.com.  I apologize for these problems but they will be smoothed out in another two weeks.

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I'm a little late in posting this here, but I was incredibly flattered to be included in the list of experts (including many fellow bloggers) interviewed by veteran lawyer/marketing consultant Cole Silver  for his incomparable Raindancing Expert Audio Series.  As Silver describes:

the Raindance Expert Series an audio library of internationally recognized experts being interviewed by an attorney with 27+ years of experience who will get you the answers and ideas you want to know. The questions are targeted with just one thing in mind...providing you practical advice and strategies that will ignite your career success...easier and faster.

For less than $27 per month, you’ll get access to over 100 experts. And each month I’ll be adding at least 5 new expert interviews to bring you only the freshest and most up to date content available to help you make more money and gain more freedom and success in your law practice.

The series offers great value and the audio allows you to listen at your convenience.  Visit Silver's site here for additional information. 

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Like most of my solo and small firm colleagues,  I'm a fan of online networking, i.e., building meaningful and trusted relationships through listserves, Linkedin.com and Facebook.com and blogs.  Not only do these online tools help us find clients or share our knowlege and expertise with others and improve the quality of the profession at large, but they also mitigate against sense of isolation that many solos otherwise experience. 

For those who don't use online networking tools, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing has an instructive post on how to get started.  Jantsch writes that ultimately, online networking isn't all that different from conventional networking - only the tools have changed.

Jantsch's advice is terrific, but I think he overlooks one important point:  ultimately, to get the most out of online networking, you need to take it off grid.  I've built many, many close relationships online blogging, listserves and email correspondence.  But in every case and without exception, what's always solidified the relationship and made it click is a personal  rather than virtual connection.  Maybe it's an in-person meeting, but even a phone call does the trick.  Hearing the sound of a voice or a laugh, seeing a smile or shaking a hand satisfies a human curiousity and conveys the kind of information that no amount of bandwidth is broad enough to carry.  And in person meetings or phone calls not only smooth a tense online relationships characterized by vigorous disagreement, but actually make them bloom --  because the personal interaction somehow makes us realize that because of our passion, we have more in common than our online discourse (and even namecalling) might suggest.  That's not to minimize the value of building relationships online - that process lays the groundwork for personal interaction and helps us to screen out those whom we'd like to meet.  But at the end of the day, an online relationship will eventually falter without a dose of human contact.  

So tomorrow before you head home for the weekend, why not pick up the phone and calling an online friend or colleague, with no other motive than simply to say hello or invite them to share a cup of coffee?  Taking that relationship off line will ensure that you keep it on course.

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Now that Solo by Choice is completed, I'm playing around with a couple of different ideas to continue to provide value to solos and solos to be.  Would you mind taking a few minutes to give me some feedback  here. Thanks!

UPDATE:  Thanks to all for the feedback.  The survey is now closed.  Stay tuned for additional information.

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This coming Tuesday, I'll drop my daughters off at school, return to my house, pick up my trial bag (which doubles as a suitcase and computer case for short trips) and walk 15 minutes to the $25 bus that runs from Bethesda, Maryland, where I live to Penn Station in New York.   I'm headed up to New York for an event filled 24 hours that will include a stop by the ALM Legal Tech Show (where I'll hopefully be posting some dispatches for Legalblogwatch), dinner with a bunch of NY based solosezzers, and a bunch of blog or book related meetings. 

So why am I taking a $25 bus up to NY instead of flying or taking Amtrak?   For me, it's mostly convenience -- the bus is so close to my house, I don't need to allow extra time (that I don't have with my tight schedule) to get to the bus, as I would with a trip to the airport or Union Station in D.C.  Plus, a benefit of taking the bus on mid-week is that the trip will be traffic free and the bus won't be filled, so I can expect a double seat to myself.  Still, more than anything, this $25 bus phenomenon intrigues me; it's a market that didn't exist back when I was in college and not even as recently as ten years ago and it's a market that's absolutely booming because it fills an until-then unsatisfied demand.

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Who says a solo has to work alone?  Over 3000 solos, myself included, are part of a global virtual law firm, Solosez.net.  If you're interested in learning more about the history of Solosez and what makes it such a special place, check out this article from law.com.  By the way, I'm quoted in the article along with several other 'sezzers.

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If you haven't seen them already, the blogosphere reviews of Solo by Choice are starting to come in.  Also, as promised, here's the first "Author's Cut," i.e., material that didn't make the book.  This excerpt was my original prologue, the piece that got me started after weeks of writer's block.  It's entitled My Solo Epiphany and it describes that "aha moment," two years into my law practice, when I first fully appreciated the rewards of solo practice.

October 1995:   As the clock ticks towards midnight, I’m still in my office, hunched over my keyboard, pounding out a reply brief that’s due at the D.C. Circuit tomorrow.  Waiting for my document to print, I catch a glimpse of my disheveled reflection in the darkened window behind my computer.  I know that at this moment, dozens of other young attorneys like myself are spending the night just as I am, toiling away on a brief or a memo or research assignment, maybe even taking a break to stare out of their own darkened windows.  Indeed, I’ve spent countless other nights like this one in law firms across this city but tonight’s different.

My document’s done now, so I grab it off the printer, eyeball each page and sign my name with a flourish on the signature line.  I admire my lone signature and savor the satisfaction of a finished job.  I already know this brief’s a winner, even though it’s only the second one I’ve written entirely on my own, even though it’s not been reviewed and marked up by ten other lawyers, even though I haven’t yet seen the judges nodding sympathetically as I make my argument before the court, even though it will be months before I learn that the court will issue a resounding ruling in my client’s favor and order my opponent to pay $65,000 in attorneys fees.  It’s after 1 a.m. when I leave my office to drop the brief at Kinko’s for copying, around the same time that my exhausted peers are dialing up car service.  Yet, tonight I’m as energized as when I arrived in my office this morning.  Although like my colleagues, I’ve spent the past eighteen hours at the law office, I produced this brief for my client, for my law firm, for me - and at the end of the day, that’s what has made all of the difference.

If you're interested, you can view the decision here.

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