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

Not sure how I missed this when it first issued, but via Leonard Sienko of the NYSBA General Practice Blog, I learned about the New York State Bar Association's Solo and Small Firm Report, issued June 18, 2009.  I approached the report with some trepidation, fearful that like many others of its kind, it would focus on solos' alleged lack of practice management skills or malpractice incidents and recommend training programs or time management courses. Instead, the Report focused on the realities of being a solo -- from time spent waiting for court to "involuntary pro bono" and evaluates the types of services that can help improve the life and livelihood of solo practitioners.  

The Report opens with a reminder that 55 percent of New York State Bar Association 74,000 members are solos and that their needs must be comprehensively addressed.  And one of the major problems faced by solos is decidedly unglamorous:  the time waste associated with waiting in court.  From the report:

It is Abraham Lincoln who is credited with having observed, two centuries ago, that a
lawyer’s time and advice are his stock in trade. The message still resounds. The loss of significant
periods of time spent waiting in courthouses is costly—for attorneys if they do not bill their clients
out of sheer good conscience, or for their clients when their attorneys bill for those non-productive
hours. Throughout the state, this waste is widely reported to be enormous—perhaps hundreds or
thousands of hours daily adding up to thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of dollars or more. For
attorneys, their clients and others, it is an imposition and a burden on their time and resources. 

The Report recognizes that e-filing, teleconferences and other modifications could go a long way to improving this substantial problem. 

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Though you don't find many solos practicing in areas like environmental law, that's Walter D. James expertise.  Walter focuses his practice primarily on environmental counseling and environmental litigation, which includes civil enforcement and cost recovery litigation, criminal defense and toxic tort/property damage matters.  Though the law firm is located in Grapevine, Texas, the Firm’s practice involves work at a variety of locations across the United States.  Visit his website at www.jamespllc.com and his blog at http://www.environmentalblog.typepad.com/

I practice environmental law, including, regulatory, civil and criminal aspects.  

I started my firm on March 1, 2004.  I was tired of the BIGFIRM mentality and practices.    

I am a true solo; I have an office assistant as well.  

The biggest challenge was overcoming the fear of not having enough work to make a living and feed my family.  However, I was counseled that (and this will sound corny – but it is not) “put your trust in the Lord; you are a good attorney, the phone will ring.”  And so I had faith

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The MyShingle profiles are an experimental feature here at MyShingle - to offer some insight into the careers of practicing solo and small firm attorneys, with questions on how they got their start to what gets them going in the morning.  My thanks to Jay Fleischman and Walter James (next post) for serving as guinea pigs for this feature.So without further, ado, meet Jay S. Fleischman - New York Bankruptcy Lawyer. 

Jay S. Fleischman is a New York bankruptcy and consumer protection and a lawyer who helps other lawyers market, manage and grow their practices.  He is the New York co-chair of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, a co-founder and the current President of the Bankruptcy Law Network, and a member of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.  He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife, son and dog."

1.  What kind of law do you practice?

I am a consumer protection lawyer concentrating in consumer bankruptcy, debt collection abuse, and credit reporting errors.  I represent consumers only.

I began my firm on December 19, 2005 after giving notice one day before raises and bonuses were announced at my former employer.  My timing was deliberate, and based on my fear of: (a) if my raise and bonus were too good then I'd find it more difficult to leave; and (b) if my raise and bonus were below my expectations then I might suffer a crisis of confidence. 

My firm has been as large as 12 people, and is now comprised solely of me.  I employ a large network of virtual assistants and of-counsel attorneys who all come together to work on matters as needed.  This allows me to expand and contract as needed without worrying about bloated overhead that plagues so many lawyers. 

My biggest challenge was in learning how to effectively market and manage my practice.  Lawyers suffer from a knowledge gap when it comes to marketing and managing a successful business, so looking to other lawyers and law firms proved fruitless.  I addressed the challenge by looking outside of the legal industry and modeling my practice on successful business principles.

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Over at my roost at Nolo Legal Marketing Blawg, I posted about the Google Local Business Center where in exchange for listing a business, users receive access to a suite of tools that enables them to track traffic to their site and even identify the locations where clients are coming from.   I registered my firm and I'm curious to see the results.  The cost is free, plus the new Google local directory helps address the blind spot that most search engines seem to have for local listings. 

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This week's news brings a handful of law firm start up stories.  First, the Las Vegas Sun profiles
two young female lawyers, Tara Young and Elizabeth Sorokac who lost their jobs in February and have already started their own practices.  Both had been practicing for only a few years and never expected to start a firm so soon.  Though Young had expected to go solo eventually, her lay off forced her down the solo path more quickly than she'd planned.  As for Sorokac, she loved her firm and went solo more as a stop-gap method to stay afloat between jobs.  But to her surprise, she's taken to solo practice and enjoys it more than she ever thought - a tribute to transformative nature of solo practice.

Meanwhile, the National Law Journal reports on NatoliLapin, a virtual firm that started back in March 2008, offering low-cost legal services for entrepreneurs, artists and others launching new business ventures.  Natoli reports that the firm is growing rapidly, given that there are more entrepreneurs because people have lost their jobs.  The firm reports that with low overhead, it keeps 80 percent of its revenue as profit.  One of the firm's selling points are reasonable flat fees - for example, an LLC starts at $395.  The firm is doing well, filling an underserved niche - just like the $25 dollar New York-DC buses that I blogged about a few years back.

So, if you find yourself thinking about starting a practice, check out this site and my book, as well as this summary from Above the Law of a panel on Starting A Practice sponsored by the Vault and City Bar of NY and a recording by Susan Cartier Liebel and myself on Going Solo in A New Economy.

 

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My dad was what you'd call a company man; he worked as a chemist for a major pharmaceutical company for 35 years until he retired in 1997, avid to spend time with his first grandchild and the six others who would later follow.   My dad's job didn't offer much flexibility in terms of dress code or hours, except in the summer when employees could take advantage of casual dress and flex time.  So when summer rolled around, my dad rose an hour early to get to the office by six in order to leave every Friday at noon.  When we were young, my parents would often pack my three sisters and me into the car and we'd drive two hours to the beach, just in time to hit the ocean and eat a picnic dinner on the cooling sand while the sun set.  Some Fridays, my dad spent in his vegetable garden, which by mid-summer overflowed with cucumbers and corn and tomatoes that my sisters and I would sell from a blue wheelbarrow on the curb in front of the house.  As we grew older, my mom started a business - a daycare center - and my dad spent his Friday afternoons there, watching the little kids on the playground (or rather, letting them crawl all over him since so few had dads at home) or sweeping the floors or washing the toys to help my mom. 

My dad isn't particularly cutting edge (in fact, he and my mom still have a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that people, including their own daughter can work productively from home) and he would never have insisted that his employer provide flex time benefits.  But neither did he turn them down when offered, notwithstanding that he could have hewed to his regular schedule and slept an hour late or spent those Friday afternoons leisurely finishing up a week's work instead of cramming it into a tighter schedule.

When we speak of work-life balance, or the seamless life as I've taken to calling it, it's dads who get short-shrift.  Yet in many ways, they have it harder.  For not only must men advocate for more flexibility which calls into question commitment to work (a dilemma that women also encounter), but in doing so, they must also buck the traditional social image of the man as the driven, work-centric provider.   Yet until more men start shouldering their portion of the work-life balance conundrum, it will remain, by default a women's issue, thus diminishing the chance for real change.

Many of the men I know who've gone solo have done so to spend time with family, to make sure that they don't miss the ballgames and school plays; to imprint those memories of beach trips and vegetable gardens.  Others have left successful careers at other legal positions for the flexibility of solo practice so that their wives have more flexibility to pursue their careers careers.  Yet in all these cases, like my dad, these men have taken a different path purposely, but also silently and without fanfare - but believe me, those efforts haven't been overlooked.  Happy Fathers' Day to all of you!

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OK, so I understand that a company like Thomson Reuters doesn't "get" the concept of free.  After all, Westlaw, one of Thomson Reuters' flagship legal products costs a pretty penny.  Even so, it's one thing to charge for a product that delivers value, as Westlaw undeniably does.  It's quite another to extract payment for materials that are either readily available for free or worse, are completely inaccurate.  Yet that's what exactly what Findlaw, a Thomson Reuters company is doing to solo and small law firms.

Like many other commercial legal product providers, Findlaw is jumping aboard the solo express, scrambling to offer products and services to this previously overlooked segment of the legal population now that solo is the new Soho.  Now, even though I've been serving solo and small firms at My Shingle for six and a half years, I don't take resent the johnny-come-lately's, particularly if they can offer useful content that I can't provide.  And on the surface, Findlaw's recently upgraded Law Firm Business Center seemed to do just that, with some informative (albeit extremely basic) videos on topics like law firm structure or fee agreements as well as a collection of articles (albeit outdated and sparse) on practice management issues. 

I grew excited when I came across a link to Attorney Forms and what appeared to be a searchable data base of forms that lawyers can use in starting a practice.  So I began playing poking around and to my horror, I discovered that (1) Findlaw is charging for the same forms that are available at MyShingle FOR FREE and (2) many of the forms that Findlaw holds out as "official forms" for a jurisdiction are substantially different from the FREE forms which the jurisdiction provides and which are also accessible at no charge through MyShingle.

For example, I decided to take a look at adoption forms for California.  While the site allows for a free on-screen preview of the forms, you need to pay $12.95 to download a usable version.  However, you can access those same adoption forms for free directly from the California court site, which in turn is directly accessible from MyShingle's Soloformania.  Moreover, by visiting the court website directly through Soloformania instead of downloading the forms, you're assured of getting the most up to date version.

The Findlaw site is even more pathetic when it comes to retainer agreements, engagement letters or other forms for running a practice. As most lawyers know, the provisions required in retainer agreements are often state specific.  Many states have "magic language" that require lawyers to spell out certain matters to clients in contingency cases or other requirements.  For example, compare the sample engagement letter for Missouri that Findlaw is selling for $12.95 with the retainer letter sample that is available FREE from the Missouri bar and accessible through MyShingle.com at our Bars Reviewed (under Missouri, practice resources).  Now granted, the Bars Reviewed links to just 10 or 12 bars that have sample agreements on line, but the agreements are free and far more robust than anything on sale at Findlaw.

We're entering a precarious time when charlatans, opportunists and even established organizations that never gave solos a passing glance are angling for a piece of this growing market.  Findlaw isn't the first company to try to prey on solos and small firms with a garbage site masquerading as content and it won't be the last.  Caveat solos. 

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On June 9, 2009, New York solo and Simple Justice blogger Scott Greenfield won a unanimous, landmark ruling from the the New York Court of Appeals in Stern v. Bluestone, which ruled that unsolicited, informational faxes distributed by solo Andrew Lavoot Bluestone on legal malpractice issues do not violate the Telephone_Consumer_Protection_Act_of_1991 or the Junk Fax Protection Act of 2005.  The court's decision spares Greenfield's client $21,000 in damages.  But more importantly, by holding that communications such as newsletters which convey substantive information are not advertising, the decision lends credence to the position that blogs (which also convey substantive information) should not be subject to bar regulations on advertising.  For vindicating this important principle - and helping a fellow solo, Scott Greenfield is our pick for this installment of Shingular Sensations. 

In the interview below, Scott shares the back story of the appeal, including his strategy for overturning two adverse lower court rulings and how the blogosphere helped play a role in the victory.

1.  Describe how and at what stage of the proceeding you became involved in this case.

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Over at Legal Blogwatch, I posted about how shingler Kiwi Camara of Camara Sibley, not yet 25 years old and just five years out of law school is giving the RIAA a run for its money in the high profile copyright infringement re-trial of Jammie Thomas.  Thomas' first lawyer, Brian Toder won a new trial of the $222,000 verdict entered against his client, but withdrew thereafter citing financial hardship associated with continued representation.  Camara jumped in just three weeks before trial to represent Thomas pro bono. Already, Camara is throwing up all kinds of hurdles for the RIAA by raising challenges on fairly basic and technical evidentiary points, such as RIAA's failure to submit certified copies of its copyright registrations or to prove that the songs that were the subject of the copyright registrations were the same as those for which RIAA claims infringement.   Thus far, the judge has been receptive to these arguments. 

So is Camara merely the beneficiary of a sympathetic judge or beginners' luck?  Hardly.  Instead, I believe that Camara's advantage derives from his status as a newbie:  because he's so green, he has no choice but to geekily dot every i, cross every t, work through every item on the checklist no matter how basic.  While an experienced lawyer might be inclined to slough off a challenge to records that are copied rather than certified, a newbie lawyer can't necessarily make a judgment as to the importance, so he or she will raise a challenge.  And sometimes, as in Camara's case, the challenge may stick.

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It's 2:30 am on the morning of World Oceans Day, as I sit here drowning in a sea of submissions for Blawg Review #215.  Buoy, I'm in trouble, with a sinking feeling about all I have yet to do.  But before I sail into the heart of this post, let me share with you why I accepted Ed.'s invitation to host this particular issue of Blawg Review.

Today, June 8 marks the first official World Oceans Day, which has been unofficially celebrated since 2009 when the concept was first propsed by Canada at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero.  The United Nations' World Ocean Day Resolution explains that "The official designation of World Oceans Day is an opportunity to raise global awareness of the current challenges faced by the international community in connection with the oceans."  

But what's the connection between MyShingle -- a blog that inspires solos, small firms and aspiring solos -- and Oceans Day?  Well, for those of you who don't know me outside of my life as a splashy, celebrity blogger, turns out that I actually have a rather pedestrian day job paddling along as a practicing lawyer.  One of my areas of expertise is marine renewable energy development, a specialization that I developed as a baby solo because no one else was doing it (fittingly, that's called a Blue Ocean Strategy - the process of identifying uncontested market space so that competition is irrelevant).

Having blogged about marine renewables for nearly six years, I know that the marine terrain  offer all kinds of swell puns that could help me structure Blawg Review #215.  (Can you count how many I've floated already?)  So without further ado, let's plunge in and explore the treasures of this week's blogosphere.

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Via Jeff Berman of Lawyer Marketing Sync, I discovered this video clip of Malcolm Gladwell discussing how Prego spaghetti sauce successfully took on Ragu by offering customers a few different sauce options - chunky, spicy and a third (which I can't now remember).  Today, we consumers are accustomed to different varieties of products. But back in the '80s when Ragu dominated, the food industry aspired to a one-size fits all standard - in the case of spaghetti sauce trying to create the most authentically Italian sauce - rather than devising different recipes to suit different tastes. 

Jeff Berman's take-away from Gladwell's talk is that it demonstrates the importance of developing a niche practices (a concept that I too endorse) that cater to the differing needs of clients.  In Berman's words:  

lawyers need to find out how to become one of the "perfect sauces" rather than fighting with everyone to become the "perfect sauce.

Berman is right, but at the same time, I think there's much more to Gladwell's lesson than the importance of niches.  Gladwell points out that the evolution of Prego's product corresponds to an overarching historical movement from universal to variability.  Gladwell uses the example of medicine - how doctors no longer search for "the cure for cancer," but instead focus on a patient's specific variety of cancer and how it differs from another.  And of course, Web 2.0 is another example of the transition from universal to variability by empowering users to customize their on-line experience.

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June is a busy month for me here at MyShingle, with a bunch of speaking events, workshops and most exciting, a relaunch of the site (that's a version of the new logo).  So here's the list:

I know this is short notice, but tomorrow, I'm participating in a teleconference sponsored by the ABA, entitled Going Solo in A Down Economy, along with Jay Foonberg, who's been teaching lawyers how to solo for nearly 40 years with his classic, How to Start and Build a Law Practice. It's a 75 minute program with 1.5 CLE credits available - free for ABA members, and just $19.95 for the general public. 

On Tuesday, June 9, I'm teaming up with my friend and colleague, Susan Cartier Liebel, founder of Solo Practice University for a FREE teleseminar on Going Solo in the New Economy.   You can register for the call and download a 14 page Marketing Cheat Sheet at this link.

On Thursday, June 16, I'm speaking on a panel co-sponsored by The Vault.com and the Association of the Bar of New York on Getting Back in the Game: How to Restart Your Career in A Down Economy,  I'll be speaking on the solo panel, but there'll be other panels as well, including one on alternative legal careers (where my friend Lisa Solomon of Legal Research and Writing Pro will speak) and another on breaking back into biglaw, where you can hear David Lat, founding editor of Above the Law who's a fabulous speaker - very funny, and also really insightful.  Registration for the full day event is here with a price range of $30 - $50 (depending upon membership), including lunch.  Space is limited to 250 and the organizers are expecting a capacity crowd, so register early (I gave up a trip to Portugal for this, so I hope you'll all come with plenty of questions!)

On June 24, Julie Tower-Pierce, author of Staying at Home, Staying in the Law and Darling Hill will be holding a second workshop, PinkSlips, Detours and Re-Entries at Busboys and Poets in Washington D.C., with registration Pinkslips and Detours here.  Admission includes lunch, and we are in the process of applying for CLE credit (2.0) in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia with more states to follow.

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