Starting a law firm is one of the most exciting things you can do.
To get started you will need to select your law practice niche; launch a website or law blog; get some malpractice insurance; stock your office with the necessary technology and software, including a ScanSnap s1500 scanner for your paperless law office; put together a marketing plan, a social media plan, and a networking plan; decide on your billing structure; and decide if you need an office or if you will be a virtual law office.
Need more ideas? Join other innovative lawyers in the Lawyerist LAB.
Spring has arrived, meaning baseball season has started, and thousands of law students are graduating with no job prospects. Suddenly that weird guy who gave a lunchtime chat on going solo does not seem so weird.
At some schools, however, law students are conditioned to believe that going solo immediately out of law school is not only a bad idea, it is likely to result in malpractice. If you believe that, then you also believe that people who talk in class are the smartest people in law school.
In Minnesota, more and more attorneys are going solo. Many of the attorneys are recent law school grads who cannot find available jobs. Others are from bigger firms that are downsizing in an attempt to save costs. Regardless of why an attorney is solo, the article points out that many solos are choosing to outsource the business aspects of their own practice.
While outsourcing may be a financial option for some new attorneys, it is not affordable for everyone. If you find yourself going solo, or thinking about starting your won firm, there are plenty of other resources to consider before paying for help.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been connecting with lawyers who are struggling mightily to make this law business thing work. Know anyone like that?
Fortunately, I also get to talk with a lot of lawyers who are NOT struggling for clients. They’re struggling with too much business and needing to get their systems caught up to the client flow (that’s the last frontier before really having it all). And while I’ve got some guidance for those of you in that boat, today I want to focus on those of you struggling for more business because if you don’t have business, you’ll never get to phase 2 before you go out of business.
This week’s webinar features guest presenter Larry Port, creator of the Rocket Matter practice management software. He will talk about running an efficient and error-free law office. Larry will discuss how small law firms can be run more efficiently and with fewer errors, leading to more billable time (or productive time for fixed-fee matters), and reducing risk of malpractice. By borrowing project management ideas popular with the software and manufacturing industries, attorneys can learn practical, simple techniques to employ right away.
Last week I joined Sam Glover of Lawyerist and Blois Olson of Tunheim Partners to teach a seminar on websites, online marketing and social media to 100+ lawyers in the process of hanging out their own shingles as part of a day-long “How to How to Start & Build a Successful Law Firm” CLE.
In preparation for the course (and because it’s fun) I reached out to my followers on Twitter to get some advice for these daring lawyers about to start their own firm.
Twitter is full of consultants and gurus aggressively pushing their products. Case in point: last Friday, I participated in a panel discussion on online marketing at Minnesota CLE. I mentioned it on Twitter, and got the above as a public reply. Since I had never even heard of Rjon Robbins before, his tweet was kind of like a stranger shoving a flyer in my face outside a store. I was put off.
But since the most basic goal of any marketing effort—on Twitter or anywhere else—must be to get people to know, like, and trust you, let’s examine Rjon’s response with those three basic goals in mind.
In this terrible economy, lots of recent (and future) graduates are considering going solo as way to practice law. I have been fortunate to work among a number of successful solo practitioners, and there are some hallmarks of success.
Willingness to do anything. Most of the solos I know are just getting off the ground, and most of them do not turn down work. They might want to do consumer law, but they will draft a will, or represent someone in a minor criminal case. Doing what you love is important, but so is paying rent.
In “Where Law School Career Services Fail (and Some Fixes),” Aaron mixes excellent suggestions with some incorrect assumptions. I wish that his transformative goals for law schools could be readily achieved, that his assumptions were correct and workable, and that the powers he ascribes to career offices were real.
We are excited to announce our newest project, Lawyerist LAB: the Lawyering Advisory Board!
Please take a minute to learn about our new solution to provide peer and expert advice to solo attorneys and others wanting to start a new law practice.
The Lawyering Advisory Board (LAB) offers an exclusive peer and expert community to help you build a thriving law firm business.
Lawyerist LAB—the Lawyering Advisory Board—is an exclusive online community for solo practitioners, firm owners, and attorneys and law students considering starting their own law practice. Lawyerist LAB offers attorneys and law students on-call peer support and expert advice to help you start a new law firm or thrive in your current law practice.
Lawyerist LAB members receive peer and expert advice on…
Learn more about Lawyerist LAB: The Lawyering Advisory Board here.
Law school career services offices at many schools are currently failing to serve their students.
After my post “Applying to Law School? Please Reconsider!,” Lawyerist Contributor Randall Ryder made the comment:
“. . . If you want to go to law school, and really want to practice law, an opportunity will present itself––or you can make an opportunity for yourself. It’s tougher in this economy, but it is still doable, you just need to work hard at it. If you are not willing to work hard, you are in [the] wrong profession.”
Randall is right. Not only can the law be a rewarding profession, the current economy actually creates opportunities for savvy lawyers to have more fulfilling and lucrative careers, with the right kind of planning. The problem is that a large number of law school career services offices spend little time focusing on creating career-savvy legal professionals.
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