I'd Rather Do It Myself: How to Set Up Your Own Law Firm

I'd Rather Do It Myself: How to Set Up Your Own Law Firm

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No one will understand the loneliness and the fears. Or, when it comes, the exhilaration. One morning in the second month you may leave for work morbid and depressed. You realize that you’re spending more time dreaming about clients than getting them. You are sure you are headed for economic ruin. But then, you return home thoroughly elated. A wholly unforeseen $3,500 retainer has fallen—a gift from heaven—unto your desk. A week later you are depressed again because a similar large fee has not unexpectedly turned up. You suddenly realize that in the past few days you’ve multiplied $3,500 by 53 weeks at least a dozen times. Your spouse, your parents, your children, your friends will all sympathize. They will tell you building a practice takes time, which, of course, you always knew but never appreciated. They will allay your fears and cheer away your depression. Or, at least, they will try. They will look sad when you are sad and happy when you look happy, even though they are never quite sure which it will be at any one time, or what it is that makes your moods swing from one extreme to that other in less time than it takes a certified check to clear. But, finally, no one, except perhaps a partner, if you have one, or another lawyer who has recently done what you are doing, will understand what is happening to your soul. This book will try to help. There are other cooks and articles on running law firms—mainly large ones—on financial management, on law office economics and so on. But there are very few books, if any, that discuss in intelligent detail the comparatively brief but so crucial period of time beginning about six months before you actually sent our your announcements and continuing through the end of first year or two of your own practice. This is a bit odd because established lawyers are often happy and eager to give advice to newcomers starting their own practice. Even lawyers with busy schedules will usually find time to tell the five or ten major lessons they learned—often the hard way—in their first year on their own. In fact, they will say how they wish there had been more people whom they could have asked and books they could have read. But then, sort of like the bar examination or the draft, once you get past it, you forget how strongly you once felt that something should be done to change it. So the information acquired by a new practitioner gets lost as he or she gets older and encounters the rush of a developing practice. It is passed on, if at all, only though a kind of piecemeal oral traditions that is often composed of facile and perplexing warning like “Don’t Take Anything That Comes in the Door” and “In The Beginning, I Charged Too Little.” I began my own practice in 1973 for reasons I will shortly discuss. They may or may not be your reasons. It doesn’t matter. Once you’re in, like a six-foot person in Seven feet of water, it’s less important how you got there than how you’re going to keep afloat. When I started, I talked to two or three others who had already done what I hoped to do, and I looked around for a book to tell me more. I found none. In the years since, I wrote three or four articles for the New York Law Journal and Juris Doctor about different aspects of going it alone (that is, all alone or with a partner or two, but without an “organization” behind you) and spoke to many others. I eventually came to feel that some of the ideas I had written about and much more that I had learned from friends should be put in a single accessible place. This is it. None of us knows everything there is to know about setting up one’s own practice, and we never will. Furthermore, despite the tendency to universalize one’s own experiences, I appreciate that my practice may be idiosyncratic and, in any event, is certainly not a model all should follow. I therefore rely quite heavily in the pages ahead on the experience, lessons and tales of others who have been gracious enough to provide me, through oral or written interviews, with an embarrassment of detail for this book. The book is as much theirs as mine. But even the combined wisdom contained here is not the “true” way to get into the law business. There will always be a people for whom a technique or approach long since rejected by conventional wisdom will nevertheless work handsomely. That does not mean you can skip over all the squares, go directly to Boardwalk and start building hotels. Even Picasso learned how to paint conventional pictures before he was able to change the rules. This book is written for you if you are in your first year or two of your own practice, or thinking about it. It does not matter if you are going to be an entertainment lawyer, a criminal lawyer or practice only before the United States Supreme Court. Lawyers starting their own firms of any kind will find much useful information here, most of it from others who have done the same thing. There are also pointers this book does not have. It does not have a list of the five best ways to keep your ledger books or the six mistakes never to make while negotiating a separation agreement. Your accountant will tell you how to keep your books, and there are enough treatises around to tell you about separation agreements. This book will, however, talk about the wisdom of having an accountant, and it will have something to say about buying treatises and having access to a law library. Nor will this book help you with questions that will arise only in the fifth year of your own practice or when you have nine partners (whichever comes first). By then your situations will have changed totally and your needs will be entirely different. What this book does try to do can best be illustrated with a brief story told by two friends of mine who recently left employed positions to open their own firm. In the first few months of practice many of their former colleagues came to visit, amazed at what they had done. My friends were bombarded with demands for information. One particularly inquisitive visitor began asking grandiose questions about capitalization, the partnership agreement, different fee arrangements and the like. When the tour of the office came to the supply room, the visitor immediately shifted his attention and asked, “How did you know what quality paper to buy?” The point is that when you first begin, there seems to be nothing but questions, needing quick answers, wherever you turn; and although the questions range from the grandiose to the mundane, they are all somehow crucial. You must know both wat kind of fee to charge and what kind of paper to buy. Suddenly, everything literally depends on the answer. “If I don’t know the kind of paper to buy, or the kind of photocopier to get or where to find a part-time secretary, then I can’t practice law. And, my God, I don’t know.” While I can’t promise to cover all the questions in either category—the grandiose or the mundane—I do hope to foresee many of them. But, far more important, I hope to convey an attitude, a way of responding to situations and thinking about your new position that will make many of the questions and answers fall more easily into place. The first chapter of this book discusses the first question one must ask when considering his or her own practice: What are the reasons to do it, and what are the reasons not to do it? The balance of the books is divided into seven chapters and seven broad subject areas: finances, including capital costs, overhead and possible income scenarios for the first year; feeing, a discussion of how to set a fair fee and get paid; clients, including how to get them and live with them (obviously you won’t live very long without them); the office, including selection of space, equipment and supportive services; operating procedures, a discussion of some fundamental office procedures to consider at the start, at least until you begin to develop your own system; structure of practice, including solo practice, partnerships and professional corporations; and, finally a chapter I have called Matters of Style and Substance. This latter chapter is a collection of some useful information, not easily categorized, which I have acquired or which has been passed on to me in the course of researching this book. One might think of the information here as the collected Old Wives’ Tales of private practitioners, but it is actually substantially less exotic and I hope more helpful. Some of the information concerns matters of style and some concerns matters of substance. It is a brief chapter of experiences that have been instructive for other and so worth passing on. This volume, and any future editions of it, is for lawyers from lawyers. It could not have been written without the generous contributions I have received from colleagues, some of whom have been acknowledged earlier. I conclude with a plea that you do for future readers what others have don for you and me. If you have or have had experiences in starting your own firm that you believe might be instructive or that contradict, extend or illuminate any of the advice given here, send them to me for use in future editions. Such material must be shared.

Publication Date

1977

I'd Rather Do It Myself: How to Set Up Your Own Law Firm

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