Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

Alright, so perfection is in the eye of the beholder but a couple weeks back I had what for me was a darn near perfect week.

What do I mean by “perfect”? Well, bottom-line was cold hard profit (for us meaning $3,000 in a single week) but more broadly I’m talking about a week where there was a wonderful mix of attention paid to past, current, and future income which occurred partly due to certain timing issues but also resulted from very intentional planning decisions. So how can I (and you) make sure we have more PERFECT WEEKS?

1. Perfection Requires (lots of) Planning. When I say this I’m primarily talking about planning/managing your calendar. What’s the old Lincoln adage…time/advice is a lawyer’s stock-in-trade? You and your legal assistant should be constantly looking at your office calendar so no time is wasted. Take a look at the daily schedule of candidates for high political office sometime with days scheduled down to the minute…that might be a bit extreme but for the success of your law practice your time is similarly important. Control your calendar!
2. Income Diversity or Create Past/Present/Future Income. Here I mean spending time collecting/concluding past cases, working on present cases, and selling/marketing for future cases. During my ‘perfect week’, we were effective in collecting past income and I had a couple of real estate closings where you sort of “collect” for all the work leading up to the closing. As for present work, I had some nice chunks of in-office work time plus four cases in court which were a mix of quick “status dates” but also two substantive hearings. Lastly, I had three new client meetings, my weekly marketing breakfast, and a media interview that all might add to our future income.
3. Create Intentional “Office Hours.” This generally goes back to the planning issue but flat-out I think you should plan for 1-2 “office days” each week. In my experience there’s a tremendous efficiency difference between the days when I can just get into the office early and be around the office all day compared to the days when I’m pulled in several directions and then just get back to the office for a few hours in the afternoon. In my opinion you need to create those minimum 3/4 hour work chunks (if not full days) to really be productive…avoid 1-2 work chunks because by the time you check e-mail and return a couple of telephone calls that time is up and you’ve accomplished nothing substantive.
4. Free Fridays. And I don’t mean take too many long weekends, nope, but I do think if you can keep court stuff and most meetings off of Fridays it will help promote perfection for 2 weeks…the current week and the next week. During my perfect week, Tuesday was fairly busy but the real money days were Wednesday and Thursday with a lot of court stuff, a new client meeting, and a real estate closing Thursday afternoon…great profitable days. But then Friday I had nothing scheduled and just worked around the home office. This allowed me to catch-up on “busy work,” get the post-court letters out, enter any billing from the last day or two, and get planning/organized for another (near) perfect NEXT week.
5. Location, Location, Location. Until we get a more virtual court system (I’m not holding my breath), if you’re a lawyer who appears in courtrooms frequently managing the location of your court appearances is critical. Roughly, you should never appear in court unless you have 3 matters set in court that day in the same courthouse and you must always anticipate court delays and be able to be productive anywhere. For example, on Wednesday I had a couple quick matters in court in the morning, then a full hearing at around 130 pm, then finished my day with a new client meeting in the downtown area. On Thursday, I had a couple quick matters from 9-10 am and then a full hearing at 11 am, had some unfettered work time from noon to 2pm and then a real estate closing at 3 pm. So a couple great days all just steps away (of course those Daley Center elevators are another story for another posting).

I was honored to be interviewed recently over at GAL radio. Hopefully I gave you all a few take-a-ways to help Grow Your Practice!

What’s it going to be, positive or a negative?

I’m constantly amazed at the treatment I see whether first or second-hand in my day-to-day law practice. And it’s often brushed off as so-called “gamesmanship” or different sorts of intimidation tactics…I’d mostly just call it “being a jerk” or plain rudeness. At a surface level I’m not surprised because sadly there’s much rudeness outside the legal profession too. And I’m not going to spin off into some rant regarding our great cultural moral decay because that’s not my purpose here. Nope, the question we deal with in this space is, how do you build a great entrepreneurial legal services business.

The focus of this post is purely a lawyer’s self-interest:  The critical impact between your relationships as lawyer with opposing counsel, opposing client, and the other players in the legal world AND the flat-out success of your business whether defined by client outcomes good old “dollars in your pocket.” I’ve had several eye-opening examples just this week and over the last month where good relationships meant success for my clients. And there have been a few jaw-dropping displays by opposing lawyers in terms of their treatment of me that just has me thinking, do you realize what you’re costing your practice due to your behavior.

First, just recently having a good relationship with the clerk in a courtroom likely saved my client a big headache. Here the opposing pro se client was a good hour late for the scheduled court date so by the time she got into the courtroom our case had been called, and an order favorable to my client’s interests was set to be entered, and essentially the court clerk had the orders in her hand set to be entered when the pro se litigant asked to have the case re-called and to speak with the judge. The clerk asked me if I wanted the case re-called, I said NO, it wasn’t, and the order favorable to my client was entered. I’m as big of a critic as anyone regarding the general functioning of some of the circuit court clerks’ offices but most of the specific individuals in single courtrooms are pretty reasonable people and more importantly, it’s in your (and your client’s) self-interest to have a good relationship with those people.

Second, having a good relationship with opposing counsel can often save you in a pinch. I recently had a death in my family that required me to be out of town for about 1 week (see this post regarding handling vacations as a small firm attorney). This was unexpected so I had a few court matters set that I simply couldn’t make. But simply by have respectful and really a friendly repertoire with the opposing two lawyers in these cases made my conflict just a non-issue. In one case the other lawyer gave me some dates and I was able to step-up before a judge on an earlier date and set the matter like we wanted to on the date I had to now miss. In the other matter, the lawyer was nice enough to cover the case for me. This ain’t rocket science but I surely could have envisioned having to pay some lawyer to cover these matters for me and that hurts my practice. Of course this is a most simplistic benefit of having good relationships with other lawyers on a grander scale…think referrals and court coverage and having people to discuss legal questions with and the list goes on and on and…

Conversely, having a poor relationship with opposing lawyers hurts your clients and your practice. If you want to hurt your client’s case by shutting down communication with the other side, motive your opponent to win at trial, create utter disrespect and ill will on the part of your opponent and simply eliminate all the potential positives that other lawyers can provide (see above…referrals/favors/expertise) treat your opponent like crap. I finished up a case last fall where my opponent absolutely despised my client and sadly his feelings flowed onto me. I got a few vile and profanity-filled phone calls from this guy that leave me to this day having about the lowest opinion of this guy of any lawyer I’ve dealt with in 8 years. As an aside, what made this guy’s behavior most ludicrous and laughable is that the case we had together was a court-appointed matter where I had zero control in my client selection. What does this type of person gain by shredding his lawyer relations?

Lastly, sometimes having the trust and respect of an opposing client pays big dividends. The obvious point that is often forgotten is that opposing clients are potential future clients or referral sources…likely not in that particular case due to conflict problems but who sees your work more closely than the opposing client? But, particularly in transactional matters sometimes your relationship with an opposing client can help your own client’s matter right now. Recently we had a dicey real estate transaction with no real estate agents on either side so it was just was lawyers and clients. So I had to be involved in some things I normally wouldn’t be like a pre-closing walk-thru. But having that little extra relationship with the opposing client may have saved the deal. We ended up needing to make some totally unwritten side agreements to get this deal closed. That good relationship (and the clients’ good relationship) might have been the difference between my Sellers seeing $250,000 versus having to re-list the property for sale and who knows what.

My initial word association with a “Third Way” would be Tony Blair’s centre-left Labour Party government in Great Britain and his attempt to meld a different sort of political alternative to the extremes on the both the left and right. Although that’s not a wholly inaccurate description of my political leanings this ain’t the Politico so lets talk growing your law practice and specifically initial client meetings.

How to handle initial meetings with potential client prospects is VERY IMPORTANT to your practice but I don’t think there’s a real clear black/white answer on how to handle these and specifically, to charge or not to charge. Here was a previous post and an earlier evolution of my thinking on this matter. Generally the debates I hear and have had within my own mind are should you offer free initial consultations or should you charge for all meetings. A brief summary of my thinking (see link above) being that in the early days of your practice you’ve got plenty of time and should offer free initial consultations to more recent times as the practice fills-up you’ve got to charge for every minute of your time.

However, is there a third and better way? These are 3 questions guiding our current Initial Prospect Meeting Policy:

1.  What’s the source of the prospect and/or how did the prospect find you? The underlying thought here is to treat your best referral sources well indirectly though their referrals. Meaning, I’m much more liberal about offering a free initial client meeting to the person who got my name from that great referral source who sends me a new prospect every month versus the new prospect making a cold call and having no previous relationship to the Firm.

2.  What’s the case potential and/or why does the prospect want to meet? Simply, might your 1 hour meeting turn into thousands of dollars of profit in the future or is the prospect looking for your expertise limited to that initial hour meeting with no potential for future payoff. Now you might say that there’s potential future payoff just from a prospect meeting with you (just getting to know you) but personally that’s too indefinite and unlikely for my taste.

3.  What’s the Trade-off? Here I’m talking Opportunity Cost:  What’s the value of the next-best choice available when you obviously have several options of how to spend your time.  This question is why I think this whole subject-matter tends to change and evolve because your law practice like any business is a sort of living thing that constantly changes and evolves. So say six months after opening my doors if I’m balancing between organizing my office, creating legal forms, or taking a free initial prospect meeting I’d say the free meeting would be the best available cost. However, these days there’s a better chance that I’m choosing between actual billable legal work versus a new prospect meeting and trading $200 for that hour versus $0 isn’t usually a tough call.

Is there a 4th Way??

**Update** GAL re-posted here some ideas from Ed Poll:

The issue: whether to charge a prospective client a fee for an initial consultation, the meeting before being engaged. The wisdom of charging in this situation has long been debated, and it comes down to three fundamental choices:

1. Free initial consultation
2. Paid initial consultation at the lawyer’s regular rate, exclusive of any subsequent engagement
3. Paid initial consultation at the lawyer’s regular rate, with the payment applied to the total bill if the consultation results in an engagement.

We’re all in the business of retaining clients but there are times when a person is best left a non-client…better for both the lawyer and non-client. Because I strongly believe that there are situations when lawyers are unnecessary and often destructive. And taking on clients where you obtain a poor result and run up a client’s fees unnecessarily surely isn’t the sort of reputation building you need to really “Grow Your Practice.”

I’m constantly amazed and appalled in many of my domestic relations referral program appointed cases where I’m defending clients against indirect civil contempt. These cases are frequently post-judgment matters in divorce. More often than not an upfront review of the case file and discussions with my “new” client uncovers not only high levels of lawyer dissatisfaction but also tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fee judgments against these former clients. In other words not the sort of glowing client testimonials likely to bring those referrals and repeat business knocking on your door.

So when does a person REALLY need a lawyer?

It depends on the person and the definition of “need.” I suppose the continuum ranges from lawyer as replacement 3rd-party actor doing something a client could do herself but simply chooses not to (like using a landscaping service) to the most specialized of legal work where the intimate knowledge and experience of a lawyer is critical (think capital murder defense). And there’s nothing wrong with serving at either of those extremes…it’s honorable work to be your client’s trusted adviser on a variety of life’s complications. But oftentimes I think the honest assessment to a client that he should handle something himself bolsters your reputation (like parents arguing about visitation schedules or knowing that there’s not a legal solution to the potential client’s problem).

Here’s a guide I’ve developed (and heard many of these points made by judges) to answer the question, Does This Person REALLY Need a Lawyer, within the divorce field…maybe you can modify my list to polish your client selection discernment within your niche.

1.  No property and no children and short-term marriage=don’t REALLY need a lawyer. Unless a party simply wants to hire you like the landscaper, to avoid the hassle of a task and would prefer just paying someone to do this for them, no property/no children often should equal no lawyer.

2.  Property and/or children=REALLY Need a Lawyer. Simply way too many ways to blow money here like not knowing how to calculate “Net Income” for child support purposes if no one knows what they’re doing.

3. One party has a lawyer=the other party REALLY Needs a Lawyer. This is a recent add-on category for me that I think crosses the spectrum outside of my little family law world because if one party has a lawyer the pro se party is looking at potentially getting screwed BIG-TIME. I have several examples of this happening but a recent scenario that crossed my desk is the best…a couple both likely in their mid-50s divorces with several children but all the children are adults and beyond college age. The party with the lawyer talks the pro se litigant into having a $20,000ish judgment entered against the pro se litigant for a child support arrearage for a time period some 5-7 years prior when the kids lived with her. Judgment was to be paid out in installments. So, this guy is stuck with a $20k judgment because he didn’t have a lawyer…no way something like that happens with simply the most minimal trained opposing counsel.

Does this person REALLY need a lawyer? It’s likely one of the first issues you should be discussing at new client consultations. I think it’s an effective way to sort of play on the “scarcity principal”…I don’t take every little case that walks in the door. An important part of good client counseling.

Few things bother me professionally more than lawyers and law firms who seem to have the following business philosophy:

—First, take exceedingly large retainers up front.
—Second, churn the case for approximately 6 months by filing unfocused, fruitless pleadings and discovery.
—Third, withdraw from the case and file a fee petition against their former client for even more $$$.

We just got retained recently in a simple dissolution of marriage matter so I pulled the case file and took a look around. The previous firm filed the case some 9 months ago and took a $1,500 retainer up front. The case was filed and service was made on the Respondent; some 5 other court dates came and went; and, the firm withdrew with the case no closer to conclusion. Perhaps even worse was a matter against a gentleman who to my knowledge owes more past due child support than anyone in the state of Illinois. The firm brought several pleadings such as petitions for rule to show cause and motions to modify child support and visitation, never even got the pleadings they filed to hearing, then withdrew, and the last I saw had brought a $10,000 fee petition against their former client. It’s quite sad actually in much of my court-appointed contempt defense work, which is quite often procedurally post-divorce, the amounts of attorney fee judgments I see against former clients and the dissatisfaction of so many former clients with their attorneys.

What to do?

How about being a results-oriented attorney. How about starting with a specific end in mind and communicating with your clients specifically what you and her/his expectations are. Sadly I think these “lawyer churn” cases are almost the norm in the domestic relations field. Rule of Professional Conduct 1.5 disallows contingency fees in most domestic relations matters (child support collection being a notable exception). I suppose a contingency case for say custody of a child is rather unseemly, but some of my examples above aren’t exactly peachy either. Flat or capped fees? I’ve capped fees in some of the most common domestic relations matters like a motion to modify child support, for example. But in an early stage divorce it’s nearly impossible to gauge things like the opposing party/lawyer and the general tone of a case.

In my opinion at the end of the day you’ve got to create the personal policy of pushing your cases relentlessly towards settlement, hearing, and final resolution. And much of the pushing is about driving action BETWEEN court dates…that’s when the progress MUST occur. Waiting on those 15-minute court dates every couple of months is a recipe for disaster.

This post is intended to serve as a bit of an introduction to a Product Reviews tab that I’ve placed permanently above. I want to talk straight-up about the products and services that I use, that I’ve tried, and tell you what works and doesn’t work for me, an Illinois small (but growing) firm attorney. We exist to give you the practical tools and advice to run a successful legal services business.

Here are eight (8) products/companies that I have used recently and/or products that I use every single day:

QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition. We’ve used this QuickBooks product for our back-end financial management, financial forecasting, and our client billing since our Firm’s inception in 2005. It’s obviously not a specific, legal billing package but the Professional Services Edition does allow us to set varying hourly billing rates and enter thorough descriptions of the services that we’re providing our clients. On the billing side that’s the key…explaining in detail to your clients the wonderful, thorough legal services that you’re providing. I get regular compliments from judges and attorney colleagues alike on the aesthetic appearance of our billing statements. Bank accounts are easily synced with QBs over the Internet. Frankly, to be self critical, I’d like to use the product better in terms of the many business planning, tracking, and graphing options that it offers.

Constant Contact. For the last several months we’ve used Constant Contact for our monthly e-mail newsletter that goes out to some 200-300 clients, former clients, and professional referral sources. Effective communication with these groups of people and keeping yourself “Top-of-Mind” with them might be your most important marketing goal as a legal services entrepreneur. This group (clients/former clients/referral sources) is where 80%-90% of your new business will come (and likely increasing as you meet people and have more clients/former clients). We’ve been sending out an e-mail newsletter for some 3 years, previously as a PDF attachment, with less effectiveness. Constant Contact allows us to choose from 100+ e-mail templates to create a nice-looking, graphical e-mail that appears in the body of a recipient’s e-mail. This grabs attention MUCH better than our old “PDF attachment” version plus readers can easily click on articles and offers that drives them to our Website. We can also monitor bounce, receipt and e-mail viewing rates. I haven’t even tried the survey or event marketing options that Constant Contact offers but they look promising too. Our firm hosts 0-500 e-mail addresses for $15 per month (no long-term contract required). Properly reaching your current/former clients and referral sources is the way to rocket your growth EXPONENTIALLY in years 3, 4, 5 (and beyond) of your business. Sign-up for a 60-day trial with Constant Contact now!

eFax. We’ve used eFax exclusively for all of our faxing needs since our Firm’s inception in April 2005. Quite simply an Internet-based fax “machine” is the only-way-to-go in the 21st century. Here’s eFax’s price listing which includes a monthly charge plus a per-page charge. One of these days a “fax machine” may be unnecessary but at least for us in the real estate field having that proof of fax transmission is often still important for contract “Notice” purposes. With eFax, you send a “fax” using the print instruction on your computer and then choose eFax as your “printer” which then opens the eFax interface. Your fax recipient’s information is entered (and is remembered) and easily sent to multiple recipients. Simply, anything that you can get onto a computer and into digital format is faxable (is that a word?). Receiving faxes come to as many e-mail addresses as you like. Both I and my assistant receive our Firm’s faxes wherever we’re working that particular day. eFax does allow you to select your local area code for your fax number. Multiple documents are easily combined into one fax correspondence in a manner just like adding e-mail attachments.

Regus (Office space solutions). We’ve used Regus for new client meetings, depositions, and multi-person meetings for the last 2 years. Regus is a worldwide company that really does a nice job of servicing flexible entrepreneurs who have office needs and want to project a professional image but without the expense and inflexibility of a traditional, single location-type landlord. I’ve just really begun to see a lot of their advertising around Chicagoland…they currently boast of 28 Chicagoland locations. My legal practice is centered in Chicago and the north/northwest suburbs so it’s nice to be able to use a Chicago Loop location regularly plus a couple outlying locations in Deerfield, Park Ridge, and Schaumburg. In my experience, clients WILL HAPPILY choose the convenience-of-location versue your “traditional” single, permanent location with your diplomas on the wall anytime. We use Regus’ free blue, businessworld membership and pay between $18-$28 per hour for a standard office.

HostGator Web Hosting. I’ve used HostGator to host my Firm’s Website (Olsonlawfirm.net) and two blogs (SoloinChicago.com & ClosingChicagoRealEstate.com) for just over 1 year. I previously used 1&1. My change was motivated by HostGator’s superior support for the latest WordPress versions for us bloggers. When I finally got serious about migrating the blogs from Blogspot to their own domains I needed the latest in WordPress support. Granted our Website could use some work, but HostGator does have easy-to-use sitebuilder software to get a basic site up quickly and easily. The back-end of our sites gets managed through a cPanel. I think HostGator’s “back-end” management has been the biggest positive change for me. I love the Webalizer feature and being able to really drill down into our traffic numbers by referrers and traffic by time of day/month. Also, our content is backed-up with one click. Further, the online chat customer service has always been spot-on.

eVoice. I’ve used eVoice for our office telephone answering for more than 1 year now. eVoice is an automated answering software program that allows you to create a personalized greeting for callers and then routes calls wherever you want. Pricing ranges from $12.95 to $29.95 per month depending on minutes and the number of extensions you need. eVoice has been great for us with 2-3 people working from several different locations. Callers to the Firm are greeted with a friendly, descriptive, automated answer but callers can reach myself or our legal assistants with the push of a single button. I think this is a better and more cost effective option than many of the “virtual office” options that charge you each time they answer a call and forward it to your cell phone and I find it more professional than you as lawyer answering your own phone. Yes, it is an automated answering service (gag) but I think that is becoming more and more the business norm. eVoice does not place your callers into some endless loop of automation, rather, with one press of a button they can leave me a voice-mail or get patched immediately to my cell phone. Call me now and tell me how it sounds…312-629-9900.

Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind. If you want to learn about blogging and general online business building, Yaro’s blog Entrepreneurs-Journey.com and some of his coaching programs are the place to go. His Blog Mastermind consists of 27 weekly Internet-based lessons which include text, audio, and video instruction. Blog Mastermind also includes a very useful forum and online community for interaction with thousands of other students. The program works very usefully through initial blog set-up and structural matters to content production, then traffic building, and finally monetization. Blog Mastermind costs $450.

uPrinting. I’ve become a huge fan of this company following recent business card and greeting card purchases. And the issue isn’t merely the quality of their end product but rather it’s their quality online, do-it-yourself design tools on their Website. I was able to create a quality, two-sided business card for $40 (500 cards). uPrinting’s pricing, quality, and design tools made them a no-brainer for our printing needs.

That figure is the increase from 1999 to 2005 in the number of people who work from home according to recently released U.S. Census figures. Nearly half of these home workers had college degrees and earned $75,000 a year or more. Some 11% of the “home workers” report working 11 or more hours per day on average. The biggest share (28%) of home-based businesses were in professional services — LAWYERS, accountants, programmers, consultants, and the like.

So ignore the scoffs from your friends who have the downtown office with the high rent…we’re working harder and better and making good livings doing it.

Personally I don’t mind working the longer hours, I’ve chosen my career because I enjoy it. The key issues for me were **elimination of a significant expense (a/k/a rent) that have helped our bottom line a ton & **the “stress relief” that comes from eliminating the morning/evening commute. Even now as someone who still has plenty of court time and meetings outside the home, the tension/rushing/pressure I feel on the ‘commute somewhere’ days versus the ‘walk to our home’s 2nd bedroom’ days is tangible. For me, the commute is a bigger stress causer than the work regardless of where the work occurs.

So if you’re tired of running to the train each morning (or worse sitting in a traffic jam on the Kennedy expressway), you have a quiet home work environment, and want to increase your firm’s profit…come on and join the millions who’ve already made the move!

Alright so I enjoy the Quixotic tales describing the new “Solo” who has just hung his shingle with trepidation, big dreams, and 500 brand new business cards as much as anyone…it wasn’t that long ago that I was there.

But, is your Firm TOO Small?

I’ve been thinking about this recently after some mildly disturbing interactions with some colleagues recently. First, a client of ours needed to locate some paperwork urgently from a former attorney. So I and the client contacted the lawyer and she was out-of-town for the winter, she had zero access to documents via electronic means, and she had zero staff. The document was finally obtained more than a week after our request, fortunately, the attorney’s spouse was going to be in Illinois and could locate the document. Second, the opposing firm in a case I called over the holidays where the firm’s telephone message reported that they were closed from 12/24-1/4 and callers couldn’t even leave a message. Third, the accountant I called recently, and I was only given a voicemail option, and then my call was returned 4 days later.

So if you’re too part-time, too inattentive to clients and opposing counsel, you very well may be too small and likely too exposed to ethical and malpractice liability.

Have you considered…

–A back-up lawyer to fill-in some gaps while you’re on the links in Arizona?
–A part-time assistant to check e-mail/telephone messages daily?
–An ‘Of Counsel’ set-up with a larger firm?

The general step is to position yourself as a sort-of “Go To” source for your clients, former clients, and colleagues for all types of legal/professional advice and referrals. The simple, specific action step is to keep an ever-expanding attorney (and general professional) referral list for lawyers outside your region and outside your practice areas.

Then develop the client trust and make sure people know that all of their legal/business/financial questions should start with a call to you and then big things happen like this…

First, you encourage greater client contact and client conversation. Even if this call serves only as a referral to someone else your relationship with the client is improved and your advice is deemed more valuable. Plus, this additional client conversation allows for you to probe the situation and new legal work is often discovered.

Second, you get to know the other professionals on your referral list and you often might find yourself creating some productive referral sources back-to-you. I know of a couple established firms where I’m on their referral lists and it’s great for me. Other professionals, a lawyer’s best client source.

So get to know some other lawyers, start keeping a referral list of lawyers by geographic/practice area, then communicate your “resource” to clients and lawyers alike and….

REAP THE BENEFITS!