Career Advice: Find one of the most obscure, yet important government agencies to work for coming out of law school and then once you’ve gotten 5-10 years of experience at that entity flip sides and use those relationships and knowledge to build a great law practice representing people before that agency/commission. I stole that nugget from Wheaton attorney Irene Bahr who was part of my CLE panel this last Saturday. Note that she first worked for the Illinois State Liquor Commission and now she exclusively represents prominent companies before it as a sole practitioner.
Buy your office: Two of four panelists from Saturday owned their office spaces and when I asked them what their best decisions were as small firm attorneys buying their office space was the answer. I don’t see this too much although my first office was as part of a lawyer suite owned by a lawyer. Probably more of an investment/portfolio planning issue almost than an attorney matter.
33.33333333……%. Andrea Buford was an impressive member of our panel as well Saturday. She heads an 8-attorney practice that was founded in 2001. And the 1/3 number is her breakdown of time spent between marketing/business administration/substantive legal work…one-third for each. I think a lot of us don’t get up to the third for marketing and business admin.
Legal work from the do-it-yourself crowd. Saw this nugget from Mattoon attorney Janet Grove in the Illinois Bar Journal. She makes a standing offer that she will spend up to 30 minutes reviewing anyone’s will free of charge tapping into that group of people who have tried to build an estate plan without a lawyer. Is there a way for you to play this trend? There’s gotta be one for me…just in the Daley law library yesterday and there are always people at the front desk getting the forms to likely improperly handle a dissolution of marriage.
And finally a Thanksgiving moment, one of the great scenes from one of my favorite television programs…our President Josiah Barlett talks turkey:
December 2, 2009
[...] a lot of writing in general is that it encourages a degree of self-analysis and introspection. This last post (and perhaps some quiet time last week in the UP) and specifically the notion of a law practice [...]