Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

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Anyone enjoy reading obituaries?

I do actually. And it’s not some prurient fascination with death or anything like that, for me, it relates to my love of history and in this case the very personalized tale of someone’s life. And oftentimes a good obit. can be very instructive as to a persons decisions and accomplishments and I can learn from them.

Recently I was struck by the death and story of Theo Albrecht of Frankfurt, Germany, a co-founder of the Aldi grocery store chain. It wasn’t anything personal but rather some of he and his brothers business practices that jumped out at me thinking there’s some application to the business of law.  Here’s some of the language from the obit. (from the NYTimes) that I want to tease out a bit and wonder if there’s not an application to running a legal services business:

After being released from Allied prisoner-of-war camps following World War II, Theo and Karl Albrecht took over their parents’ small grocery in the bombed-out city of Essen and, out of necessity, sold only a small number of essential items. When the economy began to boom, competitors expanded their inventories to include thousands of items, but the Albrecht brothers realized they could operate more efficiently by limiting selection and keeping stores fairly small.

“The Albrecht brothers said, ‘Why do I need all these other products? I make most of my sales with these few products and have a lot less complexity and costs,’ ” said Matthias Queck, research director in Frankfurt for Planet Retail, a market research company.

Rather striking isn’t it, maybe less is more? Although there’s an Aldi about 5 minutes from where I live I think I’ve only been in an Aldi once in my life. My wife who is the resident “foodie” in our family and the person who also does the weekly grocery shopping has remarked that Aldi has great deals but she can’t complete the full weekly shopping there because of their slightly limited selection (consistent with the above). I didn’t realize that Aldi owns the Trader Joe’s chain as well which essentially uses a similar “limit selection” model for more higher-end foodstuffs. We’ll go to “Joe’s” more frequently but again you can’t quite do your total weekly grocery shopping there.

Is there “Aldi” application to the business of law??

• Sold only a small number of essential items. In lawyerland this is practice specialization, no? The opposite of this “Aldi” model would be a general practice where you may work in a limitless number of subject matters. Why is this practice area limiting concept so hard for me to pull the trigger on? At some level it just sounds counter-intuitive…the idea that limiting your market somehow would increase your business. Of course there is a ton of evidence inside the law and outside the law to support that premise yet I still hear subconscious whispers saying, “Don’t drop that 10% practice area because that might be the chunk that grows into my million dollar niche.” Yet I know that even I have a negative perception of lawyers (at least in an urban market like Chicago) who claim to be general practitioners or list a bunch of unrelated practice areas on their business cards because I KNOW she can’t be an expert in those many fields.

• They could operate more efficiently by limiting selection. These next two points are really the supporting points to the first point and what I need to use to argue with my own subconscious when it’s telling me to maintain small, unprofitable practice areas. I’d focus on intellectual efficiency and marketing efficiency particularly. It is HARD WORK to represent someone well if you practice in oh more than 5 practice areas. An example from last week, a friend asked me to review a commercial lease for him. I’ve done that before but it’s something that is in that 5% area of my practice and it took a lot of time to pull up some old leases and grab a checklist off the Internet and I still probably didn’t do an A+ job. Conversely if he had wanted to discuss the defense of an indirect civil contempt preceding within the domestic relations division of the Circuit Court of Cook County, I likely wouldn’t have had to do anything other than draw on my experience from the tens of similar cases I’ve handled just this year. With marketing I’m not sure I would focus on “efficiency” so much as simple effectiveness. I don’t use much paid advertising where I’m paying for multiple ads or something since I practice in multiple practice areas, however, in our e-mail newsletter and Website presentation I’m sure I have lessened our marketing EFFECTIVENESS by garbling our focus and likely leaving people guessing as to where our practice expertise lies.

• Make most of my sales with these few products and have a lot less complexity/costs. I’m reading a lawyer/management book now (I’ll likely post a review when I’m done so I’m not naming it yet) that says if you don’t have systems or processes for everything you’re doing in your law practice, then, all you own is a “job” you don’t really own a legal services business separate from yourself because too much is dependent on just you. McDonalds being the opposite example where it can have huge turnover of immature teenagers flipping burgers but continue to thrive because of its operational manual, i.e. their “systems.” I can totally see how I can cut complexity/costs by cutting practice areas and really systematizing my law practice. I have decent systems for billing and marketing but I’m SORELY lacking in my systems in the substance of my practice and it’s surely because I’m too broad.

Can you apply the above to your legal services business? Is this concept holding you back? Are you too broad, too general? I believe this “breadth of practice” challenge has been the #1 or #2 hurdle for me in growing a great legal services business. Why not give it a try for 6 months to a year?

And Now, the Tricky Part:  Naming Your Business. We’ve written about the ethical issues related to law firm naming in the past here but it still seems to me that there’s a real dearth of creativity when it comes to the law firm names that I see.   Quick, how many firms do you know that don’t simply include some lame/uncreative use only of a practitioner’s or various partners’ last names? I think I know two, other than the gentleman profiled in the WSJ article. The piece includes 12 examples of different companies and their strategy in company naming. I’d suggest that is an area ripe for innovation and an instant marketing advantage for someone starting a practice.

Divorce lawyers:  Facebook tops in online evidence. Not a bad place to start if you have a dicey case particularly with child custody issues.  Good old social media! The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says 81 percent of its members have used or faced evidence plucked from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites, including YouTube and LinkedIn, over the last five years. I have. Some examples from the piece:

– Husband goes on Match.com and declares his single, childless status while seeking primary custody of said nonexistent children.

– Husband denies anger management issues but posts on Facebook in his “write something about yourself” section: “If you have the balls to get in my face, I’ll kick your ass into submission.”

– Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook’s Farmville, too, at all the wrong times.

– Mom denies in court that she smokes marijuana but posts partying, pot-smoking photos of herself on Facebook.

How to get more business:  20 tips on marketing the small law firm (page 10). Plenty of ideas, pick a couple and implement now. A couple easy ones:  *Get out of the office & *Get your newsletter on track on a consistent basis (at least quarterly).

Taking the Leap to Self-Employment. Good piece really taking a hard look at the challenges of self-employment. You must be motivated to sell a product or service for which there’s demand & the business idea should be based on expertise you already have. Good teaching point for lawyers, you’ve got to be marketing like crazy early in the history of your practice and can’t be learning your business idea from scratch at the same time. The light at the end of the tunnel:  Even in the face of failure, most entrepreneurs are not willing to give up. “Once they taste having more control over their lives,” he said, “they almost never go back.”

In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That. And finally a mildly humorous story from our current, touch economic climate (perhaps I need to take a look at my law school transcript)…

One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average.

But it’s not because they are all working harder.

The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

I picked-up up the above recently because I don’t love selling and although over time I have realized the central role of rainmaking in building a law practice, let’s just say I came to that realization reluctantly and a tad slowly. My experience is that most lawyers tend to fall in one of three categories when it comes to rainmaking:

*1. Lawyers who view “selling” as beneath them and “not something that Professionals do.”

*2. Lawyers who engage in rainmaking but approach it in an inconsistent and disjointed manner.

*3. Great, natural and consistent rainmakers.

So if you’re in category #3 you’re probably all good and if you’re category #1 I’m guessing you were graduated from law school prior to 1980 or you probably need a more fundamental shift than can be obtained from some 200 page marketing book. But if you’re in category #2 like me, I think The Reluctant Rainmaker can provide some smart, long-term organization to your rain-making efforts.

Author Julie Fleming is a former patent attorney and currently provides attorney coaching development over at Life at the Bar.

Here are my 5 favorite “take-aways” from The Reluctant Rainmaker (get the book for more!):

1.  The RIGHT Business Development Priorities. Meaning, what client prospects should be the focus of your Rainmaking efforts…a) Current clients; b) Former clients and referral sources; c) “Warm” potential clients and referral sources; and lastly, d) Strangers. Without being too emphatic it’s hard for me to think of a situation where small law firms should spend much time at all marketing to strangers. I ran an advertisement for some 6 months early in my sole practitioner days in a Chicagoland senior publication with the only return on that investment being one initial client meeting. The critical point:  It’s SOOO MUCH easier and more efficient (meaning cheaper) to generate new business from people who know you versus strangers.

2. Create Your Business Development Plan. Creating this sort of a roadmap for your marketing efforts is likely what most of us stuck in category #2 are missing. Checkout The Reluctant Rainmaker Business Development Plan Generator.

3. Make a Great Biographical Sketch. Why is it that something like only 15% of attorneys have real client-friendly/focused biographies whether on the Web or in written materials? When I get a new case or transaction I’m always curious about the opposing counsel and checkout their profiles on the Web and I sure think potential clients are doing the same before retaining counsel. The Reluctant Rainmaker suggests including a photograph, areas of practice, wide-ranging narrative (including things like practice area description, special skills, leadership roles, and personal interests), and a separate section listing representative clients, articles written and/or speeches given, and bar/industry/community memberships.

4. A Simple Classification System for your Marketing Activities. So is what you’re planning and doing a high/medium/low yield activity & is it fast or slow yield? For example, a law review article may be high but slow yield whereas a “legal update” newsletter to your list of clients/former clients/referral services is probably high/fast yield. And you probably want a mix of high yield slow and fast since like in the example above although your legal update might bring in some business quickly a law review article likely has more staying power and reputational benefit long term.

5. 5 Great Elevator Speech formats. This is golden and something every lawyer needs a better grasp of…the big 5:  a) The benefits-focused description; b) The practice, client-centric description; c) The Unique Selling Proposition intro; d) The provocative statement; and, e) The “you know how” introduction.

And don’t forget this recent post, Why Don’t You Write More, inspired by The Reluctant Rainmaker…because every lawyer has some text sitting around waiting to be re-packaged.

Pick-up The Reluctant Rainmaker today!

Or if you don’t, these are some great insights into how to better compete with other attorneys.

The headline stems from this article here, How Do Lawyers Get Away With This Stuff?, that I read recently in the NYTimes’ Small Business Blog – You’re the Boss, The Art of Running a Small Business. As an aside that blog gives some of the best, consistent small business advice that I’m aware of…most of the columnists are small business leaders.

First let me summarize and extract some quotes directly from the article. Notably, the author of the piece is Jennifer Walzer, President of Backup My Info! which I think has gotten a fair amount of publicity as a hot, up-and-coming business in the fast growing online/off-site data backup marketplace…I mention that because when you hear her complaints about lawyer service I would think she and her company would be pretty welcome clientele for 90% of lawyers out there. The background of the article is Ms. Walzer hired a lawyer to review a new lease for her company and the article describes her experience in dealing with the particular lawyer/firm. This opening ‘graph is great:

At my company, we try so hard to provide great customer service that I sometimes forget that bad customer service exists. And then I hired a lawyer.

First…

We sat down to talk, and I explained that I had a relatively straightforward sublease agreement but wanted to make sure that I was protecting myself. The lawyer said he was happy to help and asked for a $2,500 retainer fee, explaining that based on what I had told him, the total fee probably wouldn’t exceed that amount. Fair enough. I sent the check and the agreement for him to review. I had enough on my plate and wanted to trust him and his firm.

It was another lawyer from the firm who got back to me. He informed me that the agreement was relatively standard but needed a few changes. I reviewed the comments and my impression was that some of the changes he made were a bit of a stretch, but again, I wanted to trust their judgment. I let them make their changes. I had paid for $2,500 worth of service, so I figured I might as well let the lawyers do their thing. And did they ever …

Okay, sounds pretty routine, and next…

I had a few more conversations with the first lawyer in which we discussed forgoing the good guy guarantee versus providing a larger security deposit to the bank (I didn’t like the idea of having to personally guarantee the rent for four years). That prompted them to send me an additional bill — for $1,450. I wasn’t thrilled, but I figured it was O.K.  because I’d raised some more questions. At that point, the deal was pretty much done, so I paid the bill and called it a day.

And, finally the REALLY GOOD STUFF…

Imagine my surprise when a few weeks later another bill arrived. This one was for approximately $2,500. It contained a long list of itemized charges that made little sense to me. I checked my phone log to try to match the calls with the charges, and the numbers weren’t there. I assumed there must be some mistake.

I called and left a polite message for the billing manager, asking her to call me back whenever it was convenient. Instead, the two lawyers called me together on speakerphone, addressing me right off the bat in a hostile tone. They demanded to know why I had an issue with the bill, which caught me off guard. I asked if we could review the bill since it wasn’t adding up for me. They immediately became defensive and asked me to prove to them which charges were inaccurate.

I picked an e-mail from the list. I had been charged for 0.2 hours at $300 an hour ($60) for one lawyer’s reply to an e-mail I’d written letting him know that I was not going to be available and would review his comments when I was back in my office. I wrote this as a courtesy to let them know my status. It demanded no reply, but I got one anyway. It said: “I hope everything is O.K. Take your time.” I thought it was nice of him. It never occurred to me I would be charged for it.

Flabbergasted, I asked how they could charge me $60 for a courtesy e-mail. The answer left me even more flabbergasted. “Jennifer,” said the first lawyer, “your e-mail took me away from a multimillion dollar agreement I’m working on, so if I have to stop what I’m doing to view and respond to an e-mail, then I have to charge you.”

That’s an incredible tale at one level but sadly so NOT surprising on another level. Particularly in some of my court-appointed contempt work it’s eye-opening at some of the lawyer treatment and lawyer billing I hear and see first-hand when I take my first meeting with these clients and also review the court’s case file and see huge fee petitions against former clients with very little having been accomplished.

Why does this sort of thing exist with lawyers and what to do?

There’s likely many reasons but I tend to think that older generations of lawyers say the 50+ crowd who are managing many firms these days are relics of an era where the legal field was rather immune from competition. In other words there were way fewer lawyers out there and thus less competition. The last 15 years or so has seen a huge increase in the number of practicing lawyers. Lets face it, there are surely aspects of legal services where the offerings are commodity services where there’s virtually no difference from one lawyer to the next, at least on the substance of the issue. Whether it is or not, I would suggest really competing with the mindset that the legal services you’re offering are a commodity and you’ve got to hustle, be innovative with alternative billing, and provide great customer to win business. I mean McDonalds isn’t going to get away with the crap that was described above, right? I’d just go to Wendys.

How might you compete with the sort of billing and customer service practices listed in the article above?

Billing Clarity. Surely there’s probably some “back story” to the article above but from what you read the client was quoted $2,500 flat-fee for a commercial lease review and she ended up being charged some $6,000. She seemed to be satisfied when the bill was at $3,600 since she had raised some issues that hadn’t been discussed up front. But however the client is being billed why not just be clear about an hourly rate, a specific flat-fee amount, or extra charges. If a client is unhappy with a result or your services that’s not totally unavoidable, but “billing surprises” are avoidable.

Billing Alternatives. A commercial lease review seems to me that it should be something a lawyer should charge either a flat-fee for or perhaps a combination hourly rate with a “fee cap” on the top end. I’ve done this sort of thing a few times in my career and I don’t think it’s too different than the sort of negotiation that occurs in buying a home…there’s a sort of set time for some negotiations of fairly standard things and then you get to an agreement and you’re done. So on the lawyer side it’s pretty predictable in terms of lawyer time needed. Why surprise a client if you don’t have to and create the potential for client ill will? Even with hourly billing a fair, honest thorough bill need not surprise a client…it sounded like there was some old fashioned “bill padding” going on in the example above. My firm is getting ready to start offering a flat-fee monthly billing option for even some unpredictable practice areas such as dissolution of marriages where someone will have to use an automatic payment option like a credit/debit card and then each month they’re charged somewhere in the $250-$750 range regardless of the amount of work done that month. I have a few final things I need to figure out about this before it’s a “go” but in other words we’re trading the potential for higher fees in some months for promised consistency and client won’t need to bring a big retainer in up-front and there will be no “billing surprises.”

No Charges. Do you ever use these on your bills? You should (I probably use them too much). The $60 e-mail above being a perfect example…doing work for a client and listing on your bill but not charging for it. I do it when someone calls for something like when is court tomorrow or that sort of purely logistical kind of thing where I’m not giving legal advice at all. I’d be pissed too for getting charged for the $60 e-mail listed in the article above.

There are great opportunities for lawyers to boost business big-time by focusing not on legal substance but rather customer service and billing innovations!

A Reluctant Retailer Decides to Open Her Books. Just substitute “law firm” for the word retailer in that headline and I think this article could be hugely impactful to you firm’s bottom-line. I think the key “take aways” from the article are really unlocking the unused intellectual value of your lawyer and non-lawyer staff alike and really building a business team. I haven’t done as good a job as I should over the years but I’m amazed at the ideas we generate when my legal assistant and I really dig into the business issues we’re confronting. The sort of all-knowing lawyer or CEO concept is stupid primarily because it so under uses the strengths of other employees.

Supreme Court Rules for Student Seeking Discharge of Student Loan Debt. Although not a fan of financial irresponsibility in lending and I am someone who does have moral qualms with bankruptcy discharge, it’s nice to know there may be some options for students. Here’s SCOTUSblog’s take on the opinion.

Staying Ahead on Retainers. This was part of the ISBA’s Illinois Lawyer NOW, Best Practices column recently. Likely a problem for many over-stretched sole practitioners. I definitely like the **get larger retainers and **actively push the use of credit cards ideas. Personal example with me is just comparing a handful of our clients who are on the “automatic credit card charge plan” versus the more typical mailed monthly bill people…the credit card folks I KNOW I’m getting paid that day we close our billing cycle whereas the regular mailed monthly billed people it’s more of an I THINK/HOPE I’m getting paid sometime sort of feeling. BIG DIFFERENCE! Here’s the link to the Illinois Law NOW Best Practices page with a bunch of free, useful practice management columns.

The Danger of Domestic Relations as a Practice Area…see here, here, and here. One piece discussed a lawyer’s alleged assault on an opposing party in an Order for Protection case…not surprising to me sadly. I haven’t been a part of any assaults but I see way to many lawyers losing their cool and even making harsh verbal attacks on an opposing party. Then there was the jailed deadbeat dad who tried to egg the judge…how’d he get the egg if he had been incarcerated?? And then the rash of religion/custody disputes that I’ve seen lately in domestic relations land. I think the divorce/religion package is more combustible than politics/religion.  I tend to view this litigation as attempts by custodial parents to over-intrude on the non-custodial parents’ parenting/visitation time.

Are You CEO of Something? This relates a lot to the first item above and really just getting more out of your people by being a good manager. And it’s a double-positive…you delegate and make your legal assistant “CEO” of certain areas of your business really empowering/growing him or her and it lets you focus on more important things. So far my part-time legal assistant is CEO of client billing, office supplies, and post-closing real estate file/mailing procedures.  Here’s a bit from the article:

We had this really motivated, smart receptionist. She was young. We kept outgrowing our phone systems, and she kept coming back and saying, “Mark, we’ve got to buy a whole new phone system.” And I said: “I don’t want to hear about it. Just buy it. Go figure it out.” She spent a week or two meeting every vendor and figuring it out. She was so motivated by that.

Saw a great bunch of videos from ABA’s Techshow with the full article here and all 16 speaker presentations here.  These are 6 minute presentations that answer the above, so, what is the future of law practice…

I honestly have no idea who Jack Newton is but the presentation is, What a law firm can learn from Zappos.com. The take-away…customer service. You can differentiate yourself as legal services become more of a commodity through providing great customer service.  His last slide tagline:  YOUR LAW FIRM IS A SERVICE COMPANY THAT HAPPENS TO SELL LEGAL ADVICE.

And from our friend Carolyn Elefant, The Lessons of Tommy Supreme.  That’s a great lawyer/entrepreneur/blogger story that I was not familiar with at all. So this sole practitioner Tom Goldstein built a niche appellate practice that eventually was bought-out by BigLaw’s Akin Gump. Some take-aways:

• Power of Free – he did lots of pro bono work to raise his profile up front…could you do this? Or give-away a free publication?
• Boot Strap – he started as a home office guy…don’t throw away money on “fluff.”
• Niche Practice – you standout & marketing is cheaper because you’re only trying to reach a niche & you’re the expert not just some generalist.
• Hustle – you’ve got to go get those clients and be unconventional sometimes.

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!

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?

Well, there’s about 8 hours left in 2009 as I jot down a few thoughts here in the Central Standard time zone. Can I say that New Years Eve is a non-event for me…not sure why although it may have to do with the fact I’m more of an early morning person than a late night person so the concept of staying up past midnight to see fireworks or some lighted ball dropping isn’t quite the cat’s meow for me. But the one thing I do enjoy about the transition from year-to-year is the opportunity to reflect on the last year and plan ahead to the next year.

Here are 4 Final Thoughts for 2009 from one Solo (attorney) In Chicago…

Steady Income Sources are Nice and/or Cash Flow is King. I’d guess that like with me, this is a huge struggle for many solos. I think a lot of it stems from the fact that sole practitioners tend to be more dependent on individual clients than larger law firms. And if these individuals are anything like some of my clients they’re not always rolling-in-the-dough which equals paying their lawyers in dribs and drabs. It’s hard to lawyer like that and it’s hard to live with that. Can you find some steady sources of income to create an “income floor” that you can count on each month? Over the last 6 months or so the combination of my work as part of the Cook County Domestic Relations Division Referral Program (run through the domestic relations division of the Circuit Court of Cook County per rule 13.8b) and as an arbitrator through Cook County’s mandatory arbitration program have allowed me to create more a floor under my income. Not huge dollars but at least I have knowledge at the start of each month I can count on say $1,500 of income that isn’t dependent on a client’s payment that month. Might there be some court-appointed options that you can plug into? Or is there a way you can gain some business or entity clientele with more repeat business to supplement your individual clients?

Marketing/Selling is Key. Here’s a fact they don’t teach ya in law school:  The lawyers who make the most money aren’t the best legal practitioners rather the lawyers who make the most money are the best salespeople and marketers. This fact is of the utmost importance if you’re starting/building a law firm. I’m just about at a point where I’ve located the marketing sweet spot in terms of really getting the phone ringing regularly with new client inquiries. The big 3 marketing channels that work for me are:  1) Current/former clients (reached via personal meetings/contacts, annual mailing, and monthly Constant Contact e-mail newsletter); 2) Other professionals (reached in many ways like category #1 plus memberships in local Rotary and LeTip chapters); 3) Bar Association referral services. For me categories #1 & #2 are where the action is BIG TIME. Other areas I’m pondering are better Internet-based ads and targeting the evangelical Christian community which I’m active in better. I’d hope to maybe do an interview with some small firm attorneys and their Google AdWords experience. I see them up on this blog and they just seem so generic that I can’t imagine why/how they’d be effective plus I’ve heard of some bad experiences…I suppose it’s all about the correct keywords, no?

Under-Billing:  A Problem with Solutions. This is becoming less of a problem for me as my self-confidence grows, I see the quality of work I do vis-a-vis other attorneys (and vis-a-vis their billing rates), and I do better with regards to items 1 & 2 above…in other words these things are all interrelated. Lawyers under-bill because they might not think they’re very good lawyers but I’m starting to see I am a pretty good lawyer. And as I build some steady income sources and effectively open several effective marketing channels I’m not as worried about losing that 1 client if I quote too high of a fee because there will be others who will happily compensate me for the quality of work that I do.

Use Friendly But Aggressive Billing Communication. I like where I am right now with regards to our billing communication and follow-up. And I don’t say that theoretically, I say it meaning we’re getting paid well and our receivables are reasonably low. What’s working for us? It’s one non-lawyer’s job to mail our bills our each month and to follow-up with clients at specific time increments if there has not been payment. And this isn’t some a-hole collection agency (I’ve sworn off of them) rather it’s a friendly member of our staff making a reminder call. Full and accurate communication in your billing is key too…the description on your bills is as important as any of your in-court legal writing and probably more. I bet most clients are reading your bills more closely than a lot of judges are reading your pleadings. Eventually you must withdraw and bring your fee petition if there’s non-compliance. I haven’t crossed the sue-my-ex-clients bridge yet, BUT, if you’re in area like under the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act where you can bring a simple fee petition as a pleading like anything else in the case you’ve got to do it. Clients seem to act if you’ve got a judgment against them and a wage deduction’s comin’.

SEE YOU BACK HERE NEXT YEAR!