Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

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Lawcrossing.com has a pretty good ‘flying solo’ piece here. I think most of the advice from the piece is pretty right on from my experience.

If you are in the pre-client (or few client) stage upon start-up, I think you need to go home office or space-for-services set-up with other lawyers. I had some five clients when I started our practice in April 2005 in a space-for-services deal. I was immediately profitable…my expenses weren’t too much. The thunderbolt that I had to deal with was when the lawyer who owned the office condo I was in got up and left for a law firm job and put the floor on the market. Having to pay rent probably increased my expenses by some 300% immediately.

Here’s a piece from yesterdays’ Sun-Times about immigration in the Chicago area. Is your Firm feeling the same effect? The numbers are, not suprising to me, but still fairly stagering. Naturalized citizens of voting age were more than 12% of the suburban population and more than 13% of Chicago’s. I found it suprising that between the six collar counties with Cook separated between Chicago and suburban Cook, DuPage County actually has the highest naturalized citizen population at 14.4%.

I think the questions that small law firm managers need to be considering are:

• How can I reach out to these populations (marketing)?
• How much do I stand to lose by not targeting these populations?
• How much do I stand to lose by not having foreign language interpretors in my office?
• Do I (lawyer) need to be fluent in more than one language?

Obviously immigration has huge ramifications that our Congress is having a hard enough time coming to any policies regarding as our federal government; it’s a tough issue. That being said, I’d be hard pressed to think of many places in the Chicago area that should not be having Spanish language interpretors available all the time. The same may apply to Polish on the north and northwest sides of Chicago.