Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

Question to Chicago family law attorneys, is there a less lawyer and litigant friendly environment than 32 W. Randolph when the opposing party is pro se and yet is (not represented) by the IL Dept. of Healthcare and Family Services (IDHFS) regarding the child support portion of the case?

I was over there yesterday bringing a very simple motion to set aside a default order entered against a client within 30 days of entry. But of course you’re first sent to one of the hearing officers which wastes maybe an hour of your time. Then your file gets sent over to a courtroom (by which time the judge is now off the bench). Even more annoying are these cases where IDHFS are not representing people but of course they’re drafting the orders and such so we don’t get any contact information on the opposing litigant before the initial court date.

End result we get a whole pleading schedule on a simple motion to set aside a default Order that was entered previously without notice to our client. Fighting that court system and also the bureaucracy of IDHFS in dealing with support payments is miserable!

I’m going to just straight-out direct you to Ed Poll’s blog. He has a ton of great recent posts on law firm marketing and financial bench-marking for law firms.

LexisONE had a blurb that reported on employees experiences and feelings regarding working from home here. The underlying report is here.

The report includes some not suprising data suggesting the increased popularity of working from home. It stated that 29% of employees work from home once a week. Is your company competitive on this critical life issue (especially for people with children)??

Law.com has a well-written piece here from Attorney Greg A. Gallopoulos from Jenner & Block addressing the above referenced question. It’s a good read. His perspective is that of a managing partner at a large law firm providing advice regarding the motives of current and potential employees.

As I read the piece I thought that a lot of the factors which he suggested were the vocational motives of law firm attorneys might also be motives that motivate people to go solo.

Here’s a post from The Christian Science Monitor about an online networking site for seniors called Eons.com. The article heralds the increased usage of online networking sites by seniors. I don’t know a lot about the site other than what’s mentioned in the article. It appears the site is centered around different topic areas around which persons congregate.

I think the bigger thought is the online/blogging/social networking demographics are going to be slowing broadening. And if you assume that the teen and twenty-something crowd are pretty much all online already, the growth is with the more elderly demographics. Maybe we should launch the elder law blog that we’ve been hesitant to do?

There’s a regular column in Chicago Lawyer magazine written by Chicago Attorney Joe DuCanto regarding family law matters. It’s an often very useful column by a seemingly experienced family law attorney. His column in the September 2006 issue discuss fee collection in family law cases. He makes some good if rather unoriginal points regarding fee collection: select clients carefully, be up-front about the costs of good legal services, keep the client informed, bill them while the emotions are positive.

His last paragraph reads:

But in the meantime, understand that litigation and collection of fees don’t belong together. If you must litigate your fees, brothers and sisters, you’ve lost not only your money but your professional dignity as well.

Is that a bit much Joe? Is the use of hard collection action somehow a loss of dignity? I think I take issue with his perspective. At its core I suppose this is the old professional versus business argument regarding the practice of law. For the record we haven’t sued any clients over fees although we do use a third-party collection manager to “remind” clients when they get behind. I just find that perspective a bit too ivory tower. If you’re out of business, you’re no longer “professional” period, dignified or not.

Picked up some interesting stuff from Hoffman & Pomerantz LLP advertising local appearance counsel. I know as a sole practitioner this a constant need for me. Also, if you’re in real start-up phase still as a solo, you might want to contact them to be one of their coverage attorneys to get a little cash into your pocket. The contact is Amy Cutter (acutter@weappear.com).

Be Excellent has a nice post here about small business attrition and some tips for staying in business.

Here’s another good NYTimes piece regarding attorneys. The article discusses a recent New Jersey Supreme Court ethics opinion holding that a Super Lawyers advertising supplement violated professional responsibility rules in NJ. It seems that the problem with this publication was that it was distributed to the mass market rather than through more narrow, lawyer-specific media.

As I think about it, most of the Super Lawyer and Leading Lawyer rankings in IL are in lawyer specific or more public-policy type publications. I think the NJ holding is appropriate and do think that a consumer could be misled by such rankings. What is everyone else’s view on these lists?

I think I got the nomination form for the Leading Lawyer Network in IL for the first time this year. My recolection was that you had to nominate like at least five people to them in order for you to be considered. So, it wasn’t as bogus as I had previously thought…I thought you could just buy your way onto those lists. However, is my ability to nominate five other people to their list in some way indicative of my ability as a lawyer? No.

Get some ideas from this piece from the 9/17/06 NYTimes on running a business on a small budget. See if you find anything new. By way of example in our practice, we use eFax for faxing that is referenced in the piece. For the package we use we get a local fax number and virtually unlimited faxing for $12.95 per month. I think the only issue that we run into every so often is a ceiling on how many pages we can receive per month. One recent month we had a trial and were exchanging all sorts of large document batches and we hit our ceiling but that’s the only time it’s happened thus far. 1and1.com is our Web host…we pay under $10 per month for them.

The article mentions bartering too. I haven’t done any bartering in the small business realm but I’ve heard other lawyers doing it. The Greatest American Lawyer had a post about his bartering for services recently.