Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

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:

and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty.
~~William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation

Just a quick nugget of America’s history about what we consider the original Thanksgiving harvest celebration back in 1621 on our eastern shore.

As I work feverishly to sort of close-up shop these next few days prior to a little upper-Midwestern travel next week I have much to be thankful for in the legal realm. Despite some of the general economic headwinds, I’m expecting to close-out our Firm’s best financial year yet (sorry for not keeping up with the monthly financials better but I’ll surely do a full-year look-back). SIC’s ramping up nicely seeing nearly 60,000 site hits and more than 11,000 site visitors just last month. And I expect that we’ll continue to really ramp-up our place as the ‘Go-To’ resource for entrepreneurial attorneys as I get some outside technical assitance and add another writer or two. But primarily I’m thankful for the people I meet as an attorney and blogger from my clientele to the hundreds of lawyers I meet and hear from on a regular basis.

And speaking of this spirit of Thanksgiving…

I’ve got my first little free give-a-way to offer compliments of UPrinting.com. The prize offering is for: 50, 7*5″ (folded to 3.5*5) custom thank you cards with plain envelopes (see here, here, and here).

What’s the contest? Leave your comment to this post stating some legal advice or mentoring story related to your law practice that you’re most thankful for. The deadline is 11/29/09. For example, I’m very thankful that the first attorney I worked for, Gordon Cochrane, an excellent sole practitioner was an absolute sticker for thoroughness and being detail oriented. It got a bit grating at the time but looking back I appreciate the fact that I’m not sloppy. Only 1 winner and I’m the judge.

How ’bout you?

And for a quick bow to the FTC, I am receiving 50 thank you cards from UPrinting.com for hosting this contest.

How?

Attend Ms. JD’s 3rd Annual Conference:  Avenues to Advancement…this Friday and Saturday (11/20-21) at Northwestern’s School of Law!

Okay, yes I am giving my own panel a bit of a plug here, Paths to Independence: Starting & Building Your Solo Practice with Irene Bahr, Andrea Buford, Janaan Hashim, and Michelle Rozovics. But the whole event is chalked full of real diverse sorts of career seminars…big firm, small firm, avenues to government and corporate legal departments…plus some real nuts-and-bolts tips on networking, summer jobs, self-promotion, and even avoiding the mommy-track (OK, I’m not too worried about that last one).

But seriously, only $50 for law students…what do ya have to lose if you’re in greater Chicagoland ($150 for practicing lawyers).

Come on and say hi.

Some occasional, insightful nuggets from around the BLAWGSPHERE…

Representing Family Members and Other Horrible Life Decisions (Nutmeg Lawyer). Nutmeg includes a nice listing of factors to consider when looking at friends & family representation. He includes a jarring story where a lawyer represented a very close friend in a divorce and the lawyer’s emotions ended up getting the best of her. Personally I’ve had some excellent family/friend representation within boundaries. I’ve for the most part represented friends/family in real estate transactions and estate planning plus a couple of sort of easily settled lawsuits. Bottomline, who do ya know better than friends and family and those I respect and know will be professional and pay my fees and are great clients. In my experience most of my friends/relatives expect to pay market value fees and are adamant about doing that.

The Most Expensive Mistakes a Lawyer Can Make (Chuck Newton). A very useful list indeed. At a recent ISBA Webinar that I moderated along with a couple of colleagues the unanimous answer to the question, “What was your worst decision you’ve made since starting your law practice” was under-billing or as Chuck lists inadequate pricing. That along with wasting $$ on office space i.e. borrowing/spending too much on Chuck’s list were my answers.

The Chicken or the Egg? Changing Practice Areas in Challenging Times (GAL).  A great & relevant point for us all no? I’ve probably been keeping my power a bit too dry in this area. GAL’s experience:

I would make several observations from my own experience.  First, the internet makes expertise available.  With a little hard work in your spare time, there’s almost no area of law you can’t gain base experience in.  Further, your chance of getting a case within a practice you’re interested in is no more than random luck, unless you go out and develop an expertise and start talking up that expertise on the web and on the street.

Wanna be a lawyer? Well, get thee to a courtroom (Ernie the Attorney). That’s a great tip all the time. If you can stumble on a few interesting cases in a courtroom while waiting for your matter to be called you’re very lucky. This is very worthwhile and easily done both for the substantive law you may learn & for more “perception issues.” I experienced some perception issues first hand recently when I served for the first time as a Cook County Arbitrator. The arbitration rooms are small so I’d closely observe the plaintiff’s and defendant’s lawyers. And the way the lawyers act from the moment they step into the room surely impacts likability and likely in some subtle way a court’s ruling.

Or if I’m a tad less fatalistic, what would happen to your active cases for the next 2 weeks if you suddenly had a family or health emergency or even a planned vacation that wouldn’t allow you to practice law for the next 14 days?

This is not intended as a re-post on vacation planning although some of those principals DO likely apply here. Nope rather I’m dwelling on a simple yet instructive experience I had recently when a colleague of mine asked me to step into a real estate transaction that got delayed and he had to skip out-of-town. Plus, Nerino Petro also made reference to a bar association’s clean-up of a lawyer’s practice upon the lawyer’s death recently at his scanner presentation at the Solo and Small Firm Conference. And it was a little challenging to get my transaction closed. By no means was the transaction in bad shape nor horribly organized yet I think a few moments dwelling on how your cases/files/firm would look to someone else just picking them up for the first time, might be useful.

Because even for a “simple” residential real estate transaction file it was very challenging to understand the status with a mere review of this file. If the lawyer whose transaction I was covering had not been reachable this would have been a very challenging transaction for me.

A Solo’s solution?

–Keep a well-organized hard/soft case file.
–Keep a detailed case log on all of your cases…this is a no-brainer for things like a real estate transaction where many people might be working the file and it’s almost more logistics than law.
–Keep a more general listing of all your current cases with status and pertinent dates.

A good biography with some good psychological history in a recent WSJ profile of U.S. Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. I like this quote and think it’s very applicable to legal entrepreneurs:

“In so many areas of life, you need to be a long-term optimist but a short-term realist. That’s especially true given the inherent dangers in aviation. You can’t be a wishful thinker. You have to know what you know and don’t know, and what your airplane can and can’t do in every situation.”

That’s very consistent with what Jim Collins labeled the Stockdale Paradox in Good to Great. The idea that you should have long-term faith that you’ll be successful but you also must have the day-to-day discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.

I do!

At least in my practice areas there’s nothing more valuable to me than a good referral source. Typically for me good referral sources tend to be other attorneys who either don’t practice in Cook County or more local attorneys who practice in different subject matter than myself or the general “other professionals” particularly financial professionals needing estate planning-probate help or even a local pastor has called me about some family law matters of late. Quite frankly, this subject of good referral sources is the best reason going why you should try to be as respectful and kind to opposing lawyers and/clients…those people are potential future referral sources.

And…

If you’re the recipient of referrals you ought to treat your referral sources right!

I was thinking about this enough to share a little nugget here because I’ve referred several matters to attorneys lately in some fields that I don’t work in…namely criminal and employment law. And I haven’t heard a peep from the attorneys I referred clients to. I’m guessing the matters I referred out aren’t huge $$$ cases but really I’m not sure (I guess if they were big money cases I may have sought a referral fee). Yet they were real, paying clients (of mine) that might turn into who knows what for the second lawyer.

I would suggest at a minimum upon receiving a client referral from another attorney you acknowledge the referral contacted you and simply express thanks to the referral source via a phone call or e-mail. Second, follow-up with the referral source periodically about the client or minimally at the conclusion of the matter to tell the referral source what great work you did for the client (the client is likely the referral source’s client too). You might take the person out to lunch or out for golf or something too. But I think the first couple points are the bare minimum.

Because now I’m a tad hesitant to refer cases to a couple lawyers I referred cases to recently ’cause I’ve heard nothing about the client matters.

Do YOU want referrals?

Well I suppose the only real way to do the above is to retire from the legal profession so please take the above headline with a grain of salt.

But I am constantly trying to alleviate some of MY clients’ “payment problems.” Part of my attempt to deal with “the problems” was to pick-up my copy of Ed Poll’s, The Business of Law, which I’ve owned for several years but hadn’t ever read. I don’t know Ed personally but I’ve been following him on Twitter (@LawBiz) for the last several months and I’m a regular participant in his LawBiz Forum. Ed’s background in helping lawyers become more profitable speaks for itself. I’m not through the entire tome as yet but I have been focusing on the several chapters in the section entitled Financial Management.

Some general things to check out are some of his financial forecasting tools and his two suggested methods for pricing legal services (his so-called Cost-Plus & Market pricings). An interesting factual nugget, “The average national accounts receivable cycle for lawyers’ services is 4.3 months.” Ugh.

But we want some action points to put dollars in your pockets, no? That’s what I need.

Here are 3 easy-to-implement billing/financial planning nuggets I’m thinking about and I’ll report back on the final implementation:

• Billing cycle change. My firm sends out client bills on a monthly basis. I’d guess most lawyers who are primarily involved with hourly billing sorts of matters send out monthly statements. For the 4+ year history of my firm we’ve closed our billing cycle on the last day of the month and then mailed bills to clients the first few days of the next month. The problem? The majority of our clients’ payments don’t come in until roughly the 15th-25th of the month. And this is often a problem because both within my business and personally I have bills that sometimes are dependent on client payments due at the start or middle of the month…and that’s a problem! My solution:  Change the end date of our billing cycle to somewhere in the early 20s day of the month and then mail bills essentially 7-10 days earlier than we’ve been doing. The goal being to move the client-payment-received window forward to the 5th-15th.

• Incorporate “Evergreen” Retainer deposits. With the exception of real estate transactions, we generally require a retainer deposit from clients up front which then gets billed against as we do a clients work. I suppose we can always take larger retainers upfront which is probably half of the solution. However I do often think clients might struggle to make too large of an upfront deposit. Yet on the back end of things my problem has been once the retainer deposit has been used then we’ve been in the habit of simply billing clients for the work done that month. And then we start to have payment problems because we’re totally at the client’s whim. My solution:  Ed mentioned the “evergreen” retainer idea to me being simply a client must always keep some minimum amount in my trust account until the representation is completed. Then if there’s a payment problem I will always have some funds to collect against. I haven’t finalized the amount of the “evergreen” retainers as yet and I think it will vary by the nature of the case…seems like a range might be $250-$750.

• Consider a discount for clients who pay promptly. Here I’m aiming at the same problem as the billing cycle change…simply, getting client payments more quickly. So I’m deciding about what date deadline I’ll use that will qualify a client for a discount & what should the discount be. I’m leaning towards post-marked by the 15th of the month for the date. As for the amount, kind of wavering between a fixed-fee vs. a %. 10% sort of sounds good and would be easy to calculate but that seems too large.

Thoughts??

You may have noticed the recent edition of UPrinting as a sponsor of this blog (sidebar) and I wanted to mention a couple things going forward…

First, this blog is no different than most people and businesses during these tough times, I’m searching for new and better ways to generate revenue and improve the quality of this blog long term. I’m looking very seriously at creating a law student section and really increasing the variety of media that appear in this space and these things cost $$$.

Second, I am not an affiliate advertiser of UPrinting nor will I be falsely shilling about its products to generate my own income. The largest benefit I’m expecting from the sponsorship to provide SIC readers is by way of regular free give-a-ways such as business cards, postcards, brochures, ect (so check back often!).

Lastly, I am a recent and happy customer of UPrinting…just used them for my new bizcards. It was a bit like using the Amazon equivalent for printed products. I wanted to support a local printer but when you can use UPrinting’s many design features on their site, order and get your materials in a couple days w/o leaving home for $50…it’s kinda hard not to like’em.

Sometimes I can actually read when I’m writing on this blog and thus I ended up attending a couple seminars and conferences recently. My random thoughts both from the rostrum and as an audience member…

Out-of-town conferences offer a good opportunity for learning, networking, productivity and FUN. It had been a few years since I attended an out-of-town seminar and I’m surely not here to compare Springfield, IL to San Francisco in terms of the most exotic of conference locations (our Executive Mansion needs better tour docents) but I really enjoyed my 3 days in Springfield at several different levels. In no particular order…it’s easy to remain pretty darn productive at a conference hotel with a smartphone or laptop with you and wireless Internet access freely available. Quite frankly if my wife hadn’t accompanied me to Springfield I don’t think I would have missed a beat on the law firm/work side of things at all. I’d suggest it’s almost a more productive time than just “being in the office.” I’m meeting people, having fun, learning new things and concepts, and on top of legal work at a good conference hotel. Maybe I’ll finally get to Blogworld in 2010.

Get as close to your current clients as you possibly can. That’s among the nuggets from a presentation by management consultant John Olmstead. The overarching marketing point he made was that his lawyer clients often approach him about new marketing/sales ideas but his first questions is, what are you doing with the clients you already have/had? The point is simple right, but often forgotten. It’s a lot more likely that future legal work is going to come from that person whom you know and knows you and you have their contact information and you have a relationship versus engaging some person in the general public who might somehow come in contact with you.

The Connected Lawyer is NOT a fan of 3-in-1 printer/scanner/copiers. But they sure save surface area Bryan!

And some interesting nuggets from the ARDC CLE…

• During 2008, the ARDC docketed nearly 6,000 investigations yet only 124 of those actually resulted in ARDC prosecutions. More than 3,800 of the initial 6,000 alleged case neglect or communication failings.
• The Top 4 grievances docketed by area of law: 1) Criminal/Quasi-Criminal; 2) Domestic Relations; 3) Tort; and, 4) Real Estate/Landlord-Tenant.
• As for fee matters that get to hearing they fall into the following categories:
  –Overcharging…must be extreme. The example was a case of $150,000 in attorneys fees charged for entry of a guilty plee.
  –Billing more than a 24-hour day to a state agency for attorney’s fees.
  –Fraudulent billing at a document review project where the project’s software was timing the lawyer.