Editor’s Note: This is a bit of a “tease” for tomorrow’s CLE presentation sponsored by the Illinois State Bar Association, Building and Managing a Virtual Law Firm…online or live attendance options available.
What do I mean when I say “Virtual Law Practice”? Three macro points undergird much of what I’m focused on in practicing virtually: 1) No single bricks/mortar office location; 2) Personnel working from multiple locations (anywhere); 3) Paperless (at least trying to be as best as a lawyer can).
I’m often asked what were the best and worst decisions I’ve made since hanging my shingle back in 2005 and interestingly both answers are different sides of the same coin. My worst decision? Over-paying for unnecessary downtown Chicago office space. My best decision? Getting rid of that over-priced office space. My decision to leave our bricks/mortar office space and the related $1,200-$1,500 in monthly rental expenses at its core was about survival. $1,200-$1,500 monthly is REAL money, particularly in the very early years of a solo law practice. Our monthly office rent obligation was far and away our largest monthly expense and constituted 60%-70% of our total monthly business expenses.
Why did I need a Wacker Drive Chicago location?
My legal assistant has always worked from home and thus the only two reasons for the office space were as a place for me to work and for new client meetings. Upon further analysis I decided that I can work wherever I am and often in the vacant bedroom at my home a lot more conveniently and less expensively than commuting to Chicago daily. That left only the new client meeting issue unresolved. As an attorney specializing in the domestic relations field where there are regular court appearances, I’ve found that in most cases there’s only a single client office meeting and that’s right up front at the initial consultation stage. Over the 2+ years where I maintained a bricks/mortar office location I ascertained that new client meetings constituted two to four meetings per month on average. So in essence I was paying some $1,200-$1,500 for five hours of office usage each month.
My firm has not maintained a bricks/mortar office location since January 2008. All client meetings take place at very nice temporary office providers. If you’re not familiar with many of the “executive suite” companies, this is actually becoming a very popular and competitive marketplace for not just attorneys but for many service businesses in general. This set-up has not only saved money but it actually allows us to offer far greater convenience to our clients just in terms of multiple office locations. This “virtual” set-up saves big money and we can offer a better service to our clientele…what’s not to like?
Communicating with Clients and Team Members
In my firm, interaction with my legal assistant and clients has evolved in two primary stages. As I mentioned above, even when I did maintain a traditional office location my primary legal assistant was not officed there. At this stage the receptionist at our office provider would simply forward telephone calls to wherever my legal assistant was located. Also, we had a small computer network built and my legal assistant remotely connected into the network over the Internet to access our documents and accounting software. Until about the last year, our client communication remained very traditional and paper-based with letters and court orders sent via U.S. Mail or e-mail. Over the last year and currently our focus has been on getting everything up “into the cloud.” For my firm the primary change has been to utilize cloud-based collaboration software whereby everything that used to be sent via U.S. Mail or e-mail is now uploaded into the secure collaboration software program which saves money and is much less paper reliant. So over the last year or so we have moved to both cloud-based financial management software for client billing and collaboration software for general project management primarily for document sharing between our dispersed staff and with clients. Although there are now several “one stop” cloud-based law practice management packages I find them to be cost prohibitive at the moment.
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