Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

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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 finally got around to reading this case out of Sangamon County involving a trial court’s finding of indirect criminal contempt against a lawyer. It’s instructive specifically regarding lawyer conduct before a tribunal and I’m a self-labeled “contempt junkie” so that part of the case’s discussion is also useful if you have the same problem.

Briefly, a pro se client seemed to be unsuccessful in getting a motion to modify certain post-divorce financial obligations scheduled before the court although he did get a motion filed. Most courts have some local rule that says you need to set a motion/pleading for hearing in 90ish days from filing or it’s a nullity (you’d need to re-file…it’s treated as if it was never filed). Here, apparently the date of the original filing of the motion was important. Next, pro se client retains lawyer who files motion to set pro se’s previous motion for hearing and lawyer says the pro se motion was still timely BECAUSE it had been noticed up in the past but opposing lawyer had improperly appeared and that the motion set in court was stricken on that day w/o notice to pro se litigant.

And what does “new” lawyer for previously pro se litigant use as evidence of the above scheduling “issue”? An exhibit to his pleading which is a page from the judge’s court scheduling calendar.

Well, so then the case heads down the contempt road. Judge asks lawyer how/where he got the calendar page and lawyer says the clerk gave it to him and clerk denies this and there’s a whole contempt hearing sort of he said/she said between lawyer and judge’s clerk.

Lawyer is eventually held in indirect criminal contempt of court and fined $100 and required to apologize to the court. On appeal they modify to indirect civil contempt and remove the $100 fine. Short opinion and an interesting discussion of types of contempt.

I wonder how comfortable the lawyer is appearing in that judge’s/clerk’s courtroom these days.

At least according to John Cesario, ARDC at today’s Working With Challenging Clients seminar @ CBA:

1.  Criminal;
2.  Domestic relations;
3.  Torts/PI;
4.  Real Estate.

Ah splendid, my 2 primary practice areas in the top 4. Real estate’s a bit of a head-scratcher…where’s the contentiousness in ho-hum transactional work?