Working Out Of Your Home

There has been a lot of talk on the blogosphere about hiring assistants, spending money on office space, etc.  It can be found mostly here, here, andhere, and in the comments to those posts. 

I may have to turn in my card to the Cool-Kid’s Club, but I disagree with most of the sentiments there about hiring staff.  Well, I should really start from a place of agreement, which is that needless frills are a waste of money, except if that’s what your clients care about.  While it is perfectly possible to practice law without thick, creamy letterhead, or without persian rugs, or without wearing Charles Tyrwhitt shirts and cufflinks, some clients expect it, and if you’re going after those clients, realize you won’t land them without it.  Doesn’t mean that you might not land one or two, but if you’re not meeting your client’s demands, you’re going to have to spend effort convincing them that they want something else (you).

One of the statements that started this discussion was that an attorney wanted to make enough money to hire a staff member.  I agree that the concept is wrong, but I believe that it’s wrong because he or she has the order mixed up.  He should be saying that he wants to hire a staff member to make more money.

Not to patronize, but it is an economic business waste to have the $250/hr person perfoming the $50/hour task.  Here’s the trickier part - most people will say that it isn’t wise to bring in a person to do the $50/hour task unless you can occupy that person with sufficient full-time work to justify the cost.  That’s patently wrong. 

Unless you are satisfied capping your earnings (at either a reasonable number for working less hours or at a higher number for working crazy hours), you will never increase your success doing it all yourself, or waiting for there to be enough work to justify hiring a person full time.  On the other hand, if you have an eye for keeping the total hours you work reasonable, and at the same time, increasing your earnings, you must, MUST, bring on additional people for one reason, and only one reason - to free you to bring in more business.  And you must bring on these people before you have enough full-time work for them to stay occupied.  If it turns out that you don’t have enough work for them, go get it.  Take the time that they’re working on stuff that the firm has to do and spend the time developing business. 

I think that a 33%/33%/33% approach to your work time is a good guide.  The manager of a law firm should spend about a 1/3 of his or her time practicing law and performing client work, 1/3 of the time attending to the administration of the law firm, and 1/3 of the time actively developing business. 

I’m not saying be foolish about it - let’s not go and hire 3 attorneys and 4 paralegals when you’re not busy enough to fill your own day.  But if you can’t meet the 33% rule I set out above (particularly the part about spending 1/3 of your time on business development) because you are swamped with work either on the administrative or the practicing law side - fix that situation with the approprite personnel.

Because I don’t care if you fight traffic tickets or set up IPOs, you need to spend time actively developing business and/or attending to your existing institutional clients. 

I don’t have an ending for this post; I could probably go on for a few more paragraphs.  I’ll leave it alone for now. 

As you might have noticed, I was away for a while. When I was around, I’d often check my “stats” on Typepad to see where my viewers were coming from, which often revealed search terms in Google or Yahoo that led people to this blog.

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people searching for solo or small law firm salary information. I’m not sure why that leads them to this site (I haven’t posted a lot on that subject), but it prompted me to talk a little about it. I’m not sure what answer people are looking for. If someone writing a blog tells you that you can expect to make $45k your first year, does that mean you don’t go for it? If that same blogger tells you you can expect to make $100k, does that mean that you do?

My attitude, and I think that most entrepreneurs share this, was always that I can make as much money as I want to in law. I may not be able to completely control the timing of when I made that money, but I never thought that there were any artificial ceilings, floors and most importantly, starting expectations on that number.

So, for the benefit of the people who arrive here looking for salary information for solo or small law firms, here’s what I’ll tell you. When you open your doors that first month, you can expect to make $0. Even if you’re bringing along a huge client or many little clients, you will not get paid for that work in advance, you have to earn it - so, in Month One, expect zero dollars. After that, the sky’s the limit.

Take the advice of the people blogging on this subject. Keep your overhead low. Maximize your profit margin on your hourly or flat-fee (or if you’re daring, blended hourly/flat-fee) rate.

Define who you are. There are many lawyers in your community (I’m willing to put money on that); you are in competition with a large percentage of them. And you always will be. Define who you are, make sure that person is someone you’d want to hire to help you with your legal matter - sell the hell out of yourself. Get people to buy you.

The money will come - and if you’ve done any of this the right way - enough will come to make you happy with your decision.

Logging into this account after a few months of inactivity, I was surprised to learn that I actually remember my username and password. Incredible.

Let’s catch up on what’s been going on with me. Most importantly, I recently hired another attorney to help with our work. This was needed for two reasons - first, the workload for my firm has stayed the same, but the hours of two of our attorneys has reduced for various reasons. Second, I’ve been overburden with many routine matters in the office, which means that I haven’t been able to attend to as many of the necessary business development tasks as I should.

Now that we’ve had this extra help for a couple of weeks, my schedule has calmed enough to get back to blogging (both practice development and substantive law blogs). Good to see you again, friends.

Heh - I honestly started laughing as I read Gary Krakow’s second attempt to install Vista, recounted here at msnbc.com

Here’s an actual quote,

When I got my hands on a copy of Vista Ultimate, I wiped the X60’s hard drive clean and did a complete install. The new Ultimate edition comes on a DVD and allowed me to do a total wipe of the hard drive again before doing a clean, full install of Vista. The entire episode took nearly two hours.

Once the install sequence completed, my ThinkPad rebooted normally. Windows Vista started up without even a hint of an error message. Unlike my experience with Vista Beta 2, the final release of Vista Ultimate actually seemed to work — until I tried playing a music file.

It was then that I realized there were a number of features not working on the X60. There was no audio output, limited video resolution choices and the Wi-Fi connection was not running as quickly as I would have liked. I wondered whether it was a problem with the computer’s drivers again.

Are you serious?  So, you folks who are the income producers for your firm - the ones where productivity suffers when you can’t work - tell me again how you can afford to spend two hours with this headache when you could be working…?

And for those of you windows users that still believe the argument that Macs are more expensive, we just leveled the playing field on that.  2 hours X $250.00/hour, means that the Macs better be more than $500 expensive over the PC machines - and then you better never had any more down time because the pendulum swings even further in our favor.

I honestly didn’t finish reading the Krakow article - it became too much for me.  He could have loved Vista by the end, but I won’t know because faced with the prospect of futzing around for two hours to even turn my machine on and getting sound, I’d rather just use my Mac and keep billing. 

This morning I taught a class to aspiring entrepreneurs on legal basics.  I was supposed to give a canned Powerpoint presentation prepared by the local small business development center, but after I arrived I discovered that they sent me the wrong canned presentation (Legal I instead of Legal II), so I decided to treat the students to one of my presentations that I use on legal basics that I created on my own.  Pardon the wisp of ego here, but the presentation is truly quite good.

In any event, during the class I was struck by how passionate I was getting in talking about the law.  About the theory behind different constructs, the practical applications of various concepts, a few bits of free advice - I mean I was really working myself into a lather about it all and I realized how much I enjoy being a lawyer these days. 

I’ve avoided many of the "soul-searching" posts here, unless it’s to rail against the shortcomings of big firm practice habits, because I don’t believe in blogs as surrogate therapy, but I think it’s high time for one. 

I had about 45 minutes on my drive home to think hard about why the change, as the title says, "a bit of reflection."  Here’s what I’ve concluded:

While I was working for the big firm, I had a hard time conceiving myself as a lawyer, a hard time thinking about what I was doing as the "practice" of law.  I didn’t care much for the people for whom I was working (through no fault of who they were as people, but more as a function of the fact that I didn’t want to be them), which didn’t make me feel proud of myself.  Self esteem was low at that point, in part because the future was grim, but also because my confidence in myself had been eroded over time.  Years spent having my work torn apart (sometimes for legitimate reasons, more often because of stylistic difference - what I had written was perfectly serviceable…and substantively correct) had left me with the sense that I’d only be capable of practicing law with years more of this kind of "training." 

Fast forward to some experience being out there on my own and I had tested my chops against other lawyers…and found myself pretty good at what I do.  More importantly, I enjoy my work immensely.  There are very few drudgeries in my practice, or perhaps I’ve done well to mask them with a love for working with my clients.  Regardless, I can’t imagine doing anything else, being satisfied with my work and career in any other way.

I’ve found that that sentiment is quite rare among lawyers.  Whether they be from large firms or be sole practitioners, there are a lot of burnt-out, disgruntled and cynical lawyers practicing right now. 

On the one hand, I’m not in a great hurry to change that fact - I think it gives me an advantage as potential clients consider their options (wouldn’t you choose a lawyer passionate and happy about his work over one that is not?).  On the other hand, I hate to see it all so prevalent among my friends.  There are many lawyers on the blogosphere, many of whom I respect, who seem to be quite happy with their practice - but they seem to be people bucking the trend - whether they be GAL, Grant Griffiths or Jonathan Stein - all people working outside of convention.

I don’t have a cute ending for this, so I’ll stop here.  I’d love to hear what you have to say out there on this subject.  How are you feeling these days?

Inspired as I always seem to be by Grant Griffiths, I am announcing the launch of two new practice-area blogs.  I believe Grant, GAL (E.S.), and Jonathan Stein when they say that they’ve gotten new clients from their practice area blogs and I don’t like falling behind the pack.

That said, *cue trumpets* - please point your browser to, and add to your rss reader, two new, exciting, and informative blogs:

Jersey Estate Planning

and

Jersey Education Law

I’ll let you know the moment either of them brings in new clients.

Best - VJM

Right now, I’m trying to deal with our electronic back-up system of client information, administrative records and the like. I’m also trying to think through the best way to share all of this information within the firm. All of which leads me to a couple of thoughts.

First, you can truly buy anything you want. As I was thinking through my data backup issue, I was speaking with my friend, Paul, who has been mentioned in this space before (and who has done the bulk of the design for our new website - set to launch soon - woohoo!). Now, if you’ve spent any time in a law firm, or any company that deals in records storage, you’ve heard the name Iron Mountain. They’ve got the cool blue and white graphic, which connotes strength, stability, reliability.

Well, IM offers a whole host of storage options, including hiring them take your records and fly around the world constantly, never landing. Suprisingly, that’s not one of their cheaper options.

Second, the phrase “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is never truer than with respect to backing up data. Look, lawyers deal in information and communication. The records tied to those factors are crucial to one’s ability to stay up and running when disaster hits. And the disaster can take the form of a fire or a lost hard drive. Either way, you’ll find yourself with your hands in the air and paralyzed to keep operations going unless you’ve put in place procedures to back up data, procedures that have been consistently followed.

Now, more than ever, technology easily allows you to take hard copies of things and back them up electronically. When’s the last time you backed up your hard drive or server information?

So, I went on vacation this past week. It’s the first full week of vacation I’ve had (taken) since the leave I took for the birth of my son almost 2 1/2 years ago. I think that’s a pretty good stretch.

I enjoyed my time away from the office and took the opportunity to recharge my batteries. Once I had “reset,” I tried to think about what I could do to improve certain things in my life, including this blog.

To be frank, my drive to maintain this has been flaggin as of late, and I have a hard time figuring out why. It’s not the act of writing the posts - I enjoy writing immensely (and the feedback I’ve received is that you enjoy reading it, so at least we’re enjoying ourselves).

No, I think I’m having trouble getting this to find some aim or focus. For while, I spent time trying to talk about tech, Apples and those things that pertained to running my practice, but as I figured out what solutions to implement, I lost the need to write about it. I’m finding that I don’t enjoy this outlet as a form of diary for my practice and it’s practices. And, more importantly, the reason I think I don’t enjoy this blog as a diary is because it means that it’s about me - something that I truly dislike about blogs about people and their lives. (Stay with me as I put this down in writing and think through more clearly in print than I did in my ride back from upstate NY.)

I want this outlet to be about helping, informing, amusing other people. Generally, I gain more satisfaction when I attend to things that are other-centered. And, I’ve deliberately stopped from commenting critically on things because I wanted to keep the spirit of this blog positive. Well, unfortunately, that set-up means one post every week or so, which doesn’t help either of us.

So, an experiment.

Let me know what you think - as always, comments are welcome and encouraged.

Crazy, but true, this blogging stuff works. I just did a search on Google for “Victor Medina” and it turns out that this blog is the #1 site. Now, if I can only get people to start looking for me!

Before I get on with some new content, let me explain what’s been going on lately - in case you can’t piece it together from my various posts on the subject. In my planning to go solo, I joined MacLaw, a listserv for attorneys using Apple/Macs in their practice. It’s an excellent resource for answering software questions, and sharing information generally about technology and the practice of law.

Well, one day, and I’ll say for dramatic effect that I was just about to delete that day’s post, I noticed a posting for an associate’s position around Princeton, NJ. I responded to the posting saying that I wasn’t interested in an associate’s position, but seeing as I was hanging a shingle, I was interested in possibly picking up some overflow work as a means to get some residual income in the door. We got to talking and found that we shared a similar mindset on the practice of law (as similar a mindset as a veteran of 35 years of practice and someone with a lot less than that much experience can share). We kept on talking and decided that it would be in both our best interests to start a firm together. I’m going to help him with his practice, and this arrangement will allow me to start and grow my small business law practice. After running a few firms and practices on his own, my partner is also happy to hand over many of the administrative responsibilities for managing the practice, which dovetails nicely into my passion for running the day-to-day on my own. In all, it’s a win-win situation.

Shortly, I’m going to have our webpage up and working and you’ll be able to learn all you want about our practice and who we are.

In return for your patience with my story (and my lack of posts lately), how about some advice and observations?

I’ve mentioned my friend Paul before. He’s one of my best friends in life (how many people can you say you’ve been friends with for nearly 15 years…and relatives don’t count…) and I’ve come to enjoy hearing his perspective on lots of issues, particularly because he’s not a lawyer. Anyway, I’ve been sharing this journey with him to an extent and we got to talking about solutions for time/billing software (our firm’s is outdated and, consequently, needs updating). I talked to him about my frustration with existing options for Mac-friendly software, as well as my underwhelm-ment (is that a word?) with capabilities of PC-based software.

All of this discussion led to an interesting place - Web-Based Solutions.

There’s real value to having most of your business life linked to web-based solutions and hosted off-site. Here are a few advantages:

1. Security/Disaster Proofing. If most of your vital information is stored (and managed and used) virtually, that data is more secure. You don’t have to worry about having your laptop stolen and losing client information (whether you’ve put things in place to prevent someone from reading what’s on there is a different story). Also, because of the redundancies built into hosted solutions, your office won’t be the central location of your files. You can be up and running immediately in the event of a disaster, like if your building burned down or collapsed into the Boston harbor (that second one actually happened to me once). And you won’t have to waste any time recreating files, contacts, etc. Hosted solutions serve as both a backup to and security for your most important data.

2. Mobility. This one’s self-explanatory, but here it is for the slow people. If you’re not tethered to your desk to be able to work, you can work from home, on a trip, or in between meetings and client visits. This is key for solos and small-firm attorneys because so much of our practice requires our constant attention. Increase your flexibility beyond phone call-forwarding and pda email checking, be truly mobile and take your office with you wherever you go.

3. Overall Flexibility. With a hosted solution, you don’t have to worry about what box you’re operating on (Mac or PC). You don’t have to worry about what version of software you or your employees are running. You also increase the flexibility of your workforce. All of a sudden, you can add independent contractors as your workload demands. You can also accommodate part-time employees who want to work almost exclusively from home (let’s say for childcare reasons) again as your workload permits.

Okay, so that’s three. You get my drift. And the list of things that can be web-based solutions is extensive. Document Management. Practice Management. Time/Billing Solutions. Email. Contacts. Calendaring.

And all that is needed is an Internet connection. Thoughts?