Five Lessons I’ve Learned (So Far) Starting My Own Law Firm
I recently started my own law firm providing employment law and HR-related services to employers locally and nationally. This outcome was by no means obvious or inevitable. As a rule, most lawyers are risk-averse. And while I’ve often had keen entrepreneurial thoughts (I have a GREAT idea for a sandwich chain if anyone wants to talk), actually going out on my own was hardly a consideration.
Yet despite my skepticism, here I am. And I’ve discovered that being skeptical does not mean one is not naïve. Especially when you wrongly think, as I did, that an extensive network of great contacts means you can just make some phone calls and suddenly have tons of work.
I, along with my right-hand man Dave, have now crossed 90 days in business. Work is finally trickling in. Here are five lessons I’ve taken from this crazy endeavor. Some are obvious. Some less so.
1. Starting a business involved a million little (and big) details I’d never really thought about
I thought starting up a law firm would be pretty straight-forward. I already had my license, and I know that I’m a solid, effective, lawyer in my specialty areas. I have a deep network of professional contacts and friends who had expressed support. What could be hard about getting this off the ground?
First, business requirements. Creating the business entity. Registering with the state, feds, and county for recognition and tax IDs. Workers’ Comp. Unemployment. Insurance…lots of different kinds of insurance. Bank accounts. This was weeks of work, unexpectedly expensive, and slowed us down.
Second, operational requirements. While we decided very early on that we’d be working from home, we still needed many operational services and products, and wanted to be cloud-based and as paper free as possible. This includes hardware like computers, desks, chairs, and office supplies. Software suites like Outlook/email, practice management software, financial tracking software, cloud-based sharing. Optimizing each of those things took more time than expected, and nothing worked right the first time. Especially setting up our VOIP phones. Especially that.
Third, branding. Other similarly-situated small business owners tend to have either really defined branding that looks really great, probably costs a lot of money, and certainly works to bring in business. Others I know do just fine with virtually no marketing and a plain business card. Starting from scratch — with no clients — as we were, I wanted some real, appealing, branding. I also didn’t want to spend much money when we didn’t have any. So, we hired someone to design a logo and help produce business cards (a great decision), but decided to make our website ourselves. The website took me weeks of full-time commitment. And it looks good for what it is. But it still lacks an edge that professionally-designed sites have. Building out a nicer site is high on the priority list once we have a bit more positive cashflow.
Put together, these requirements, and many others I haven’t even mentioned, took months of combined time for Dave and me. Time when, honestly, I had been expecting to be out marketing, growing the business, and doing paid work.
2. It’s OK to take on substantial risks/liabilities, so long as they are known and planned for
Many attorneys in my position start on their own and build a body of work before hiring anyone, if they ever do. I viewed having a non-attorney employee as a means to distinguish our business, and provide options many of our competitors don’t.
It was the right call. Dave is my right hand, my most trusted advisor, my unofficial psychiatrist, and my first employee. He runs or is involved in all aspects of the business. He is unquestionably the greatest asset the firm has. He is also — with apologies for speaking about him in these terms — the firm’s largest liability and biggest risk. Intellectually I knew that going in, but it didn’t mean there wasn’t massive sticker shock and fretting when I ran the first two payroll cycles and we hadn’t yet brought in a penny.
And this exposed yet another mistake — not having a separate plan to mitigate that risk. Meaning, I hadn’t developed a plan up front for Dave to generate enough billable time to at least cover his expense to the firm (notwithstanding his significant administrative duties). This remains a work in progress, but now that it’s a primary focus, we’ve already moved the bar and I’m confident we’ll get there.
3. It’s hard for an introvert to network, but we still have to do it…constantly
Conventional wisdom I’ve read says it takes seven touches/contacts with a potential client before they think to call you. While I have reason to doubt that in all or most cases, I have known from the start that we would need to network constantly, and get in front of people repeatedly.
But, confession: Dave and I are both big-time introverts. For a time, I joked to myself that we should be called Shy Guy Employment Advisors. The concept of actively selling my expertise and putting myself out there petrified me, and was made only slightly less unpalatable being secure in the knowledge that we have a great product and expertise to sell. This fear slowed us down, and probably cost us work early on.
I knew that networking HAD to happen, so I started with my closest contacts. That was great I guess (and I love them dearly), but these were people who — assuming they had any work (and they generally didn’t) — were going to throw it my way anyway. It was a good time to practice my pitch and get feedback, but it still took me way too long to push out to the next rung of contacts. Fear drove that delay. But I did it, and then extended to yet another rung, including people I barely know or don’t know at all. And that’s when things started rolling. Every day I was (and still am) running around town for lunches, drinks, coffees, and breakfasts.
And then we landed that first client. If you find a particularly amazing and trusted one who will talk about you and recommend you to all her business contacts (like we did), even better. That changed everything for us — our demeanor, our confidence. Now we’re on the cusp of double-digit clients, but it’s all traced back to the first, and the effort we put in to get there.
4. Some people will ignore you, but that doesn’t make them bad
Professionally, this venture means everything to me. It’s my present and my future, and it’s all I think about. I take it very personally.
AND I EXPECTED THE SAME FROM EVERYONE ELSE, TOO.
And when they inevitably disappointed me, I took that personally. Every time I reached out to someone and they didn’t immediately respond, it got to me. It especially got to me when I’d see that they read my note on social media, and still didn’t write back. Even more frustrating was the total lack of predictability as to who would respond. Some close(ish) friends completely ignored my rquests to say hi, while some distant contacts responded effusively.
When you’ve put so much of yourself into something, and people don’t respond, it hurts. I wasted a lot of time wondering and worrying about it. I even fake drafted really mean things in my head to the people who weren’t responding.
I was being unfair. Just because this is my baby, it doesn’t mean anybody else is obligated to respond. They have their own lives and stresses. While I would personally never ignore a request from a friend or contact, I shouldn’t impose that standard on others, and no amount of fretting about my self-worth is going to help anyway.
When I finally allowed myself to believe that, it was like a cloud lifted. While I have few regrets in this project so far, I do wish I’d spent that precious time working the contacts that were responding, and finding others that would, instead of dwelling on a toxic negativity.
5. Specialization or Diversification? Bucking conventional wisdom, you may need to do both
Before we started, I was inevitably asked by others what areas of employment law we were going to specialize in. There’s plenty of employment law generalists out there, but most tend to have a primary focus — litigation, advice, etc. Much of the solicited and unsolicited advice we received was to find a small number of things to focus on and market those, even to the exclusion of a broader practice.
We have a key specialty area — investigating and responding to EEOC and state agency charges — that most employment lawyers look at as incidental to their practice, but which we want to be a primary area. Starting out, our focus was almost exclusively on this work, and to date, we’ve received precisely zero. Whether that’s because it’s a bad model, it’s a bad time of year, or we’ve just marketed to the wrong people, it just hasn’t worked out yet. While that doesn’t mean it won’t eventually happen, we have had to adapt rapidly to avoid burning through all of our capital.
We have the luxury for now to market and do all sorts of work. If more specialized work comes in, we can always focus on that later. Or not.
Well that’s it for now! Stay tuned for more lessons learned in the near future.
In the meantime, want some unsolicited employment law advice? Here’s Manager Maude!
