When I graduated from law school in 2010, legal jobs were hard to find. After a brief stint as a staff attorney, I realized that starting your own law firm was the most viable path to fulfilling the dreams that led me to law school in the first place.
Key Takeaways
- Niche Specialization Wins: Trying to be everything to everyone leads to operational paralysis and imposter syndrome. Zeroing in on a highly specific practice area builds faster authority and yields more clients.
- Lean Operations Over Luxury: Hybrid and remote standard frameworks remove the requirement for expensive office spaces. Keep capital expenditures tied directly to revenue generation.
- Runway is Mandatory: A successful firm launch requires a five-to-six-month cash buffer to comfortably handle the natural lag in client acquisition and invoice collection.
So, I launched a practice with a law school friend called Mays & Kerr, LLC. Neither of us had experience as lawyers or business professionals, but we were entrepreneurs at heart and passionate about the legal profession. Despite our inexperience—and some early mistakes—our practice took off and the firm became very successful.
Based on building my own practice and helping several friends and colleagues do the same, here are five lessons I learned about navigating the business landscape and keeping the big picture in mind.
1. Keep It Lean
The best thing about launching a practice today is how cost-effective it can be. Lawyers don’t need to buy specialized equipment or tools. Give us a computer, a phone, and a suit, and we can start making money representing clients. With remote and hybrid setups now being standard practice, you can easily forgo renting premium brick-and-mortar office space, buying an upscale mahogany desk, and other traditional “nice-to-haves” to ensure you take more money home.
Staying lean also helps immensely when you eventually start to scale. For every dollar spent, you’ll ask: “How does this expenditure increase my ability to generate revenue?” Getting to the next level often requires a willingness to increase operating costs, but you’ll invest wisely because you’ll know you can function without frills.
2. Specialize
When first establishing my practice, I thought it would be fun to be a general practitioner. I quickly realized it wasn’t—it was my personal hell. Like most people, I enjoy being competent and knowledgeable in my work. But when I was taking family law, personal injury, employment, probate, and civil rights cases, I never felt fully knowledgeable. I didn’t know the answers to most of the questions that came up. And, while I could find the answers eventually, this was no way to practice.
Soon, I made a 180-degree pivot to specializing with a laser focus on a single species of employment law: claims arising under the Fair Labor Standards Act. By tightening my niche, I learned everything I could about it. After six months, I knew more about this tiny neighborhood of the law than many of the more seasoned lawyers I litigated against—not because I was smarter than them, but because I only handled FLSA cases. If you want to build a sustainable book of business, starting your own law firm with a clear niche is the key to enjoying your job and making a profitable living.
3. Be Smart About Leaving Your Current Job
Most lawyers start their first firm after leaving another law practice. It’s extremely important to wrap up with your past firm and transition clients in a way that won’t create legal or ethical problems. Refer to the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct and guidelines from your state bar for information about ethics requirements. Regarding legal duties, note that you may have fiduciary duties to your current employer. It’s never a bad idea to consult with a business lawyer at this stage.
In her classic advice on making a smooth transition, author Hindi Greenberg stresses that remaining on good terms with your former employer should be a priority: “You never know when you may need to work with your former employer again in some capacity, ask for a reference or have some contact in an unrelated business situation.
4. Prepare for a Ramp-Up Period
While starting your own law firm can be relatively inexpensive upfront, that doesn’t mean you can jump in without financial backup. Building a reliable base of clients and cases takes time.
Make sure you have enough in savings to cover your personal living expenses while revenues are growing. Look closely at your household budget and bank account to see where your money goes each month. What unnecessary extras can you live without temporarily? What necessities can’t be ignored? Track your mortgage, utilities, health insurance, and meals. Estimate how much you need in savings to cover expenses for five to six months (assuming you don’t bring in a single penny of profit during your initial ramp-up period). Be sure to add a buffer for those unexpected situations that always arise at the worst possible moment.
5. Don’t Skimp on Essential Tools
As with any other modern business, you will need to spend money to make money. Carefully consider how to spend your seed money, but don’t skimp on the modern SaaS infrastructure your firm needs to operate securely.
We all know time is money. Keeping your overhead low is important, but cutting corners on tech workflows often turns out to be more time-consuming and costly in the end. Investing early in robust practice management software, secure cloud accounting, and automated intake forms will save you hours of admin work that can be redirected toward billable tasks or client acquisition.
Starting Your Own Law Firm FAQ
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