How To Make It Rain

I would love to start my own practice. . . Is this possible?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Luke Lxxxxxxxxx" <xxxxxxxx@charter.net>
To: rjon@howtomakeitrain.com
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 8:37:59 PM (GMT-0500) America/New_York
Subject: Question from Law Student

Hi RJon,

I am a law student in Minnesota and would love to start my own practice right out of school.  Is this possible?  I still have 2 years of school left, but I know this is my dream….can you provide any advice? 

 

Thanks!

Angie Lxxxxxxx

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Hello Angie & thanks for the great question!

The answer is absolutely, positively YES.  And I'm especially happy to see that you are thinking ahead which distinguishes you from so many other law students I have met over the years both back when I was in law school and ever since who seem to think that the only "acceptable" choice out of law school is to get an impressive job with a big firm.

Reality check: Across the United States, more than 50% of the lawyers are actually solos!  Click HERE to check out this & some other interesting statistics in the Press Room section of How To Make It Rain.com 

The fact of the matter is that when the big firms come to campus they're typically only going to be interested in Top 10 Graduates who are willing to kill themselves "for the good of the firm" in hopes of someday climbing to the top of the pyramid and being able to leverage off of other top 10 graduates who will kill themselves to support those at the top of the law firm structure.  This is just the basic economic structure of a large law firm and is shocks me that so few law schools feel obligated to equip their students with a fundamental understanding of how a law firm business actually works.

OK, but back to your question. . . yes, it is absolutely possible and realistic to expect to graduate from law school two years from now and open a successful law firm of your own.  But you have to recognize that your J.D. isn't going to necessarily equip you to run a successful law firm BUSINESS.  It's only going to prepare you to go to work for one, and the traditional J.D. curriculum doesn't even address some of the more important skills you'll need to thrive in a law firm environment either!  So the upshot of all this is that if you want to open your own law firm in two years you are going to have to develop your own "shadow curriculum" to equip yourself with the book skills and get some practical experience too.  Here's what I suggest:

1. Read David Maister's Managing The Professional Service Firm to get a basic understanding of the various strategies available to you and not inconsequentially to recognize the strategies being employed consciously or unconsciously by your soon-to-be competition so you can find your niche and compete effectively right away even amongst the largest firms with the most experienced attorneys

2. Read Foonberg's How To Start & Build A Successful Law Practice to get a practical overview of all the skills you're going to have to learn in order to run your firm effectively - remember you're going to spend half your time running the firm so you better know how to do it well.  And this classic gives a great overview with lots of practical tips.

3. Read Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited.  I actually prefer this one on audio which is read by the author to get instruction on how to develop systems & procedures for your law firm so that it doesn't end up eating you alive and making your miserable.  Sorry to be blunt but that's the reality. . . a huge percentage of lawyers are simply stumbling along hardly able to get out of their own way with a completely screwed-up relationship with their business and consequently with their families and themselves.  Systems = Freedom.

4. Listen to my own How To Market A Small Law Firm - You can get it for FREE when you subscribe to my Bronze Coaching program and even though you're not even graduated from law school yet, I highly recommend you begin marketing NOW.  How do you market legal services when you're not even a lawyer you ask?  Go ahead & listen to my program and then send me a follow-up e-mail once you have the basic foundation and I'll be happy to elaborate (That's why I took the time to record everything, so I wouldn't have to keep repeating myself)

5. If you can find it, read Mark McCormick's "The Terrible Truth About Lawyers"  It's been out of print for about 20 years but Amazon can sometimes help you find a used copy.  Read it.  Re-read it.  Remember forever that clients hire you for THEIR reasons, not yours.

OK, that should get you started on your book skills.  Now here's what I suggest you do about getting some practical skills. . .

A. Begin offering paralegal services to friends & family.  Help them fill out forms, help them by doing research on issues they need to understand.  Check with your local State Bar to understand how far you can go as a "Paralegal" without violating Bar Rules and offer all the services that are allowed but for a fee.  That's right, I don't want you to do any of these services for free not even for your family.  I want you to get them to sign an engagement letter acknowledging that you have disclosed that you are not an attorney, that they will not not rely on you for legal advice but only for providing the types of services your State Bar says you can offer, and agreeing to your hourly rate or negotiated flat fee.  I want you to keep track of the time you spend helping your friends & family.  I want you to ask them to give you a deposit for anticipated fees & costs and review my free course entitled "A Simple System For Managing Your Trust Account That Won't Make You Feel Like A Schmuck".  Set up a filing cabinet in your home or dorm room or wherever to keep your billing files, your engagement files and your substantive work files and devise & test a filing system that works for you.  It's ok by the way if you want to give your Mom a bill showing the amount of time and the steps involved in solving her problem and then to give her a "courtesy discount" to zero-out her bill.  But you MUST get used to doing all of these things or else you will suffer when you get out of law school, pass the bar exam and have to do all of these things for real or else miss a meal.

B. Get a job with a big firm as a clerk.  It's important to know what you're missing.  And as I've said above, it's also important to have good systems & procedures.  I don't often have alot of great things about big firms but they do tend to have great systems & procedures that you can learn from and copy.  Spend alot of time in their mail room and file room to see how they do it.  Study the architecture of their computer system.  Get comfortable with their file management software, billing software and appreciate the dollars & cents value of their documents and forms library so they don't have to keep reinventing the wheel.  Absorb the essence of the place so you can project the same level of professionalism when you open your own law firm.  Figure out who the Rainmakers are and make friends with them - those relationships can be valuable to you in the future - but don't get sucked into the cult of personality you find in many large firms. And don't stick around if you find yourself in a big firm that's poorly organized.  You're there to LEARN.

C.  Go to the courthouse and  learn where everything is.  Since you're a law student you can ask a million "dumb" questions of the clerks, judicial assistants, and passing lawyers without feeling embarrassed. Where do you go to file pleadings?  Is there an after-hours drop box & how does it work?  How do you get an emergency hearing with a judge?  How do you know which judge to call if you need a TRO on the weekend?  Can you get a tour of the clerk's office?  Howabout sitting in on motion calendar in a Judge's chambers?  Walk around, introduce yourself and ask. .  .the worst thing anyone's going to say is "no" but I suspect you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that alot of judges and even the Clerk of Court him/herself will be impressed with your initiative and go out of their way to familiarize you with the way things work so it won't be such a scary mystery to you.  Then go to another courthouse and notice that they are all organized pretty much the same way.

OK, that's it for today.  Keep me posted on your progress!

RJON

Calling All Starving Real Estate Lawyers

If you are a real estate lawyer and you're starving, then I want to speak with you.  Because of the recent and dramatic slowdown in the real estate market I'm encountering more & more real estate lawyers who are beginning to suffer.

• If you're having to tap into your savings or worse, into your line of credit to maintain your office.
• If you're struggling to find a way to keep your staff busy each week.
• If you've already called-in every favor and gone back to the well enough times to know that it's now dry.

If any of the above are at all familiar to you, then I want to speak with you. . . because I have some advice learned from the LAST TIME this happened in the late 1980's that could literally make the difference between feast or famine for you and your family.  I may also have an opportunity that can generate some much-needed cash flow for you. . . and help your former clients too.

Interested?  Send me an e-mail to: RJON@HowToMakeItRain.com and tell me:

-What State you practice in.
-Approximately what percentage of your practice is Real Estate closings vs. the rest.
-How long you've been in your current practice.
-Approximately how many closings have you performed in the past 5 years.
-What is the approximate value of the average property you've handled legal work for.

Of course all information will be confidential & I'll reply to let you know I've received the information and when we can schedule a no-charge telephone appointment.

How much is YOUR time worth?

I struggled to choose the right subject line for this post.  In the end I decided to focus on asking readers to consider how much your time is really worth to you.  Not how much you may charge for your time, but how much your time is really worth to you because we only get one ride through this life and we have to learn to cherish every moment.  Part of cherishing every moment for me and my Rainmakers is figuring out what's worth learning the hard way vs. what skills are better to learn from someone else's mistakes.

Mr. Dxxxxx,

Thanks for the compliment!  The answer to your question is that my Mom built her $1M/year web-based business by NOT wasting money on hucksters who claimed to be able to do it all FOR her.  Instead, she invested in herself and learned how to promote herself online.  She did eventually hire a web company to manage her website though not until after she already had a basic working knowledge of how to do it all herself.  This approach not only saved her a ton of cash but more importantly, it prevented anyone from being able to hold her hostage. 

I'm not saying you can necessarily build a multi-million dollar law practice all by yourself with only the skills you'll learn in my $39/month coaching program.  But you can definitely build a solid firm that doesn't have you pinching every penny like you said in your previous message that you have to do now.  The fundamentals still work pretty well and that's what I stick to, no "magic formula" or any other kind of b.s. "secrets".  In fact I'll make you this promise. . . not only will I NOT "reveal" any kind of big "secrets" to you, I'm pretty sure once I lay everything out for you in step-by-step fashion each week in the Bronze program, you'll probably look back at it and see that if you had thought enough about it and been organized enough and disciplined enough and invested enough time making all the mistakes I've made over the years you could have figured it all out by yourself. 

THAT was the point of the testimonial I shared with you.  That lawyer had already made enough mistakes on his own to have figured out what I had to say so he didn't need me to lay it all out for him.  My materials are designed to short-cut the learning process for lawyers who would rather spend their time doing the RIGHT things instead of spending ten years figuring out all the wrong things not to do.

RJON

3 hour call backs & how the pizza guy cost one lawyer alot of business

Hi Joe,

Have you received your How To Market A Small Law Firm audio program yet?  AFTER you've had a chance to listen to it, please send me an e-mail if you still have those IP-specific questions.  Not sure I agree with your 3 hour call back rule though. 

Have you seen an ezine article I've written about the so-called "sundown rule" most lawyers try to live by?  That is, they try & call their clients back before the end of the day.  In my experience that's a mistake.  Puts alot of pressure on the lawyer and fails to give the client what they want most which is to bring some measure of predictability to what is for most a very scary and foreign experience that's way outside their comfort zone.  Instead I'd suggest you try to get in the habit of scheduling telephone appointments with your clients rather than bust your butt to try & call them back within 3 hours if 3 hours isn't convenient for you, not enough time to find the answer so you can resolve their question in one call instead of two and 3 hours may not even be convenient for them either.  Better in my experience to just schedule a call back appointment so everyone can relax and maximize the efficiency of the phone time together. 

The point of the pizza story is that our staff has as much to do with our success as the quality of our substantive work.  In that real life example, the lawyer's assistant lost her a good client who has alot of business to give because the assistant was doing what was most convenient for herself not what was most convenient (and most respectful) to the paying client who was standing there like a jerk now running late because the freakin' pizza guy was more important to her than me. 

Let's just balance out the priorities and look at this objectively. . . I'm paying you $3,000.  I hire lawyers for this exact same kind of work on a pretty consistent basis.  Between me and all the people I refer to real estate attorneys I probably represent well over $50,000 of work per year.  My own time is easily worth a few thousand a day and after having been jerked around a few times while the staff of this attorney demonstrated to me that they really don't give a crap about my time they added a final straw onto the proverbial camel's back and made me stand there in my $1,000 suit with paying clients waiting for me to call them back and myself waiting to pick up a settlement check for over $70,000 so that they wouldn't inconvenience the pizza guy for 5 more minutes because he has to make a living too!?!  It's not like the guy stumbled in off the street and was bleeding or dying of a heart attack.  He was waiting for someone to make change for the cost of a pizza he was being paid to deliver.

Rhetorical Question: How would you like it if it was YOUR phone call that was being delayed and when I got on the phone I explained that the reason I'm 20 minutes late to call you back is because I had to give your time to make change for the pizza guy?

The purpose of writing the article was to make my clients aware of the need to look at their practice from the client's perspective because at the end of the day, they get to cast the final vote on your success.

Thanks for your participation in my coaching program.  I look forward to continuing to learn of your success,