Recommendation: Design Your Own Card.com

I know most people seem to use VistaPrint to order business cards, but I had a really good experience with www.designyourowncard.com. They have a great interface and selection of fonts and papers. Play around with all of the buttons and dials on the layout page and you can see that you can pretty much set up any design you want. I think their prices are a little more than Vista but you get nice professional raised ink cards. I think shipped mine came close to $50 for 500 cards. I ordered on a Thursday afternoon and got the cards on a Monday. If you are thinking of using them, put in a request for their paper stock samples now, its hard to tell what they look like on the page. My only complaint was I couldn’t figure out how to save the design and return later to finalize, there is an option to save but but it didn’t seem to work for me, it may have been that I was using FireFox rather than Internet Explorer but who knows. Don’t be put off by the selection on the front page, just pick a card where you like the way the text is organized (ignore font and color) and then modify it on the next page. Check them out.

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Microsoft Outlook . . sucks!

I am exhausted. I have spent the better part of the past two days trying to get Microsoft Outlook to work with my personal mail account and my new solo law account. I want to get it so that my law email account is in the form of . . name@[mypracitcedomain].com. Outlook is so bloated and such a mess. I made repeated tries, searching help files on the web etc. It is still not working exactly right but at least I can send and receive email. The main problem was trying to figure out the best way to keep personal and work accounts separate. If I hadn’t invested this much time in it I might be tempted to give Thunderbird a try.

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Diploma: Lost and Found

Well I have been sitting in my new office, four bare white walls for the past three weeks (actually it has only been 8 working days . . I say that as a lame attempt to comfort myself for not making more progress since I started this!) so I think it is time to finally get my diplomas framed. Yes, another start-up cost.

The problem is, I have been vaguely aware that my law school and undergrad diplomas have been missing for several years, lost somewhere in my mother’s house. She is a pack rat so, even though she is the only person living there, the house is filled to the brim with . . . .stuff. So last night I went over there and spent over an hour going through stuff. I knew my law school diploma was large and in a tube when last seen (about 10 years ago) and my undergrad diploma was small (like 5 x 7inches) and had not been seen for about the same amount of time. I looked and looked, through my old room, filing cabinets, packed-full closets. I found the old holder for my undergrad diploma but it was empty (I am sure it was put in a “safe place” that no one can remember). I found my old collection of concert ticket stubs (perhaps my mother's not the only pack rat). The only people that are still performing are U2 and Elvis Costello, and REM . . for those of you that care other the other classic early 80s bands included, X, English Beat, Physhadelic Furs, Violent Fems, the Clash (my all time favorite), the Police, Peter Tosh, Talking Heads . . and yes . .I have to admit Devo). I also found a stack of old rejection letters from my first post-college job search that I saved, it really was a pretty thick stack, I forgot how many places I applied to.

No diplomas. I was on my way out the door when I realized I never looked in my brother’s room (now basically a large storage closet), I went up there, and in the back behind a chest of drawers were a bunch of document tubes and one of them was my law school diploma. I unrolled it and looked at it and remembered law school graduation. I had this involuntary sensation of . .hmmm . . I want to use the word pride but I am not sure that is correct, I just felt good about being a lawyer and feeling good about what I accomplished in law school. I felt that way when I returned to my old law school for the first time in several years. I hope this new path works for me and that the good feeling is not just because I have been out of the practice of law for a while soon to be replaced by cynicism.

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Blogging, blogging etc

This is the start of my third week in the new office (remember, I am only here three days a week, the other two are spent out at my old corporate job), the past two weeks have also been complicated by school vacation week and a two week vacation by our day care providers. I don’t have any clients yet but I also have not done any active marketing. Yes I do have a plan, I am a little behind where I wanted to be at this point. I can remember telling friends I wanted to make a “running start” when I opened up. By that I meant that on day one, I wanted the web site up, the announcement emails ready to go, business cards in hand etc. That didn’t happen, in fact I am just (as of today) going to finish off my law web site. It took a little longer than expected to get the office, computer etc. set up and I expect there is a little procrastination involved, obsessing about getting the web site exactly right before I started reaching out to old friends and colleagues.

I have also spent a lot of time getting what I’ll call my practice blog ready for “prime time”; I started this back in November/December and had a hard time keeping it up but I was able to post every now and then. In the past few weeks, I have been filling out the content. One of my favorite forms of procrastination is to see how many visitors the search engines are sending my way, right now I am averaging about 60 to 70 unique visitors a day and have the top ranking in Google for a few two word search terms (no idea why!). I need to give the practice blog a face lift (have hired someone to do that for me, they are behind schedule) and put a link to my practice web site, bio etc. For me the practice blog serves three purposes: (1) keeps me up to date on developments in my area of law; (2) establishes credibility with potential clients; and (3) provides a source of client leads. I have done absolutely nothing to publicize the practice blog yet so I will be curious to see what happens over time as I spread the word.

As others have said, if you are thinking about starting a solo law practice, why not get the blog up and running now, even if you are in law school or a year or more away from launching your practice it can be a fun way to feel that you are actually taking steps to go solo and keep up on your area(s) of the law etc. Here is an example of a law student's blog I found today that was referenced in an email that BNA sends out summarizing developments in Internet law. Stop, back up, think about that. For all you navel gazers out there that moan (myself included) . .”but I don’t know enough to practice law on my own”, we have a law student that is being referenced by a BNA email letter that probably being read by thousands of lawyers in the field. As you might have seen on myshingle.com, over at the Benefits Blog which is celebrating its third year anniversary, they are getting 81,000 visitors a month. That’s just amazing.

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Yellow Pages + Web Site

Here is an anecdote passed on by another solo attorney that started his practice fresh out of law school that I’ll share with you. He found that he got good results when he placed a yellow pages ad that listed his web site. He had a general practice (e.g. real estate, family law, bankruptcy, estate planning) and said he got about 2 call per week from the ad which converted into one client every two weeks. He recently started to wind down his practice to pursue a new position as a prosecutor and turned off his web site. He found that after the web site was taken off line the calls he got from his yellow pages ad stopped almost completely.

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You Can't Do It

I have fallen off my schedule, I had wanted to get my web site complete before now but am still working on the text and layout. I will post a longer note about how I went about creating a web site but the short version is I used the web site www.elance.com to advertise the project and found a web designer in India who is working with me. For the past two days I have gone to the library of a local college that has wireless Internet access to get some work done, I am not moving into my new offices until this Sunday morning.

For some reason, today was a bit of a weird day, I think I felt the pressure of building a practice a little more today than I have recently, doubts started to sneak in around the edges which has been a rare occurrence lately. Before I made the break with my old employer I had many sleepless nights but after I told them I was much more relaxed. Press on is what I say. A friend that lived in the dorm room next to mine had written "You Can Do It!" on a chalk board (what they used before white boards) inside his room, at the time I had thought it a bit corny but now I can see the value of simple reminders like that one (note to self, you can do it!). Its interesting (at least to me . . maybe not the nonexistent readers of this blog), however, in that when I imagine someone saying "You Can't Do It" to me, that gets me even more motivated.

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Sweet Home Alabama

Friday was it. My last full-time day of employment at my non-law job. It was a little weird in that I am going to be starting back there two days a week after taking this week off. We went out to lunch, nice things were said about my year or service to the company, I cleaned up my desk, sent out an email to people reminding them that I would be converting to part time and headed for the door around 4:00pm. As I pushed through the door into the warm spring sunny day I started to spontaneously hum then sing Lynyrd Skynard's song Free Bird. By spontaneous, I mean that I didn't really think about the song and then sing it, I just became aware that I was singing it, the sun was on my face, I felt so energized. As I got to my car, I pulled out my iPod to see if I had Free Bird loaded in there, I thought I did but it wasn't there. I did find Sweet Home Alabama, however, and thought oh well I haven't heard that song in a while and hit play as I pulled out the parking lot. What a great song (I'll leave it to others to sort out the politics of the song), I was listening to the lyrics which are really about coming home to a place you love. Not to get too sappy, but this move to solo law has a feel of coming home, I am returning to the practice of law after a 9 year break, a home coming of sorts, hopefully I am also going to find a home in solo practice that will quench the thirst for career satisfaction. Something I have not quite been able to find for the past 10+ years. I cranked up the volume, rolled down the windows, and listened to the song three or four times speeding down the highway.

Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you

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