Random acts of kindness

Its Friday at 5:00pm, time to Blog. I have had some good days and bad days this week. Today was a pretty good day. I had a meeting with a potential client. This was a former work colleague that is now a managing director of a small start-up. I reached out to him about 6 weeks ago and he said he would keep me in mind and just this week invited me down to meet with him and his CEO. I put on the gabardine pants, polished shoes, pressed shirt, official looking leather briefcase and headed out to battle. I opted not to wear a suit or tie, I knew they wouldn’t be wearing one, it was too hot anyway so I skipped it (I think the best practice is to always error on the side of wearing a suit . . but I felt I could get away with it on this run). We had a good meeting, it sounds like I will get some work out of them (although not as much as I had hoped, it could develop into something more in the future). The whole thing was a nice affirmation that my strategy may work, that there is a need for this kind of service among start-ups out there. We didn’t discuss my billing rate, they didn’t ask and to volunteer it would have seemed a little presumptuous.

Lessons learned: Perhaps this is obvious but do not expect an immediate pay-off from networking contacts, you are really planting seeds some of which will come to bloom over time and some will not (did anyone catch Ari’s speech on Entorage about planting seeds all over town?). I have a tendency to wait until I am ready to do the work (e.g. open for business) before reaching out to people and I think the better practice is to get the word out there early and expect that it will not generate any leads for a while. Another lesson is that I need to work on my elevator pitch. It was a little rough, not as succinct as it could be. I also need to distinguish how I present my self as a solo lawyer to a client versus how I presented my self interviewing for a full time job. It occurs to me that they are different situations. On a job interview the hiring people tend to want to hear your story, what jobs you have had, where you went to school, why you made the career choices you did. In my case it’s a long and painful road to navigate, so the good news for me is that on a client interview you don’t need to go through your whole history, just hit the relevant skill areas, some examples of how you applied those skills etc. (I found myself giving a job-interview-style summary of my background this morning and that was a mistake). I would be curious to hear how other people handle this kind of thing, it may be different depending on the type of work and client you are meeting with.

After the meeting, I had some time to kill so I stopped by the continuing legal education bookstore. I asked how much one of the slimmer books was but it was way too high although the woman that worked there said they were going on sale in August. I started chatting with her she was complaining about computer problems at home and I told her a quick fix, she was nice and appreciative. I continued to browse for about 15 minutes, they also had a rack of older books that were marked down to $10. She then asked me which books I was interested in and I told her, a little wink, wink, nod, nod and the three books I wanted made their way to the discount rack (saving me about 90% of the total cost). That put me in a good mood, a little boost for a low income solo practitioner.

I then had an eye exam, at 40 the eyes are starting to go south (no glasses need up to now). And then to the office. I spent the afternoon reaching out to old contacts. I have stepped up that effort as my part-time job appears to be coming to an end (much to my surprise, more on that later). Feeling pretty good, after some depressed days earlier this week.

Read more!

The War on Terror

So here I am in the office on a Saturday afternoon. I started to come into the office on the weekends (last week I spent about 4 hours over two days) not because I have a flood of clients but rather because I am feeling guilty for not making more forward progress on the practice. Where does the time go? That is my constant refrain that has me coming into the office more frequently.

So here I am blogging on a Saturday, did I need to come into the office just for this? The answer is no, but now that I am here alone in the office I am feeling a little blue, a little depressed and I find typing out posts to be good for my mental so I thought I would bang out a post or two.

So let me share with my very few readers some recent thoughts on talking with other solos. Before I opened this office, I talked with several solos about their experiences and now, after making the leap, I have continued to network with other solos, have read the solosez email list and similar regional lists, gone out to dinner with some. So what lessons have I learned? Here are a few:

Two years. One of the few (and perhaps only) constant themes I have heard over and over is that it take about two years to get the practice going. One solo said that on average the solos that came through his law school to share their war stories made about $15K their first year. I have another friend who did about $30K his first year and then is on track to do about $85K this years (that’s gross). Over and over again, I heard 2 years although sometimes it was 1.5. years to 2 years, or if you can get to the two year mark you are going to make it. So for those of you that are doing some financial planning to make the solo path work, I would try and lay out a two year runway.

There are successes, strugglers and failures. I wish I could identify some best practices but the truth is that everyone seemed to have a little bit of a different story. Some focused on one area, slowly built up the practice and are now a success. Others appear to be struggling and unhappy. Other still have the emotional terror, panic attacks some five or more years into their practice. I guess what I take away from this is that you are not going to find the answer to the question: can I make it as a solo from talking to other solos. Without too much trouble, you can find examples of very happy successful solos out their and struggling grumpy solos, but you will not be able to find the answer to the question of which camp you will fall into.

Marketing Wizards . . .Not. I was very surprised at just how bad the quality of Internet marketing was among these solo lawyers. Most did not have web sites, and those that did they tended to be rather amateurish. Not sure what to make of this. Perhaps it’s a good thing that they don’t seem to need to spend a ton of time on things like web sites (I know that is the case in some situations, they have too busy a practice to worry about the colors, logo and font on their web sites). It also seemed to create an opportunity to set yourself apart from the others who are doing web marketing.

There is more out there than Internet solos. There is a lot more to the profession out there than the people who participate on Solosez and other Internet lists. As I noted above, lots of solos do not even have a web presence (I tried to find the web site of a solo that Myshingle.com who successfully argued a case before the US Supremem Court and guess what? He didn’t have one or at least it I couldn’t find it). I guess what I am trying to say is not to form your impressions or limit your networking to Internet listservs. There is a ton of talent out there that has never heard of myshingle.com etc.

Find a pathfinder solo. When I am feeling down, dejected, depressed . . when self doubt is taking hold, when my chest is tightening, when I wake up at 3 in the morning thinking what the hell am I doing? When I dread the question from friends an neighbors . . “how’s the practice going? Do you have any clients?” . . One of the things I think about is a solo friend who just like me, picked up a law book, read it, taught himself an area of the law, found a mentor, took some CLE classes, advertised, got his first client, got a second client, a third and a fourth. Now two years into it, is he a success? Not yet. He hasn’t crossed that threshold just yet, but he is damn close . . damn close. If I can get to where he is in two years, I know this will work. I guess, where I am at is the old saying . . if he can do it . . why the hell can’t I?

So there are some thoughts for a Saturday afternoon, and you know what? some of the dark mental clouds have lifted for now. I am going to go and work on my health care proxy form and then go home to my wife and kids.
>

Read more!

Big grin, but feeling stupid!

OK, I'll just come out and say it . . I didn't realize that anyone was leaving me comments until I happened to click on the "Moderate comments" button in the blogger template. And, it turned out, there were several there waiting to be approved and published. So for those of you that have left comments over the past several weeks, sorry for the delay. Somehow I thought I would get email notification of comments which is the way another blog software package works for me. This is all somewhat comical because, although this site gets very few visitors I was wondering " . . hmmmm how come no one leaves comments?" I feel like I am talking to myself in an empty room

Read more!

The mental battle

Time certainly moves quickly. Last Friday I was thinking I should write a quick post since it has been a week since my last post and already another week has gone past. So a quick update, I continue to spend a lot of time studying the law, learning new areas, a little bit of networking but probably not enough, building my second web sites, getting my two other practice blogs up and running. But I am not actually practicing law or making any money or serving the needs of any clients. My other/old/part-time job continues to take up close to half of my time during the week.

So I could write about technical practice aspects (blogs, web site, technology), but instead I think I will try and comment on what I call the mental battle/war that wages in my head from day to day and hour to hour.

So there are about 8 hours in the working day (at least when I am in my law office) and at any point in time I find my emotions thoughts range from:

Panic -- What the hell am I doing? Am I crazy? What if the solo practice doesn’t work . . . shallow breathing? Will I be a failure? What do I do if this doesn’t work?

Self doubt – do I really have what it takes? Can I really do this? Do I have the knowledge and self confidence? Will clients come to me? Can I really teach myself the various aspects of the law I need to know about

Alone – This is all on my shoulders, no one else to blame or depend on.

Fear – Where are the clients going to come from? What if I don’t know the answers when I do have clients?

Exhilarated – I love being my own boss, setting my own course, making the decisions without being dependent on anyone, proving my self, no more ass kissing, I come and go when I want to.

Supremely confident – somewhere in me, I just know this is going to be a success, others have done it and they have succed. Sometimes I just feel so certain this will work.

Happy --- I am so damn happy I went to law school and have this unique option to open up my own practice.

Overwhelmed – it seems like there is just so much I do not know about the law, just getting through the books and researching takes forever.


Reading back this list, I see that there are more negative feelings than positive. That said the roller coaster mental ride is more evenly balanced between the positive and the negative, in fact I would say it is more like 66% positive feelings and the rest of the time negative. What I am surprised about is how quickly (minutes?) I can go from supreme confidence to panic. Writing this post has been calming, good therapy so to speak. More later . . . back to work.

Read more!