A few ways to save money or slow spending

Here are a few random tips on either saving money or delaying expense until you have money coming in the door.

• Hold off on buying malpractice insurance until you start doing work; if you are gong to be doing work day 1 then by all means get the insurance in place. If you do not know when the clients will come, wait until you start doing the work. I think most places can have the coverage in place pretty quickly (like the day you call . . or they can delay coverage until the specific date you request).

• For local phone service, do not go with the bundled expensive package up-front (this is what I did before switching to a barebones metered service); wait for call volume to justify the volume of service. Do some research and see if there is an alternative for the big local provider (in my case its Verizon); I found some recommendations on a law news group for a vendor that was 50% the cost of Verizon which I am now switching too. When it comes to the phone number, however, defiantly call up your phone company and get them to give you lots of business number options; in my case they probably gave me a choice of 20 different numbers and I picked the one I liked best. I am not sure how that would work with the new low cost vendor, if they would have that kind of list or customer service.

• Pick a separate vendor for the long distance and intra-state long distance. I think Verizon was at about $.07/min, the new local provider I am switching to offered $0.05/min but I found this outfit that is offering $0.025 per minute with no monthly minimum so I am going with them.

• Hold off on purchasing the stationary until you really need it. You can do a pretty good job in Microsoft Word of preparing decent looking stationary to get you started (order the stationary from the various vendors so you can get design options). I still have not ordered high-end stationary, I am a fan of investing in that sort of thing and will do so soon, I just did not need to have it right from the start. Also, by waiting you can be sure what you want to call yourself; I have already switched from wanting to be called “[last name] Law Firm” to a more traditional “Law office of [name]”.

• Consider holding off on purchasing things like Quickbooks, practice management software, paper shredder until you have the volume of business to justify it (you don’t need many clients to justify it but it can cut down on the start up costs).

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How I found my web site builder

It seems just about everyone can recommend a good webmaster, friends, families, email news groups etc. I even considered becoming a web designer. (A few weeks post-9/11, when I had been laid off from my high-tech star-up and was becoming disillusioned with the business world, I knew I wanted to have my own small business but could not figure out what that would be. I considered custom furniture making (took some wood working classes), web design, coffee shop, fast food places etc. Yes, I had my law degree at that time and for some reason never considered going out as a solo . . I haven’t written much about that mental block . . I am not sure where it came from but I never ever considered going solo back then, now I certainly regret it, what better time to start a law practice than when no one will offer you a full time job. )

I had no idea how to pick a web designer, I actually had very specific ideas about how I wanted the pages to look. I knew what I wanted and really just needed someone to implement it. Also the cost seemed high, certainly (i.e. above $1,000).

I ended up turning to a site called www.elance.com where you can post a job and then solicit bids and proposals (they even have legal jobs posted but I have not pursued them, not sure how the out of state element works). There is no cost to posting a job on elance and no obligation to select a bidder, so it might be worth a try to see what kind of response you get. I posted a very basic description, saying I wanted a 5 page web site for a new law practice. I may have included a mock-up in Microsoft word (using the drawing feature) of what I wanted the general design to look like; if you have an existing site include a link to it. (Tip: when you post a bid not click on the box that basically says you only want premier bidders (aka higher priced bidders) to respond, I thought about doing this but did not and got plenty of good proposals). The job stays posted for a week although you do not have to wait that long to award the job to someone. In that week, I got 35+ different bids from all over the world, some even sent me a mock-up of the site (complete with my name etc., lots of judge’s gavels and scales of justice). The prices ranged from $150 to $3000 and came from all over the world. One problem I had was that it took forever for me to go through all of the proposals, review their portfolios etc. This led to a few weeks of decision paralysis on my part. You can pretty quickly eliminate bids that are either too high or that do not have enough of a track record of feedback. You can also eliminate bids from certain countries or based on their portfolios (which ultimately start to look the same). In my case, it turned out that one of the lowest priced bidders was also the one I liked the best and he was based in India. All payment is made through the elance service (you can do PayPal but based on a bad experience for another job I did through elance I would only use the elance system because it keeps it all under one roof, if there is a problem at least elance has a record of payment made). I sent my India bidder the word document that had the basic coloring and layout of how I wanted it to look and he prepared two web page samples for me to choose from one based on my design and one based on his, I told him I liked mine better so we went with that. I provided the photos (most of which I found on the web . . check out corbis) where needed and the text and he built the pages and put them on the web for me to review. I probably sent him 10 to 15 rounds of edits in all, he was great to work with, everything was done via email and attachments. Finally, he loaded for me and I paid him (you pay some money at the start of the engagement and then some percentage at each point during the work). The whole thing came to under $200 and I think the result looks great.

Where there any drawbacks to doing it this way? It can take some time, he would turn around edits in between 1 and 4 days so with multiple rounds of edits it took longer than I would have liked but some of that is my fault. Also, it was sometimes hard to communicate changes unless I provided a very detailed description of what I wanted (to explain where I wanted the copyright notice, I had to do a screen shot of the page and then float in an arrow and text box to show him the exact location). I also would not consider him a real design expert, he did a great job of coding the design I wanted but I would not rely on him for design expertise. Ultimately, I had a great experience; I referred some other business to him and always found him to be extremely professional and friendly to deal with.

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Update & Lessons Learned Part 1

One of the benefits of solo practice is that (in the absence of any pending work that needs to get done your time is your own). Its now 10:35AM, I took a long weekend with the family at the beach and have spent the morning going through email etc. I have a 12:00PM lunch with a former business school classmate who is thinking of starting a company and wants some advice. So I have about an extra hour and thought, I would get back on the blog horse and put off the real legal work I have to do to the afternoon. (Thanks basquette for the encouragement . . . I need it!)

So I am now a little more than 4 months into this Project Solo and it has been a little over a month since my last post out here so I have lots to cover. These next few posts are going to be a mix of “lessons learned” and other random observations in no particular order or importance.

Grooving on Technology, Marketing etc. I’ll start with the bottom line here, put networking and getting clients at the top of your list ahead of stationary, computers, web sites, filing systems, practice management software, quickbooks etc. Do you have a networking strategy? Do you have a plan to get involved with other attorney groups? Do you have an address list to send announcements to? I know I secretly thought more business would come through the web site and, over time perhaps it will, but at the start I believe most of your clients are going to come from word-of-mouth referrals from family, friends, other lawyers you meet or other people in the business. Purchase an alumnae directory, contact non-lawyers who might work with your target client base, contact local lawyers who work in other (related?) practice areas and let them know you are out there. I only make this comment because I plead guilty to spending too much time building a web sites, buying office furniture, searching for the lowest priced computer, finding the best flat screen LCD monitor, searching Craigs list for a good deal on a Herman Miller office chair (yes I found one!) and not enough time focused on finding clients. I call this grooving on the technology [or insert your favorite topic you like here] because it is all too easy to spend time doing stuff you enjoy (e.g. Internet product research) and not the stuff that not many of us enjoy (e.g. networking or selling yourself). Not that all that other stuff is not important and can take an amazing amount of time but just make sure client development is getting is fair share of focus.

In other news, I may have my second corporate client which would yield about 1 day per week in recurring business. This would allow me to replace about 50% of my pre-solo corporate salary. I found an ad for a full-time corporate in-house attorney at a small business that fit my target profile (up to about 100 employees, no general counsel or other lawyer) so I sent off an email to the CFO that said basically “not interested in the full-time position but would you consider a part-time position while you looked for full-time” and included a link to my web site and bio. Within 2 hours of sending that email, I got a phone call from the CFO saying he was interested, they had considered part-time as an alternative to full-time etc., we scheduled a later time to talk in more detail which gave me a few days to think about what kind of rate to charge I have an hourly target rate of $200/hour but then drop it down if there is a commitment for a specific amount of work per month (right now its anywhere from 3 to 4 8 hour days per month). He seemed very positive and indicated he would hire me, I just needed to set up a time to meet with the CEO. I haven’t been able to do that but it sounds like this will happen. More details to come. I guess the lesson learned here is that you never know where the leads will come from. I have sent out many emails to former friends an colleagues letting people know what I am up, many have responded, many have not (which I find a little annoying). This particular lead was one item among many on my “to-do” list, it probably took about 45 minutes to an hour to look into the company, compose an email, reverse engineer the CFO’s email address etc. I could have easily overlooked this or not followed through as it seemed like a long shot. But I am glad I did, its another mental boost and validation of my model. That said, we haven’t signed an engagmetn letter yet and the CFO didn’t return my email today asking about good times to meet with the CEO so doubts are creeping in.

I am finishing this post up at the end of the day. I am off to a dinner with some local solo lawyers at a nearby restaurant.

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