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).