June 2006

Dave Swanner has some great, defy-the-experts advice on starting a law firm.  The essence:  Don’t overplan, get a phone line and some business cards, and just do it.  Though Dave admits in his comments that this no frills approach may not work for everyone, particularly those with major financial commitments, he’s definitely on to

Over at Legal Blogwatch, I posted here  about a recent analysis by Volokh guest blogger Andy Leipold, who found that criminal defendants stand a
better chance of acquittal before a jury.  I thought that the study might help some of my readers who practice criminal law to make more informed decisions about a

Though not every family law case ends up like this one, nonetheless, family law cases are often fraught with more emotion and problems than any other type of case.  Clients often come with misinformation about the process and unreasonable expectations about how much the case should cost.

While trends such as collaborative lawyering may

It’s one thing to write about the  ethics rules relating to leaving a law firm, as I did at this post.  But the way that a law firm should treat a departing attorney and shared clients in theory and the way that things actually work in practice are often entirely different realities, as this

Here’s a huge public thanks to Ed Poll, one of today’s preeminent law practice management experts and coaches, for sticking up for solos.  In this post, Ed joins the chorus of bloggers speaking out against the New York bar’s recently proposed restrictive advertising rules.  And in this post, Ed takes on the

It’s not often that practice areas like family law, primarily the province of solo and small law firms merit attention from a legal commentator of Dahlia Lithwick‘s stature.  But Lithwick tackles issues like the problems with an adversarial family court system and how well you really know your clients in her op-ed piece in

Jim Calloway has a great post on one of the unanswered (pun intended!) questions concerning solo practice:  what’s the best system for answering the phone?  Jim’s post summarizes the pros and cons of (a) outsourcing to a live answering service (uneven quality and costly); (b) using paid employee (who may be low paid and unmotivated)