With last week’s announcement of Legal Zoom’s recent partnership with Sam’s Club to offer deals on legal services as well as Avvo’s launch of Avvo Advisor, the blogosphere’s abuzz with discussion of “should lawyers participate or shouldn’t they?” ( See  Susan Cartier-Liebel, The Bridge Builders  at Above the Law, Bob Ambrogi’s coverage of Avvo Advisor and Law Dingo  (offering a similar service to Avvo)and Victor Li at the ABA Journal.

Of course, the $39/15-minute question is: should lawyers participate in these platforms or not? Can these types of services introduce lawyers to leads that will convert into valuable clients – or are they a waste of time that could even potentially put lawyers at ethics risk or loss of a bigger client?

Frankly, it’s hard to say. The idea of taking on loss-leader work isn’t new; lawyers have long offered low-cost services through bar referral services and employer-sponsored pre-paid legal plans – often with favorable results. The theory is that you establish a relationship for a low cost, and the client may return for help when larger matters arise. On the other hand, most lawyers’ experience with internet-based leads, at least in the early days, left much to be desired – with calls from crazies whose case had already been rejected by every lawyer in town.

But that’s what’s changed. As the Internet matures, it’s no longer a source of last resort but rather, the first stop for many people seeking legal services who actually have money to spend.  Many haven’t asked friends for referrals because, let’s face it – people often don’t want to share their legal problems with colleagues. Also, sometimes (as has happened with me when it comes to referrals), people may have very different price sensitivities from friends. There’s nothing more awkward than receiving a list of estate planning lawyers who start a $10k for a trust when you were looking for someone at half the price. On the Internet, folks can search for lawyers from the privacy of their home without having to share their legal problems or financial limitations with friends and colleagues.

So whereas as recently as two or three years ago, it was easy to shrug off the Internet as a potential source of solidly priced work, that’s no longer the case. 

This week, it’s Above the Law  columnist Shannon Achimalbe’s turn to Monday morning quarterback a solo practice that ran out of steam– a topic covered previously by Lawyerist , MyShingle and Simple Justice. In spite of this handful of posts, failed law firms or failed start-ups don’t get much coverage (and when they do, it’s all smoke or spin). So even though failure isn’t a topic we like to hear about, analysis is necessary for a balanced view.

In a nutshell, here’s the skinny on the Achimalbe’s hapless solo. He went to law school to escape a minimum wage job but couldn’t find employment after graduation. After a year out of school, he ran into a couple of classmates who’d started practices – and while it wasn’t his first shot, he decided to give it a try.  The first year was rough, with just four clients, and monthly expenses of around $2000 – including rent, bar and networking events, advertising and suppliers – so solo worked odd jobs part time to supplement income. Year two, solo committed to more networking and pro bono that finally bore fruit. So not surprisingly, Year 3 (always the charm) brought a lucrative client which necessitated expansion.  Solo grew – but too quickly — hiring an assistant and adding the cost of additional office space and updated phone system – a jump of $2000/month to $5k. Of course, you know what happens next: two months later, business takes a dive, solo can’t cover his costs and sheds the assistant and fancy digs. But this time around, his heart isn’t in pounding the pavements to get the business back on track and so he shuts down, taking a somewhat more stable but low paying non-legal position.

So what went wrong? Certainly, the $3000/month overhead bump was largely to blame – but why did this solo feel that it made sense to ramp up so quickly? With so many outsourcing options – independent contractors and virtual assistants or even part time work force – readily available and well-documented at websites galore, it is difficult to understand why this solo chose to lock himself when the cash had barely started to flow. Perhaps he was tempting fate – figuring that if solo practice was meant to be, he’d cover that new overhead and then some. Or maybe, because his heart wasn’t fully committed to solo practice even after three years in, he acted impulsively because he felt he had nothing to lose. 

In a buyer’s market for legal services, great work alone often isn’t enough to attract or retain a client. At least that’s what two in-house counsel advised in recent interviews posted at JD Supra and summarized at Daily Report Online. According to these interviews, today’s in-house counsel expect outside lawyers to take the time to understand a company’s business needs, provide services that aren’t billed for and generally increase the size of the pie for the company to make in-house counsel look good to management.

For example, one in-house counsel expressed appreciation to a law firm that invited him to attend a seminar relevant to his job at the company and which also earned him CLE.   Ivan Longo, a corporate counsel at CocaCola responded that the smartest thing a law firm has ever done for him is to identify a business opportunity or acquisition. In-house counsel also want their outside counsel to at least apply a cost-benefit analysis to the matters they handle and devote time and effort commensurate with the significance of the matter to the company (One counsel said that the worst thing an outside attorney ever did was to bill more than the company was seeking to recover from the other party).

While lots of law firm coaches and marketers are frantically mailing this information to their law firm clients offering to help create packages, many of these demands are plain silly if we think about them. Really – why should lawyers routinely provide un-billed services? We don’t tolerate those demands from deadbeat clients, so why do we think it’s a good idea to routinely comp a massive corporation? Sure, I understand devoting a few hours here and there to represent help a CEO client’s son incorporate his start up or bail his daughter out of a DUI. But those tasks are personal favors outside the scope of representation. But these corporate counsel seem to suggest that outside firms shouldn’t charge for work within the scope that falls within or closely relates to what the firm has been hired to do.

By now, you’ve probably read about Stacy Ehrisman, the Georgia attorney who filed a judicial complaint against immigration judge J. Daniel Pelletier after he denied her unopposed continuance request due to maternity leave and then berated her when she showed up with her four-week old infant in tow.  Lots of female commenters – Staci Zaretsky,  Above the Law, Alaina Sullivan, freelance attorney, Modvive and Caitlin White, MTV – took  the judge to task for sexism – both for refusing to accommodate Ehrisman’s schedule and humiliating her in the courtroom.

But was the judge a sexist?  I’m not so sure.  Law is an uncertain business and there are never guarantees that a request for a continuance will be granted, even when it’s unopposed.  All lawyers – and solos in particular, who often struggle to find back up – deal with this kind of uncertainty every day. But until we start using technology to cut down on the number of onerous and useless in-person scheduling conferences that run up client bills (geez, why not just use Doodle?), juggling court dates is always just a little like Russian Roulette.  My guess is that most lawyers, male or female, requesting family based leave from Judge Pelletier could expect the same result as Ehrisman received.

Likewise, there’s no question that Judge Pelletier’s remarks to Ehrisman were way out of line.  But seems that Judge Pelletier is also a big bully – and nasty as his remarks were to Ehrisman, they pale in comparison to his reported treatment of detainees.  

flatfees

Updated September 1, 2022

A recent decision by a New York court, rejecting a law firm’s breach of contract claim to recover $2.3 million in legal fees from a client highlights both the importance of a detailed written representation agreement and yet another reason to consider adopting flat fees.

According to the New York Law…

Slowly but surely, these times they are a changing. In Ethics Opinion 1025, the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) clarified that its advertising rules – which require lawyers to list a physical address on letterhead and business cards – does not “independent mandate for attorneys who advertise to maintain a physical office address.” What’s noteworthy about the opinion, however, is that it recognizes that a physical office is not necessarily presumptively more safe, secure or accountable from the perspective of the client. From the opinion:
First, a prospective client’s intelligent selection of a lawyer can be facilitated not merely by physical presence but also by the potential value (due to lower overhead) of having a lawyer who works solely through a virtual law office (where that can be done competently, as we address below). Second, some clients who work only virtually might also prefer, for some kinds of work, the lawyer who operates virtually as well.  Third, the robustness of electronic communications, and the appointment of a virtual law office service as an agent for accepting service of process, effectively combine to eliminate any concern that a physical office is necessary in all cases for the receipt of service and other communications.  Indeed, as N.Y. City 2014-2 points out, the more electronically-connected lawyer may be “at least as accessible as a lawyer who rents a dedicated physical office space.” We note that physical offices almost always are open only on a limited schedule. Finally, there is nothing inherently misleading about advertising a virtual law office.  All such advertising must be truthful and not misleading, and the inquirer here intends to disclose that all services are conducted virtually and not via a physical office.

In any universe other than the one inside the Beltway, attorney Paul Zukerberg would be the overwhelmingly favorite to serve as the first elected Attorney General of the District of Columbia. Zukerberg has the legal chops for the job; he’s practiced law in Washington D.C. for twenty-eight years, focusing on complex traumatic brain injury cases on the civil side to and marijuana and drug possession on the criminal sides.

But Zukerberg doesn’t just practice law, he changes it too. He’s been instrumental in galvanizing the movement to decriminalize pot in DC – which took effect in July 2014. And in fact, there wouldn’t even be a direct DC Attorney General election this fall at all but for Zukerberg’s successful lawsuit  to overturn a DC Council decision to postpone the elections until 2018.

Yet despite Zukerberg’s vast body of work, the Washington Post questions his qualifications and ultimately, endorsed his opponent, Karl Racine. The reason? Racine hails from venerable Venable, a prominent D.C. based big law firm, while Zukerberg’s solo. And in a stratified company town like DC, it doesn’t matter what solos do or how much they accomplish (including beating big law at the Supremes), at the end of the day, they’re still small potatoes in comparison to big law. 

Move over, vanity license plates emblazoned with slogans like NTGUILTY, or call lines like  1-800-SUE-THEM. Beginning today, lawyers everywhere will have yet another means to brazenly trumpet their presence as the gtld  (generic top level domain names) .lawyer and .attorney become generally available for registration. That’s right, by tonight, the web will be littered with declarative URLs like CallMy.Lawyer or WorldsBest.Attorney or more banal but descriptive ones like NewYorkCityPersonalInjury.Lawyer.

Still, while seemingly related to dozens of other poor taste forms of lawyer branding, the new lawyer and attorney dots aren’t just another type of digital beauty mark. As I’ll discuss below, only licensed lawyers in good standing qualify to register these new domains, and thus, the domains act as a quick proxy to distinguish real lawyers from the dozens of  #newlaw, lead-hen and pay per click sites that dominate Google searches for lawyers.  The only remaining kink: will the ethics regulators view registrar regulation of lawyers’ license status an encroachment on their turf and declare lawyer use of the new domains a prohibited deceptive practice?

Before reaching the larger policy questions, let’s take a look at how the new domains work and more importantly, whether solos and smalls should consider registration. By way of background, back in 2012, ICANN, the non-profit organization that oversees creation and management of domain names announced that it would expand the limited registry of gtld (such as .com, .org and .gov) to include law related terms such as .legal, .law, .lawyer and .attorney.  On October 8, 2014 following a sunrise phase, in which trademark holders could register domains matching their trademarks, .lawyer and .attorney will become generally available for any lawyer to register.

Let’s just say that 2014 hasn’t been a banner year for me. The trade association I co-founded nine years ago and helped grow to 55 members at its peak imploded. I lost a motion that I’ve never had denied- nor ever even seen denied in 25 years of practice – and  managed to pull out a narrow save only by pulling an all-nighter on a reconsideration request before driving 8 hours north to drop my daughter at college. I’m likely going to face my first professional action and while it’s utterly groundless, that won’t spare me from ponying up my deductible. I even dropped my iPhone in the toilet – first time ever – and had to replace it after a grain of the rice that I’d submerged it in to dry it out lodged in the charger hole. Oh, and my husband has a brain tumor, of a serious variety (some aren’t as bad as others. This one is). Oy, this is one sorry post.

When bad luck hits and sticks, many of us start to wonder whether we’ve done something to attract or deserve it. After all, if good luck flows from a good attitude and strong work ethic, then arguably, the opposite holds true. And then, we find ourselves living out a big self-fulfilling prophecy, giving up before even trying because after all, what’s the point?