Post updated March 17, 2022
Legal subscription services go by many names: prepaid legal, toll bridge agreements, outside general counsel plans, lawyer-on-retainer. Essentially, a subscription service is a catch-all for a business model where users pay for ongoing access to a product or service. In any event, the concept of legal subscription services has
There’s a new law firm on the block here in Washington D.C., reports the Washington Post — easily recognized by its sunny yellow bike. The cycle analogy is a bit of a play on words, since here, the BIKE stands as an acronym for the Tandem’s tagline, “Be yourself, Innovate, Kindness and Engagement.” Not surprisingly, Tandem boasts an “anti-law firm culture” — which apparently shorthands for no suits, funky work space (ala start-up or Ally McBeal , your pick) and a healthy disdain for how “other” lawyers do things.
Tandem is structured differently from traditional law firms as well. D.C. Ethics Rule 5.4(b) allows for non-lawyer partners, provided that they are also firm employees (as opposed to passive investors) and provide services that “assist the organization in providing legal services.” Capitalizing on this rule, one of Tandem’s co-founders, Michael McDevitt is non-lawyer and former CEO of a successful weight-loss company while the other co-founder, Randy Price brings six years experience as a big law associate. The remaining firm members are comprised of a mix of big firm expatriates and management types, including two with deep roots in e-discovery.
But is Tandem a law firm? Well, sure – it provides legal services to clients even though it also includes business and strategic advice. Tandem’s approach makes sense. Law doesn’t operate in a vacuum and at times (as is often the case with cease and desist letters ), lawyers need to ensure that they fully protect their clients’ legal rights without destroying the company’s image. In short, taking both an analytical and holistic approach to a case is part of being a good lawyer.
On the other hand, Tandem sends mixed messages. Tandem’s LinkedIn profile categorizes the firm as providing “management consulting,” not legal service. Tandem’s webite describes that the firm “combines legal services, business consulting and growth capital.” Finally, Tandem accepts compensation in equity which can be a smart strategy, as evidenced by some of the Silicon Valley firms that rode the dotcom boom. But it’s also a place where there’s a need necessary to tread cautiously to avoid a conflict of interest.
Clients who forget checkbooks. Or want to bring a case for the principle of the thing. Or who assure you that they’ve got a multi-million dollar, slam dunk claim. If you’ve practiced law for even three weeks, you’ve probably encountered at least one of these red-flags. Trouble is, starting out, you may not recognize these
Many lawyers starting a practice opt for virtual office space — basically, a physical location that provides various amenities such as a mailing address and forwarding, a few hours of office or conference room space and/or receptionist of answering services. For lawyers with limited resources or who prefer to work from home, virtual space, in my view, offers the best of both worlds – an affordable spot to meet clients as well as a way maintain the privacy of your home address.
Of course, I’m partial to virtual offices. I started out in one when I launched my firm twenty years ago. Today, however, there are far more options, including co-working space, the virtual office’s slightly more down to earth cousin. In fact, there are even some law firms with extra space that provide virtual office services to generate additional revenue.
So if you decide to start out in a virtual space, how to choose? Here are some considerations that I’ve gathered from my experience and that of my colleagues.
Cost Comparison
One of the most significant factors that goes into the decision of whether to lease a virtual office is cost. Here, you can’t assume that a virtual office is always the cheapest option. Some high-end virtual spaces can run several hundred dollars a month and in some parts of the country, there’s not much difference in cost between a virtual office space and a full-time location of reasonable quality. On the other hand, virtual offices generally offer more flexibility than a full time space which will often come with a one-year lease or more. In addition, some of the more affordable office space may not be very attractive so if you work with high end clients, you may be better off with a posh virtual space than a low-rent permanent office.
You’ll also need to determine what a virtual office’s base rates include. If there’s no office or conference room time and you need to pay $60/he each time you need a space, your costs can add up quickly and diminish the benefits
Ethics
In some jurisdictions like Delaware , certain virtual arrangements won’t comply with the bonafide office rule. New York has certain rules governing lawyer advertising of bonafide offices, and the bar maintains a list of virtual offices that comply. In addition, the New York City Bar now offers a virtual office program guaranteed to meet ethics requirements.
Here on the East Coast, we’ve had a long, hard winter. Between bitter cold, sleet and snow, delayed school openings and court and government shut-downs, it’s been difficult to find the energy to get through the work in front of me, let alone slog through the litany of marketing staples — law firm newsletter, Twitter,
The problem with being late to the party in the blogosphere is that there’s often nothing left to say. And so it is that late with my dispatch on #ReinventLaw, I find that most of what I would have described — from the mixed bag of speakers and their varying degree of success with the Ignite format to the general absence of a connection between most of the talks and the practice of law to the highpoint of breaking bread with old friends and meeting new ones to the overall experience (both positive as well as somewhat claustrophobic) of sitting in a large room packed full of believers, skeptics and opportunists — have already been amply covered by other blog posts listed at the end of this one.
Still, a few thoughts. Overall, I wish that I’d been more invigorated and challenged by Reinvent. I suppose that part of the problem is that I’ve been using technology so long, that talking about what it can do just isn’t all that interesting any more. I remember buying my first Mac back in law school in 1987 and what a life-changing experience that was. I clearly recall the exhilaration and promise that I felt back in 2002 when I hit the enter key and unleashed this blog on the world. My experience isn’t new; most lawyers in my generation have their own respective “How I Fell in Love with Technology” story while younger lawyers having grown up on technology don’t need such a story because they take tech for granted. As we should – because technology is a tool and nothing more.
But Reinvent says or wants us to believe that things are changing. Maybe so. Yet it seems to me that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Despite all the power that technology confers, solos and smalls and our interests still go ignored (a slight highlighted by Reinvent, which included only a handful of practicing solos/smalls in the roster of speakers), ethics rules reinforce the status quo and tech still hasn’t brought the cost of legal services down enough to make lawyers affordable for all. As one speaker said, Google glass may make it cheaper to attend a deposition – but the real cost of deposition is the reporter and the $5.00/page transcript. Technology has promise, yes – but not if we use it simply to address address low hanging fruit or advocate for widespread adoption without fixing earlier problems.
Post updated April 20, 2022 – As of April 2022, many states have eliminated the prohibition on trade names. See here.
There are plenty of reasons for a law firm to use a trade name. Trade names can communicate your firm’s concentration or what’s unique about your practice more effectively and directly than a
I’ve often wondered whether a firm that lacked competency in certain practice areas could nonetheless, advertise these capabilities “on spec,” figuring that it could either refer the work out or hire a temporary lawyer to handle these matters if they came through the door. I’ve seen this tactic used occasionally by the #Altlaw law firms
With a little more than six years of practice under his belt, Maine-based lawyer Paul Greene is still relatively new to the practice of law. Yet he’s at no risk of displacement by online platforms. Instead, Greene — a former sportscaster — left a larger firm to launch his own shop, Global Sports Advocates,
I’ll be the first to admit that there are lots of reasons not to start a solo law practice. If the law bores you, you loathe working with clients (or conversely, view them as “customers”) or you can’t afford a computer, phone and malpractice insurance, then solo practice probably isn’t a good idea. But the arguments against soloing set out in this article by Jennifer Ator, Thinking of Going Solo? Think Carefully, courtesy of the ABA LPM Magazine, are quite frankly, idiotic and reflect poorly on the capabilities of the ABA’s Law Practice Division which supposedly assists lawyers in making an informed decision about solo practice.
The article identifies three challenges of solo practice: isolation, lack of collaborators and having to handle everything on your own. And to be fair, while these are certainly challenges, you’d think that the author, who is a member of the ABA’s LPM Council, would be familiar with the multitude of solutions.
With regard to the isolation, Ator writes that solos are all alone, without anyone with whom they can celebrate a victory, commiserate over an unfair judge or nasty opposing counsel or share a defeat. But solo practice isn’t the equivalent of solitary confinement. Solos frequently build relationships and form friendships with other lawyers in the community, which mitigate against isolation. And with social media, lawyers can find places on line (both public, for boasting, and private for sharing more confidential news) to interact with other lawyers all over the country. Even the ABA provides a great service in this regard – Solosez – an online list serve of more than 3000 attorneys who share their victories and frustrations about law practice daily. These options are far preferable to complaining to the same small team of coworkers over and over again because no one person is burdened and the solo receives the benefits of multiple sources of support.
Next, Ator argues that solos lack collaborators for projects, making the points that two heads are better than one. And while that’s certainly true, solos can turn to colleagues and online contacts to collaborate. In fact, many solos who handle a case that involves multiple disciplines may team up with one or two other lawyers to provide that added support. As for details like proofing for typos, Ator mentions that at one of her former firms, “there was a policy that nothing went out the door without two lawyers reviewing it for typographical errors.” I doubt that in today’s economy, firms have the luxury of billing for two lawyers to review a document. Most solos find it far more cost effective to hire a virtual assistant, paralegal or editor on an hourly basis to handle these administrative tasks.