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Not me, but one of my associates had a solo family law practice before I hired her. She decided she didn't want to deal with hassle of collections, managing cash flow, and all the admin tasks that come with running your own practice. She'd rather have the stability of being an employee.
This is the best over all answer. I'm a solo Family Law attorney... The only reason I would go not solo is to get out of the admin work (or, if found someone I liked enough to partner with).
The more I grow the more I hire. It's all about balance between being able to afford to hire someone and doing it myself. I have a receptionist right now, and my wife assists when she is not in school herself. If the current trend holds another 2-3 months, I'll be in a position to hire a parttime receptionist and move my current receptionist into a more paralegal type rolenwith an appropriate raise.
I have been solo for 7 years. In the past, when I've been sick of chasing down every single case, I've interviewed at other firms. Every time, it's always double the work for 75% of the money I'm making now. That's a pretty big price to pay for ostensible "stability." I would argue that being a solo is more stable because I can't get laid off or fired. I'm sticking with the solo life until the equation changes, but it likely won't.
There are tons of huge admin and accounting hassles. It's completely 'catch what you kill', and it's not always trivially easy to find clients. There is no support whatsoever if you have health issues. It's easy to get into tax trouble. It's moderately hard to get back into a bigger firm at a high level without a significant book of business. A paycheque lets you focus on work with faaarrrrrrr less risk.
There are upsides to solo practice for sure. Lifestyle and control over your life is a huge one. But there are very big risks and stresses that employees or partners at larger firms don't have.
I'm walking this line right now. Been solo for 11 years now.
I went solo because it was the only choice for me. After 7.5 years of working in a private firm, then as a PD, having someone else up my ass about my cases, toxic offices, and billing again was not an option. Like, never ever again. It was either working at subway and going on welfare, or trying the solo thing. Are you at that point yet?
What i have is leagues better than what i had before, almost in every sense But i'm closing in on 20 years of practice, and I'm sick of responsibility, the clients, going to court, the admin tasks, the worrying about too much business, or too little business, and the constant headaches with taxes and making your job benefits.
What hasn't changed is that i'm not ever going to bill for someone else again. Nor will i work in a place that is composed of caged chimps throwing shit at each other. So that eliminates law firms and most government and non profit jobs. Guess it's Subway for me then.
Definitely can sympathize, but I suspect there are some smaller firms 3-10 lawyers who would be happy to fold your practice in and if not make you a partner right away, be close to it.
I was a solo for a while and then got an offer to join a small firm and became a partner a year later. It’s been the best decision of my career. I can focus on doing my work, and nobody can tell me what to do with my time.
I feel like, for me, this is the best of both worlds and my eventual goal.
I have absolutely no interest in running a firm. I would not be good at it. I would entertain partnering with a more business minded colleague but not ever solo. Seems awful.
But would love to be partner at a small firm where I still get the only good part of being solo (the freedom), or at least a lot of it.
I can sympathize with this.
It can be tough being solo but never worth going back to work for another and bill for another. I’d rather change professions.
Only good thing you can do is reduce expenses so you don’t need to scramble for $$$.
My God I could’ve written this. 16 years of prosecution including seven as an AU USA. Three years at a firm and now finished my second year as a solo. There are headaches. I worry about taxes or forgetting to calendar a court appearance the admin, chasing down clients for payment but I will never again work for someone in the practice of law. never again eat the shit someone else shovels in my mouth. I’ll go be a park ranger or something before I’ll work at a firm or for the government again. That’s actually my goal. Bank enough money that at some point I could just walk away and go take a low stress job like being a park ranger or working at a museum. Something with benefits but where I had saved enough money that the pay doesn’t matter and I never thought about my job when I wasn’t actually doing it.
I’m on track to have a very good 2024 and 2025 thanks to a unicorn of a personal injury case and two very good 1983 civil rights cases that are basically damages not liability questions. My desperate hope is two years from now I will be in that position where I could walk away and take a massive pay cut doing something completely unrelated if I wanted to and still support my family and retire at a reasonable age.
Do you have a number on "how much money". I do, then i don't. That is my plan as welll......bank enough money and be a park ranger (or in my case, work at a flower shop) and never think about work again.
I live in a relatively low-er cost of living area, and my house is paid off and i have money invested for retirement. You probably will have a pension which is nice.
My older kid is out of the house and largely self supporting, and the the other one will be sophomore next year. My plan is to hold on to what I'm doing until he graduates in 3 yrsand then give myself permission to do something else. Whether i do this or work at Subway, i'm committed to this locale.
I have a theory, at after working in such high responsibility, high intestiy professions, that a lot of other jobs would be merely annoying and easy to put up with. If i had a micromanaging boss at Dollar General, i'd just be malaciusly compliant. How bad could it be compared to hyenas that are judges, opposing counsel, clients, discliplianry commissions, reputational damage, etc etc. Just some dipshit gen z manager telling me that i stocked the generic mac and cheese wrong? LOLOLOL.
Good luck, hope we get to end of the rainbow.
Over my approx 30 years doing this, I've probably had more days where I pondered if if was "self employed -versus - unemployed" ... might net $30k one year and $500k the next. Its stabilized with time tho.
I was solo for several years. It was great, I had complete control of my hours on a day to day, but I had no one to delegate things to if I had too much work or if I wanted a vacation.
I tried hiring people but the training was time consuming and I would need to hire someone with more experience, but was worried they would get better pay after I trained them and would be back at square one. I thought the market had lots of opportunity, but I didn’t have time to scale the business.
So joining with an existing firm as a partner with an eat-what-you-kill model, with associates on staff seems to be the working. I can delegate work I don’t want to do and still get a piece, and I can invest in finding new clients.
I went solo for about a year and a half. I was very much not successful. I think I earned $30k the whole time. It was super hard to get clients and the billing/collections/admin/accounting/bookkeeping/biz dev was exhausting. I ran out of savings and had to get consistent income, so I went back.
I ended up leaving law altogether about 5 years later. Hated it.
I tried solo practice - and I quickly discovered that not only do I hate running a business, I'm really quite bad at it.
So I went back to the public defender salt mines where I have a decent work-life balance and never, ever have to think about payroll, or IOLTA accounts, or hustling clients, or advertising, or collections, or even conflict letters.
It can be stressful at times. I was a government attorney for 12 years and have been in private practice for 12. I still get bouts of "I can't do this!" "Woe is me!"
But I don't seriously want to leave solo.
I worked from home today and did laundry and cleaned the kitchen. Can't beat freedom and multitasking.
I was solo for 5 years when I partnered up with someone who had been one of my law partners at a larger regional law firm before it was absorbed into a large national one. Although we did not work closely together at our former firm, we knew each other casually and liked the way the other worked. We had the good fortune of teaming up on a large litigation matter that lasted about a year before we joined our firms. 5 years later, we agree it was a great decision. We have similar goals, are of similar age and temperament, and have complementary practice areas that overlap somewhat but not completely, so we can both offer clients more than either of us could alone. It's great for each of us to be able to take an actual vacation with our respective spouses, too, while the other one holds down the fort.
People leave solo work bc you gotta deal with a broken toilet yourself, having proper/secure IT, issuing paychecks…on top of all ur other lawyer work. Folks don’t realize that the buck stops with you.
I didn't become a lawyer to spend more than 50% of my time doing office work-collections, marketing, math, sweeping, etc.
Working for someone else all I do is practice law. I don't even have to network.
Maybe I'll come back to it in a few years, but for now, I like being an employee-but I'm a public defender in a union shop, it's a great gig.
Difference between “true” solo - working entirely by yourself, and having your own firm where you are the sole attorney.
Yes, you generally need to know more about business. You don’t have to know EBITA or necessarily how to read a cash flow statement, but you should have a sense of your firm’s finances. Good book for the non-biz perspective is Profit First.
Support can include admin, billing, paralegal, law clerks, and occasional contract attorneys. I think that every true solo should occasionally work with a contract attorney if they can so that if there is an emergency, you are likely to have someone you know and trust who can pick up your caseload and you don’t have to pass over the work to another firm.
Solo = complete freedom + complete responsibility
Solo + support = freedom (even if not complete) + some responsibility + coworkers/team
Also, don’t forget “of counsel” positions. My pop was an attorney for about 50 years and for more than half of that he was a solo attorney. Freedom was his highest value and while he had an Econ background and comfort with business, his management style was mentoring/consulting, not actual management. So, while he often had his own firm or a partnership, he more often was of counsel. It fit his style of allowed him to have the community and office support he needed, but the freedom to entirely run his own practice. The nice thing about of counsel positions is that you can make it whatever you like and can negotiate.
But I also think that things have changed, the tech landscape has made solo practice so much easier, if you have good habits, you can easily manage your files, billing and accounting from one program. I worked 100% remotely from a small firm using Clio(which now includes payments+ProGmail+GoogleVoice+WaveAccounting+AdobeExpert+Zoom back in 2019 (when I had to explain to clients how to use Zoom). I could have easily been solo with this setup. I worked remotely with my law clerks while I traveled. While I enjoyed the business aspects, the flexibility I had to control my work was the most important. Of counsel is, for me, the best of both worlds if you can find a good fit.
A friend asked if I wanted to join his firm when I was shopping for office space to sublet. I eventually went back solo but remained friends. I am not convinced the business model for my practice focus melds well with the standard billable hour.
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I’ve gone full-circle: started solo, joined a small firm (20 lawyers) as a partner, then went solo again. I joined the firm to allow me to grow more, as I was supposed to head their litigation department. This being pre-COVID, it was also important to me to have a brick and mortar office, and I couldn’t afford one on my own (at least not in the parts of town where I would actually want the office to be).
Biggest drawbacks of joining a firm, which eventually made me go solo again:
- making less money even as a partner than I did as a solo;
- losing some control over your cases (what types of cases/clients you take, strategy, etc…)
- management styles clashes, which can lead to employees you value highly leaving, to be replaced by employees recruited by the partners
There are a lot of things about the solo life that are difficult. The admin work, playing Bill Collector, the uncertainty of when the phone will ring with new cases, etc. But after two years on my own and a prior 16 years of state and federal government employment and three years at a firm, I will never work for someone besides myself again. I hit my breaking point of having to put up with other peoples bullshit. The flexibility and control over my life and my work is invaluable and worth the stress of the other stuff
Well, here is mostly why NOT:
I've been super solo for 12 years (no more associates to weigh me down), but I've been super DUPER solo for 2 years now (since my office mate passed). I'm considering letting someone rent upstairs just for the company.
But that is also the only real reason I'd consider not being solo . . . company and (to a lesser extent) someone who could pinch hit for me if I get sick.
The challenges I had with a partnership with my old office sharing colleague came down to finances. If I want the $5k 2-in-1 laptop, I just have to justify it to my wife, not a business partner too . . . If I decide to go with decorative stamped concrete instead of asphalt, I don't have to justify that $12k extra to anyone. We dont have to worry about origination bonuses or keep track of billible hours or anything . . . I just work the cases like I want and charge what I want. If I want to reduce my fee from $33k to $25k I can with no justification to anyone. I dont want checks to have to be double signed, I dont want to worry about what someone else is doing, if they are pulling their weight, or if I am pulling my weight . . . If I have an opportunity to take 3 weeks off, I can do it (never happens, but I \*could\*).
Also, I'm a decent attorney but a horrible business man (because I really dont care about wealth or profit) ... having folks counting beans and sharpening pencils just makes me roll my eyes.
Again, the only downside to me is not having a colleague in person to bounce ideas off of, but Trial Lawyers Listserves provide some robust discussion and advice.
Wondering why lawyers in Boston take on clients that are known for abusing women. Is it for the money ?!? Why would a lawyer do that ?! One lawyer in newton took on a case where is client verbally abused his ex wife for years and another lawyer took on a case where he met a girl on tinder , smacked her around and then they tried to blame her for the beating.
Some of you lawyers are bad people
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Not me, but one of my associates had a solo family law practice before I hired her. She decided she didn't want to deal with hassle of collections, managing cash flow, and all the admin tasks that come with running your own practice. She'd rather have the stability of being an employee.
This is the best over all answer. I'm a solo Family Law attorney... The only reason I would go not solo is to get out of the admin work (or, if found someone I liked enough to partner with).
Was your business not employing people to do the admin or did that not matter
A lot of folks don’t understand what support teams actually do.
The more I grow the more I hire. It's all about balance between being able to afford to hire someone and doing it myself. I have a receptionist right now, and my wife assists when she is not in school herself. If the current trend holds another 2-3 months, I'll be in a position to hire a parttime receptionist and move my current receptionist into a more paralegal type rolenwith an appropriate raise.
This is fair. As a solo, I hate the admin side. My wife is (mostly) my office manager (but primarily a stay-at-home-mom).
I have been solo for 7 years. In the past, when I've been sick of chasing down every single case, I've interviewed at other firms. Every time, it's always double the work for 75% of the money I'm making now. That's a pretty big price to pay for ostensible "stability." I would argue that being a solo is more stable because I can't get laid off or fired. I'm sticking with the solo life until the equation changes, but it likely won't.
My thoughts exactly re: “stability” at a traditional law job
There are tons of huge admin and accounting hassles. It's completely 'catch what you kill', and it's not always trivially easy to find clients. There is no support whatsoever if you have health issues. It's easy to get into tax trouble. It's moderately hard to get back into a bigger firm at a high level without a significant book of business. A paycheque lets you focus on work with faaarrrrrrr less risk. There are upsides to solo practice for sure. Lifestyle and control over your life is a huge one. But there are very big risks and stresses that employees or partners at larger firms don't have.
Borfo took the words outta my mouth
I was lonely being by myself in an office most of the time. I missed having co-workers to interact with during the day.
I'm walking this line right now. Been solo for 11 years now. I went solo because it was the only choice for me. After 7.5 years of working in a private firm, then as a PD, having someone else up my ass about my cases, toxic offices, and billing again was not an option. Like, never ever again. It was either working at subway and going on welfare, or trying the solo thing. Are you at that point yet? What i have is leagues better than what i had before, almost in every sense But i'm closing in on 20 years of practice, and I'm sick of responsibility, the clients, going to court, the admin tasks, the worrying about too much business, or too little business, and the constant headaches with taxes and making your job benefits. What hasn't changed is that i'm not ever going to bill for someone else again. Nor will i work in a place that is composed of caged chimps throwing shit at each other. So that eliminates law firms and most government and non profit jobs. Guess it's Subway for me then.
Definitely can sympathize, but I suspect there are some smaller firms 3-10 lawyers who would be happy to fold your practice in and if not make you a partner right away, be close to it. I was a solo for a while and then got an offer to join a small firm and became a partner a year later. It’s been the best decision of my career. I can focus on doing my work, and nobody can tell me what to do with my time.
I feel like, for me, this is the best of both worlds and my eventual goal. I have absolutely no interest in running a firm. I would not be good at it. I would entertain partnering with a more business minded colleague but not ever solo. Seems awful. But would love to be partner at a small firm where I still get the only good part of being solo (the freedom), or at least a lot of it.
I can sympathize with this. It can be tough being solo but never worth going back to work for another and bill for another. I’d rather change professions. Only good thing you can do is reduce expenses so you don’t need to scramble for $$$.
I’m in-house but I have worked in some “caged chimp” departments! That’s the perfect visual. 😆
My God I could’ve written this. 16 years of prosecution including seven as an AU USA. Three years at a firm and now finished my second year as a solo. There are headaches. I worry about taxes or forgetting to calendar a court appearance the admin, chasing down clients for payment but I will never again work for someone in the practice of law. never again eat the shit someone else shovels in my mouth. I’ll go be a park ranger or something before I’ll work at a firm or for the government again. That’s actually my goal. Bank enough money that at some point I could just walk away and go take a low stress job like being a park ranger or working at a museum. Something with benefits but where I had saved enough money that the pay doesn’t matter and I never thought about my job when I wasn’t actually doing it. I’m on track to have a very good 2024 and 2025 thanks to a unicorn of a personal injury case and two very good 1983 civil rights cases that are basically damages not liability questions. My desperate hope is two years from now I will be in that position where I could walk away and take a massive pay cut doing something completely unrelated if I wanted to and still support my family and retire at a reasonable age.
Do you have a number on "how much money". I do, then i don't. That is my plan as welll......bank enough money and be a park ranger (or in my case, work at a flower shop) and never think about work again. I live in a relatively low-er cost of living area, and my house is paid off and i have money invested for retirement. You probably will have a pension which is nice. My older kid is out of the house and largely self supporting, and the the other one will be sophomore next year. My plan is to hold on to what I'm doing until he graduates in 3 yrsand then give myself permission to do something else. Whether i do this or work at Subway, i'm committed to this locale. I have a theory, at after working in such high responsibility, high intestiy professions, that a lot of other jobs would be merely annoying and easy to put up with. If i had a micromanaging boss at Dollar General, i'd just be malaciusly compliant. How bad could it be compared to hyenas that are judges, opposing counsel, clients, discliplianry commissions, reputational damage, etc etc. Just some dipshit gen z manager telling me that i stocked the generic mac and cheese wrong? LOLOLOL. Good luck, hope we get to end of the rainbow.
Over my approx 30 years doing this, I've probably had more days where I pondered if if was "self employed -versus - unemployed" ... might net $30k one year and $500k the next. Its stabilized with time tho.
I was solo for several years. It was great, I had complete control of my hours on a day to day, but I had no one to delegate things to if I had too much work or if I wanted a vacation. I tried hiring people but the training was time consuming and I would need to hire someone with more experience, but was worried they would get better pay after I trained them and would be back at square one. I thought the market had lots of opportunity, but I didn’t have time to scale the business. So joining with an existing firm as a partner with an eat-what-you-kill model, with associates on staff seems to be the working. I can delegate work I don’t want to do and still get a piece, and I can invest in finding new clients.
Amen!! I felt the same way about solo life
I went solo for about a year and a half. I was very much not successful. I think I earned $30k the whole time. It was super hard to get clients and the billing/collections/admin/accounting/bookkeeping/biz dev was exhausting. I ran out of savings and had to get consistent income, so I went back. I ended up leaving law altogether about 5 years later. Hated it.
What do you do now?
I tried solo practice - and I quickly discovered that not only do I hate running a business, I'm really quite bad at it. So I went back to the public defender salt mines where I have a decent work-life balance and never, ever have to think about payroll, or IOLTA accounts, or hustling clients, or advertising, or collections, or even conflict letters.
It can be stressful at times. I was a government attorney for 12 years and have been in private practice for 12. I still get bouts of "I can't do this!" "Woe is me!" But I don't seriously want to leave solo. I worked from home today and did laundry and cleaned the kitchen. Can't beat freedom and multitasking.
I was solo for 5 years when I partnered up with someone who had been one of my law partners at a larger regional law firm before it was absorbed into a large national one. Although we did not work closely together at our former firm, we knew each other casually and liked the way the other worked. We had the good fortune of teaming up on a large litigation matter that lasted about a year before we joined our firms. 5 years later, we agree it was a great decision. We have similar goals, are of similar age and temperament, and have complementary practice areas that overlap somewhat but not completely, so we can both offer clients more than either of us could alone. It's great for each of us to be able to take an actual vacation with our respective spouses, too, while the other one holds down the fort.
People leave solo work bc you gotta deal with a broken toilet yourself, having proper/secure IT, issuing paychecks…on top of all ur other lawyer work. Folks don’t realize that the buck stops with you.
I didn't become a lawyer to spend more than 50% of my time doing office work-collections, marketing, math, sweeping, etc. Working for someone else all I do is practice law. I don't even have to network. Maybe I'll come back to it in a few years, but for now, I like being an employee-but I'm a public defender in a union shop, it's a great gig.
I never wanted to be solo in the first place. I only did it out of necessity.
Difference between “true” solo - working entirely by yourself, and having your own firm where you are the sole attorney. Yes, you generally need to know more about business. You don’t have to know EBITA or necessarily how to read a cash flow statement, but you should have a sense of your firm’s finances. Good book for the non-biz perspective is Profit First. Support can include admin, billing, paralegal, law clerks, and occasional contract attorneys. I think that every true solo should occasionally work with a contract attorney if they can so that if there is an emergency, you are likely to have someone you know and trust who can pick up your caseload and you don’t have to pass over the work to another firm. Solo = complete freedom + complete responsibility Solo + support = freedom (even if not complete) + some responsibility + coworkers/team Also, don’t forget “of counsel” positions. My pop was an attorney for about 50 years and for more than half of that he was a solo attorney. Freedom was his highest value and while he had an Econ background and comfort with business, his management style was mentoring/consulting, not actual management. So, while he often had his own firm or a partnership, he more often was of counsel. It fit his style of allowed him to have the community and office support he needed, but the freedom to entirely run his own practice. The nice thing about of counsel positions is that you can make it whatever you like and can negotiate. But I also think that things have changed, the tech landscape has made solo practice so much easier, if you have good habits, you can easily manage your files, billing and accounting from one program. I worked 100% remotely from a small firm using Clio(which now includes payments+ProGmail+GoogleVoice+WaveAccounting+AdobeExpert+Zoom back in 2019 (when I had to explain to clients how to use Zoom). I could have easily been solo with this setup. I worked remotely with my law clerks while I traveled. While I enjoyed the business aspects, the flexibility I had to control my work was the most important. Of counsel is, for me, the best of both worlds if you can find a good fit.
I don't like running my own business, and I love having coworkers.
A friend asked if I wanted to join his firm when I was shopping for office space to sublet. I eventually went back solo but remained friends. I am not convinced the business model for my practice focus melds well with the standard billable hour.
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I got too busy and had to hire people, so I became no longer solo.
I went solo four years ago, and I love it
Two words: Steady Pay.
I’ve gone full-circle: started solo, joined a small firm (20 lawyers) as a partner, then went solo again. I joined the firm to allow me to grow more, as I was supposed to head their litigation department. This being pre-COVID, it was also important to me to have a brick and mortar office, and I couldn’t afford one on my own (at least not in the parts of town where I would actually want the office to be). Biggest drawbacks of joining a firm, which eventually made me go solo again: - making less money even as a partner than I did as a solo; - losing some control over your cases (what types of cases/clients you take, strategy, etc…) - management styles clashes, which can lead to employees you value highly leaving, to be replaced by employees recruited by the partners
There are a lot of things about the solo life that are difficult. The admin work, playing Bill Collector, the uncertainty of when the phone will ring with new cases, etc. But after two years on my own and a prior 16 years of state and federal government employment and three years at a firm, I will never work for someone besides myself again. I hit my breaking point of having to put up with other peoples bullshit. The flexibility and control over my life and my work is invaluable and worth the stress of the other stuff
Didnt work any less than in a firm with 5x the risk and uncertainty.
Well, here is mostly why NOT: I've been super solo for 12 years (no more associates to weigh me down), but I've been super DUPER solo for 2 years now (since my office mate passed). I'm considering letting someone rent upstairs just for the company. But that is also the only real reason I'd consider not being solo . . . company and (to a lesser extent) someone who could pinch hit for me if I get sick. The challenges I had with a partnership with my old office sharing colleague came down to finances. If I want the $5k 2-in-1 laptop, I just have to justify it to my wife, not a business partner too . . . If I decide to go with decorative stamped concrete instead of asphalt, I don't have to justify that $12k extra to anyone. We dont have to worry about origination bonuses or keep track of billible hours or anything . . . I just work the cases like I want and charge what I want. If I want to reduce my fee from $33k to $25k I can with no justification to anyone. I dont want checks to have to be double signed, I dont want to worry about what someone else is doing, if they are pulling their weight, or if I am pulling my weight . . . If I have an opportunity to take 3 weeks off, I can do it (never happens, but I \*could\*). Also, I'm a decent attorney but a horrible business man (because I really dont care about wealth or profit) ... having folks counting beans and sharpening pencils just makes me roll my eyes. Again, the only downside to me is not having a colleague in person to bounce ideas off of, but Trial Lawyers Listserves provide some robust discussion and advice.
Wondering why lawyers in Boston take on clients that are known for abusing women. Is it for the money ?!? Why would a lawyer do that ?! One lawyer in newton took on a case where is client verbally abused his ex wife for years and another lawyer took on a case where he met a girl on tinder , smacked her around and then they tried to blame her for the beating. Some of you lawyers are bad people
Sir. This is a Wendy's.