Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners

What Does Lawyering From Home Say About You? Either You're A Genius Or Unemployable

Imagine the convenience of strolling down the hall to begin the workday, dressed in your finest "whatever was laying around," and taking a break to read Above the Law without anyone being the wiser. Living the dream.

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At some point, while stuck in an unending traffic jam or pressed up against the throngs of humanity in an unair-conditioned train, every lawyer contemplates working from home. And any lawyer with kids thinks about working from home about twice as often. Imagine the convenience of strolling down the hall to begin the workday, dressed in your finest “whatever was laying around,” and taking a break to read Above the Law without anyone being the wiser. Living the dream.

Unfortunately, this dream is beyond the grasp of most lawyers today. The staid legal industry expects lawyers in their offices near their colleagues, even though few tasks aren’t handled electronically — even when lawyers sit mere steps away.

Fair or not, lawyering from home raises eyebrows. “If you’re working from home, people tend to assume you’re either doing it because you’re good at what you do, so you can, or because you can’t make it anywhere else, so you have to. You want to brand yourself as the former.”

One would certainly hope so. How does a lawyer go about doing that?

The above quote is from Eric Hsu, a lawyer in Washington state who runs his practice entirely from his home. In a profile in Forbes, Hsu explains that he started his shop out of his garage to keep it in line with his revenue stream:

When Hsu decided to start taking cases as Clear Focus Law, he was—and still is—employed at another full-time job. Starting and maintaining his business from a home office has allowed him to grow at his own pace.

“It’s scalable,” he said. “When I was first starting up and just taking a few cases, it still made sense [to launch the business]. Whereas, if I were to rent an office space, I would need to reach a critical mass before it made sense.”

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So that’s why the former prosecutor started working from home, but how did he brand himself as a lawyer who inspired confidence in his clients? Well, the bad news for many of the dreamers out there is that Hsu structured his business to give himself some unfair advantages:

He’s the high-tech, startup entrepreneur version of a lawyer, which is no accident. His home-based Clear Focus Law serves the entrepreneurial set in Washington state, many of whom operate their businesses in the same way.

“It fits in with my clientele,” Hsu said. “They work from home or they work from a virtual office, so we really identify with each other.”

By targeting the startup set, Hsu locked in on a population of clients who understood that working from a garage doesn’t mean you’re an idiot. It may well mean that you’re banking your life savings on a doomed experiment, but the client at least thinks smart people work from garages. It can also build client trust. We’ve touched on this before, but building client relationships requires trust and clients that can identify with their lawyer — through dress, lifestyle, etc. — are more likely to trust their counsel. That said, if you’re looking to build your firm on business from Morgan Stanley, working from home in your pajamas is probably not in the cards.

Combining a flexible practice with a high-tech clientele afforded Hsu one more selling point over his larger rivals:

Although he recently read up on the challenges and risks of firms moving to high-tech solutions in a law journal, he’s long been communicating with clients through a secure, third-party, digital platform and storing his documents securely in the cloud.

“The legal machinery of large law firms moves slowly,” Hsu said. “Lawyers are naturally risk-averse types. They want to know, is there no way anyone could ever hack into it? Is it 110 percent secure? No. But neither is your paper on your desk if someone were to break into your office.”

As a solopreneur working from home, Hsu is able to make that assessment himself and move forward with the kind of secure technology tools his clients value, giving him an advantage over a more slow-moving firm.

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Imagine that! A lawyer capable of running a business on 21st Century technology. Law firms are notoriously awful at using the computer box and the World Wide Web. We have reason to believe law firms are already unintentionally leaking client information to hackers but just not admitting it. Hsu is being diplomatic when he pretends that law firms employ fig leaf security because they want to be 110 percent safe. Please. They just have no idea what’s out there and don’t want to waste the potentially billable time to find out. By placing himself in a position to talk digital security shop with his often tech-savvy clients, Hsu gives his business another shot in the credibility arm.

The moral of this story is that working from home, like most everything else, is about building a relationship of trust, identity, and confidence with clients. Hsu figured out how to match his client relationships with his preference for running his office out of his home. The challenge for the rest of the dreamers is to likewise work backward and identify the clients you want and figure out if you can get there while working from your couch.

Virtual Lawyer: Running A Law Firm On The Cloud From Home [Forbes]

Earlier: This Partner Wants You To Dress Up So You Can Be A Tool Just Like Him
When Luddites Handle Cyber Security, You End Up With American Law Firms

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