Small Law Firms

The One Thing That Must Be Right When Building A Home Or A Practice

The foundation of a successful law firm is the the delivery of quality legal services -- first and foremost, you have to be a good lawyer.

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There are a lot of decisions to be made while building a home. How many rooms do you need? Brick or siding? What should the layout of the house be like? Should we really get granite countertops in the kitchen? What about a home office? Oh! I really want one of those full-body spray jet showers.

Building a home offers almost limitless options, and it is easy to get caught up in all of it. There are all manner of ways in which to tweak a home to fit your dreams and desires. You can adjust them as you see fit. And as time goes on, you can continue to make changes to a home. Paint the walls. Re-do the kitchen. You might think when you build a home it is going to be perfect, but there will always be little problems with the home. Or things that you want to adjust later. A home is something to be worked on over time (I say this as I just re-hung a door in our bathroom this past week).

But the fundamental, it-has-to-be-perfect aspect of a home is the foundation. If you’ve never been to a construction site while they are laying the foundation for a building, it’s an exacting process. It’s not just pouring some concrete into the ground. Everything must be measured and aligned just so. The soil must be assayed. Water tables must be considered. A solid foundation is tailored like a suit. It is something that is meant to last for decades.

When starting your own law practice, there are also almost infinite decisions you can make. What do you name the practice? Should you get a logo? Who is going to be your malpractice carrier? Do you lease space? Sub-let from another firm? Work out of Starbucks? (No.) LexisNexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, or Fastcase? Just as in building a home, there are innumerable decisions and choices to be made when starting a practice. It can be easy to get caught up in it all. Branding, marketing, accounting, networking — they all take up your time when starting a firm. But just as with building a home, a firm is built on its foundation.

The foundation of a successful law firm is the the delivery of quality legal services — first and foremost, you have to be a good lawyer. 

When starting a practice it can be tempting to get caught up in all the accoutrements that come with hanging your shingle. Many lawyers taking the first steps out on their own spend large amounts of money on everything discussed above. Especially on marketing and branding. But if the lawyer isn’t good at his craft, it’s just putting lipstick on a pig. Slick advertising and SEO-optimized websites might fool some people for a while, but if you can’t deliver on the actual legal services you are promoting, then it’s all going to come crumbling down. The foundation of the firm was not prepared to handle everything you had put on top of it.

Obviously, given the state of the legal industry, not everyone is starting their own practice after 10 years of working and gaining experience at a firm. Many law school graduates are now hanging their shingles right out of school as they have no other choice. Expecting these fresh graduates to be effective, “good” lawyers is a bit of a stretch. But if you are someone in such a situation, that doesn’t mean you can’t strive to become a good lawyer.

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Spend less money on marketing and more on professional and personal development. Attend informative, substantive CLEs (these cost money), and not the free “iPad in One Hour For Trial” CLE. Develop relationships with more experienced attorneys. Instead of spending lots of time and money on developing a logo, spend it on taking other lawyers out to lunch and pick their brains on how they developed into the lawyer they are today.

There will be time for marketing and the type of office chair you want to have as you build a practice. But if you don’t start off with the right foundation — being a good lawyer — then the rest will have nothing to stand on.

Keith Lee practices law at Hamer Law Group, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama. He writes about professional development, the law, the universe, and everything at Associate’s Mind. He is also the author of The Marble and The Sculptor: From Law School To Law Practice (affiliate link), published by the ABA. You can reach him at keith.lee@hamerlawgroup.com or on Twitter at @associatesmind.

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