I’m a long-time reader of ATL, and am happy to fill in for Carolyn Elefant, who is a wonderful resource for solo and small-firm lawyers. As you will see, I’m a ways away from being in a position to advise other solos on how to succeed, but I can, however, talk about the differences between Biglaw and what I will call SmallLaw.
To fill in my background, a little over a year ago I started my own firm, which was the latest step of a legal career that can charitably be described as itinerant. After graduating from law school in 2004, I spent a year as a contract attorney (aka doc reviewer) in New York, then moved to Atlanta and somehow managed to get an associate job at Holland & Knight, where I started with their 2005 class. (Everyone else in the class had summered there, and that first morning they were looking at me like, “Who’s this guy?”) Holland & Knight, and Atlanta in general, were great, though for various reasons in 2007 I lateraled to Sidley Austin in New York. I would have spent the rest of my associate career at Sidley if they had let me, but then the Great Recession came along and dislodged me and probably a thousand or so other capital markets attorneys, and I was fortunate to have a friend from law school help me land a position with the Treasury Department — as you may have heard, jobs were hard to come by in 2009 — where I worked in compliance for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. In the beginning of 2012, I went back to Biglaw as a senior associate, but then after a while it became apparent my odds of becoming a partner at the firm were roughly on par with my odds of landing a date with Katy Perry, so I had to go back to looking at job listings and cranking out the cover letters (and résumés, and deal sheets). One day, I was writing a cover letter when I realized my heart wasn’t in it. Didn’t have a clear picture of what I wanted to do, just that it was something else.
We’re fortunate that in our profession at any time we can start offering our services directly to the public. Doctors, CPAs, and some others can do this as well, but there are many professions in which this is simply not possible. My father was an airline pilot, and it would have been difficult for him to quit Northwest Airlines and open his own business flying 747s to Asia. Whereas all that we have to do is make sure our bar license is valid, and then we can start telling people we’re open for business. I think the top-tier law schools could do more to remind students of this possible career path, instead of focusing on landing students at large law firms, where they do mostly boring work for long hours until they can’t take it anymore.
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I had never seriously thought about hanging out my own shingle, though through the years I had been intrigued by lawyers that had done it. In Atlanta, with its low cost of living, it is fairly common for attorneys to open their own practice. Once it hit me that this was a possibility, it quickly became apparent that that’s what I wanted to do. For one thing, bouncing in and out of the various firms had made me realize it’s impossible to have any degree of real control over a legal career without one’s own roster of clients, and for me at least, the best way to force myself to get my own clients was to go solo.
I started Googling for articles and blogs about starting a law practice, and read Carolyn Elefant’s book Solo by Choice (affiliate link), which was enormously helpful, particularly the sections regarding starting a practice without clients and how to make ends meet the first few months without resorting to larceny. I talked to a few of my contacts who have made the Biglaw-SmallLaw leap. It helped to know others had done it, especially people like me who had been trained as securities lawyers – which isn’t necessarily the best background for an aspiring solo — since there were plenty of naysayers, who would dream up artificial roadblocks such as that I first had to have saved up a year’s worth of expenses (after I had just had a push to pay off my student loans) or needed to have a lineup of clients already in place. Of course both of those things would have been nice, but saying someone can’t succeed without either just shows a lack of imagination.
Having prepped for several months before opening my firm, I had what I thought was a good idea of what was in store, particularly in regards to the differences between Biglaw and SmallLaw (e.g., no tiny bottles of mouthwash in the bathroom, no 24/7 word processing department). But going from being force-fed work to having to depend on yourself 100% for your livelihood is huge. It’s exhilarating and scary and in many ways it’s a blast. I’ll share my experiences, both good and bad, in this space as I continue this journey of building a firm.
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Gary J. Ross opened his own practice, Jackson Ross PLLC, in 2013 after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and compliance matters for investment funds, small businesses, and non-profits, occasionally dabbling in litigation. You can reach Gary by email at [email protected].