Small Law Firms

The Office Decision

Do you actually need an office if you're a solo or small-firm practitioner? Here are some of the things you should think about when deciding.

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It’s a decision every SmallLaw practitioner has to make. Home or office? In terms of agonizing, heart-wrenching decisions, it’s right up there with “Ginger or Mary Ann.” While I absolutely do not think everyone has to make the same choice — people who believe everyone has to do what they do tend to be full of beans — I thought I would share how I arrived at my decision. (See here, here, and here for some perspectives on the choice. You can see some of the various factors at play below.)

When I was a bit more senior in Biglaw, I could often find a break in the evening when I could take my work home. Change into sweatpants, plop myself on the sofa, put my feet up on the coffee table, open up the laptop, and finish whatever it was that had to be done that day. When I decided to start my practice, I went with a part-time office in a shared space, meaning I would work from home the bulk of the time.

I quickly discovered putting in the solid 10 to 12 hours a day you have to put in to have a successful practice was exceedingly difficult at home, at least for me. Sitting on the couch finishing up a 10-K review I had started in the office that morning was a lot different than doing everything from home. It was fine for the personal networking part: no problem sending LinkedIn requests from the kitchen table or following up with the stack of business cards I collected at the previous evening’s networking event. But reviewing a lengthy contract or researching whatever arcane securities matter someone had hired me for seemed to take hours longer than it should have. I started wondering how many more hours I could bill if I had an office, and also if it would give me my home life back.

Baby steps, always. I started working from the local bar association, which has a large library room filled with computers. Many solos come in early in the morning, stay there all day, and leave in the evening, just like it was their office (which for all intents and purposes it is, especially since last year they started letting us receive mail there). It stays quiet, but you can whisper to friends and colleagues, and step out into the hallway to take a call. And of course, you’re in a huge room of law books, so just about any kind of research can be done there. As far as I know, no one has really claimed certain computers as being “theirs,” though I did give a nasty look to someone once who stole my spot when I had gone out to lunch. The only real downside was that I had to always save my documents to a thumb drive, which I was always forgetting to take with me when I’d leave at night.

Then through a weird set of circumstances I inherited a litigation matter and boxes and boxes and boxes of documents were delivered to my apartment. They fit right in with the boxes of dealbooks, treatises, CLE materials, and other stuff I had from my Biglaw days. My apartment started to look like a storage room, except at any time 2-3 of the boxes would be open and shuffled through, since I’d be trying to work out of them. I couldn’t very well show up at the bar association every day with a dolly of boxes, so I was back to working from home. Around this time I was dating someone else who worked from home, so there would be two of us trying to work in my cramped apartment surrounded by boxes. And she was on conference calls all day and I needed quiet, so the situation became untenable.

I had to get out. Working from a box was harder than living out of a suitcase. Imagine living out of 10 suitcases, and not really being sure which of the 10 has your lucky pair of sunglasses. I found a small, quiet room downtown, with good neighbors and plenty of food and networking options nearby. I even have a couple of windows, which are at a premium in this city. I don’t have a view, but I have a couple of birds which land on my sill every day to check up on me and see how the practice is going. (The blue one thinks this column is getting too long and I need to get back to billing.)

And now I have my home life back. I can see parquet where there used to be stacks of paper. There’s now a (new) loveseat where there used to be a tower of boxes. And as I suspected, I’m far more productive from the office. Last Sunday evening I had some work to do, and instead of doing it from home, I took the subway down to my office. At 8 o’clock at night. I figured I could spent six hours doing it from home, or three hours doing it from the office. Easy choice.

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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].

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