Gary J. Ross
This is the last of a four-part series on what you can do while you’re a lawyer that will help you in your legal career. If you’d like, check out the previous posts about being a teacher, a small businessperson, and a politician/judge.
Writer
LexisNexis Practical Guidance Rolls Out Dedicated Practice Area for AI & Technology
The new generation of AI-related legal issues are inherently cross-disciplinary, implicating corporate law, intellectual property, data privacy, employment, corporate governance and regulatory compliance.
Do you like seeing your name in print? Do you enjoy looking at a blank page and wondering what the heck to do now? I attended a session recently on how to promote your business, and the speaker said that writing, more than speaking or anything else, will establish you as an expert in your field. (Obviously she wasn’t an expert in her field since she was speaking and not writing.)
If you can list articles on your bio, or better yet books, you will be seen as a thought leader, with the increased billing rate that goes along with that. Would a client rather pay $400/hour for Joe Blow, or $500/hour for someone with a list of publications attached to his name? Obviously a lot of clients have cost sensitivity, but there are enough clients out there willing to pay a premium for someone with credentials that it’s worth the extra time investment. For anyone who may be burning out on being a lawyer, spending part of your time writing to promote your business and then raising your rates proportionally could be the answer. (Then you could eventually exit to become a full-time writer.)
I would rather spend time writing and teaching and then be able to bill more per hour, and then with the higher rate work less hours, and then spend the time I’m not billing writing and teaching, leading to a still higher rate, and then with the higher rate work less hours, ad nauseum until eventually it levels off. I love my clients, but that sounds like a far more interesting scenario than billing 12 hours a day, or however much I’m able to manage (in SmallLaw it’s not near as much as Biglaw, just because there’s a lot of other stuff taking up your time).
Writing a law review article while you’re a practicing attorney is difficult to the point of being unrealistic, but there are a lot of periodicals out there, particularly online-only periodicals, that could be interested in an article that you could write. I would recommend trying to network your way into being asked to write an article instead of writing an article first and then trying to shop it around. A few years, ago I twice had to handle a certain corporate task and I found absolutely no secondary sources about it, so after the second time, I wrote an article about how to do it. Wrote the article, figured out the best publications for it, sent it to those publications, and voila! Never heard back from any of them. Oh well.
Keeping Law School Accessible When Federal Loans Fall Short
As federal borrowing caps tighten financing options for law students, one organization is stepping in to negotiate the terms they can't secure alone.
Even though a lot of legal writing is dry, most any time you write — and you have some semblance of control over the editing process — you can show a little personality in your writing (which I suppose could be a double-edged sword if you’re a jerk). Maybe in your examples you could use the character names from Empire, or if you’re writing about torts and there’s a victim, name the person after your least favorite college football coach.
I’ll note the increased billing rate you can (hopefully) charge may be the only compensation you receive for writing, unless you manage to write a book or like me, you’re able to get the big ATL bucks. I typically get paid for my CLE presentations, whereas I’ve never gotten paid for writing an article (which goes a long way towards explaining the huge imbalance in my CLE-to-article ratio).
When I was interviewing for Biglaw jobs, I heard a lot of lip service about how associates were encouraged to write articles and to have speaking engagements and whatnot. But then, once you’re in, they want you to bill. And if at the end of those 12- to 14-hour days you want to spend an extra four hours writing an article, that’s fine, but you can’t let it get in the way of your billing. Some associates would get pegged as people who wrote client alerts and other marketing material, but to me, at least those often seemed to be the folks who weren’t billing much. I can’t imagine a partner stopping by my office and me having to tell him I was writing an article, i.e., not working on anything.
In SmallLaw, your day is up to you. Do you want to spend the whole day billing, or do you want to spend part of each day writing or teaching, or serving as an ALJ, or in some other capacity? Of course, you don’t want to lose any clients, and you can’t tell a client you don’t have time to work on her urgent matter because you’re closing up shop at 3 p.m. so you can spend a few hours working on a law journal article. There is no magic formula, and arriving at a manageable balance can be a long process.
But at least in SmallLaw it’s up to you.
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 securities matters for startups, large and small businesses, private equity funds, and investors in each, and also has a number of non-profit clients. You can reach Gary by email at [email protected].