Small Law Firms

5 Things I Miss About Biglaw (Part 2)

If you don't like being a small-business owner, maybe SmallLaw isn't for you.

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When I wrote Part 1 of “5 Things I Miss About Biglaw,” I was a little more than a year-and-a-half into my SmallLaw career, and had one part-time summer associate and two handfuls of clients.

Now, two-and-a-half years later, I have a 50-50 partner, two other partners, three associates, and a couple of duffel bags of clients. The things I appreciate about Biglaw now are different than they were back then. Now I’m much more concerned with maintaining a practice than flying first-class on someone else’s dime.

Here’s the second installment of 5 Things I Miss About Biglaw.

  • Administrative Assistant. Often in Biglaw, people would tell me they rarely used their admin, but they were all associates. In however many years it was, I only heard one partner say she didn’t use her admin. As a rule, partners had their admins busy. Associates are of course busy, but they’re busy with billables, which isn’t what admins are for. The typical associate doesn’t have to spend half his or her time coordinating speaking at a bunch of events or getting interviewed or coordinating employee hiring and onboarding or dealing with vendors. It can be paralyzing. I miss having someone to whom I can forward an email from a vendor claiming they haven’t been paid and say “handle this”, and then never again hear a peep about it.
  • Marketing department. A lot of time these days is spent putting together proposals and marketing brochures or PDFs. Though as an associate I was only interacting with the Biglaw marketing departments every so often (mainly to have them stick a logo on a PowerPoint or collect a list of emails), now I miss having them. It would be great to tell someone to, for example, put together a pitch like the last one we did for a BVI fund but this one needs to be a master-feeder with a focus on cryptocurrencies, and then be able to bill hours while the person in marketing puts together the pitch materials.
  • Everyone under one roof. We have a great tax lawyer. We have a skilled employment attorney. We have a brilliant patent lawyer. But the thing is, none of these people are (officially) a part of our firm. They all have their own firms. So I have to get special permission from the client, who is not always on board with my bringing in an “outside” lawyer. They also might disagree with how much time the lawyer estimates the question will take to answer, and try to negotiate through me, which isn’t a great place to be. This never happened in Biglaw. If we were working on an issue that required an employment compensation specialist, we would just call the person down in Atlanta who specialized in employment comp and ask her the question. Tax lawyers got brought in all the time. It was so much easier and faster.
  • Billing Department. Man, oh man. Clio has helped, but with multiple people billing, getting invoices out is harder than ever. And now that my firm insists on retainers, the entire billing process has become an enormous timesuck. Also, one thing I’ve found is that when a third party, like an admin, sends an invoice, the client pays it a lot faster than when I’m the one sending it. Maybe it serves to emphasize that the money is going somewhere other than my pocket. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t strike fear into people. (One of my students told me earlier this year that he wasn’t going to be able to turn his paper in on time because he had an event to go to that evening and “I’m more afraid of my wife than you.”) Someone like me needs a billing department handling invoicing and collecting.
  • Vacations. I used to scoff at associates who would brag they hadn’t had a vacation in years, claiming they were just so valuable no one let them take a vacation. For the most part that was B.S. Sure, if you took three months off for paternity leave, you probably weren’t making partner. But the entire house of cards wasn’t going to come down if you took a week or two off. In SmallLaw, it’s easy to get yourself into a situation where you don’t see how you can leave the office for many days in a row. (Many days, like five.) There aren’t a lot of people around to cover for you, and a lot of clients don’t want to talk to anyone else anyway. I know for me, it’s gotten to where going to American Bar Association conferences are my only vacations. Sad!

I like getting new clients and doing legal work. I can’t say I really care for anything else. Biglaw, at a certain level and for the most part, lets you do that. I miss that.

Gary J. Ross is a partner at Ross & Shulga PLLC, which he co-founded in 2017 after running his own firm for four years and after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and securities law matters for venture capital funds, startups, and other large and small businesses, as well as investors in each. You can reach Gary by email at Gary@RSglobal.law.

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