Law Schools

Launching Your Firm Post-Law School

Big firms can be great places to learn, practice, grow, and build careers -- but they're not the only path to success.

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After running Evolve Law for three years and writing about the need for metrics and data-driven decision making, I have strong opinions about the practical courses needed within law school. I am looking forward to teaching the business of delivering legal services online for Suffolk Law next spring. In the meantime, I learned about an interesting new collaboration that will help recent graduates or those starting new practices.

Mary: What was your ah-ha moment? How did you decide to put Legal Launch Kit together?

Ian Nelson, Hotshot: The founders of Hotshot, Procertas, and Praktio have been friends for a while and we’ve always known that our solutions are very complementary. We were talking recently, and one of us made a comment that there’s so much talk in the legal press of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and so on — which is all really important stuff — but that people often overlook or take for granted the foundational skills that law students need as they transition to become lawyers. These are the practical things that we all help train on in our own, complementary ways, and we thought that it made sense to package them up together as a way to help students be as practice ready as possible.

Michael Bloom, Praktio: For us, the “ah-ha” moment occurred during a goals exercise where we were articulating what Praktio is really trying to do or be. We want to be a life preserver (or a jet pack?) for attorneys as they seek to cross what can feel like a disorienting chasm between theory and practice, law school and law firm (or wherever they might practice). I know other — like Hotshot and Procertas — shared that mission in complementary ways. So we started chatting about ways we could bring our resources together, and, thus, the Legal Launch Kit was born. ​

Casey Flaherty, Procertas: I know this is trite. But my “ah ha” moment came from being a large law firm associate and feeling completely out of my depth. I couldn’t believe clients were paying for me to learn on the job. Apparently, neither could they — prohibitions against billing for first years have since proliferated. I thought to myself there had to be a better way to bridge the gap. That’s part of our mission at Procertas, and we’ve been happy to find fellow travelers in Praktio and Hotshot.

Mary: Tell us a bit more about what you have developed.

Michael: Despite the heroic efforts of many, it’s not easy to transition between law school and practice. With the Legal Launch Kit, we’re aiming to make it easy (and, dare I say, affordable!) for law students to have a bunch of great training tools and resources to support them as they jump into practicing outside their law school perhaps for the very first time.

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Mary: What are your thoughts on this article by Carolyn Elefant about how we measure and evaluate success for solo attorneys ?

​Michael: ​My take anyway is that we, in the legal profession, often fall prey to narrow, stale definitions of success (law review, clerkships, Biglaw, etc.). Being fixated on narrow, stale definitions of success can cause lawyers to make choices that actually aren’t best aligned with their own actual values or goals (whether that’s making money, making an impact, balancing other interests, or some combination of those or other things). Big firms can be great places to learn, practice, grow, and build careers — but they’re not the only path to success. Each lawyer ought to define for themselves (for their own sake) what success looks like and then backward plan a path to get there — being sure to reassess goals and plans along the way (of mice and men and all that).

Mary: Moving to lawyers, new and experienced, what is one tip you can give to those who are reluctant to embrace technology?

Casey: If you were truly averse to technology, you wouldn’t be reading this (online) article. Technology has a way of becoming part of the fabric of our personal and professional lives such that we stop thinking of it as something separate and apart. The internet, email, word processing. Almost no one operates outside of our digital infrastructure.

Yet complacency comes easy. We get comfortable with bare survival. There is so much our common, core tools can do that we don’t take advantage of. This is a source of enormous waste. It is also low-hanging fruit. Simply getting better with the tools we already have does wonders for our productivity. It also raises our technological baseline and accelerates learning when new tools come along.

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All of the above will help lawyers better serve clients. I wholeheartedly agree that lawyers cannot check their digital personal lives at their office door. Our clients will vote with their thumbs and move on. Please reach out if you are interested in being interviewed to @maryjuetten on Twitter. #onwards

Mary E. Juetten

Mary E. Juetten J.D. lives on the West Coast and is both an American and Canadian professional accountant. Mary is passionate about metrics that matter and access to justice. She founded Traklight and Evolve Law and consults as an Access Advocate for LegalShield. She is Of Counsel with Nimbus Legal email at mary@nimbuslegal.co or on Twitter: @maryjuetten.

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