Solos Are Prospering In A World Gone Remote

Many solo practitioners showed a higher disposable income than ever by the end of 2020, noted the CEO of XIRA, which provides a fully integrated law practice management platform.

This past year was (we hope!) a once in a lifetime event for all and its multiple impacts remain to be fully understood. Some implications seem immediately evident, though.

With social distancing and stay-at-home guidelines preventing old ways of doing business, technology was thrust into the limelight. Niche and newer technologies that were known mainly to digital road warriors all of a sudden became household names, and brands like Zoom were quickly harnessed to allow business to continue to function. 

Law practice in particular adapted to challenging conditions. Corporate and big firm lawyers, with IT staffs and who were more used to dealing with their high value clients by phone or video conference, were able to use existing infrastructure to re-envision the workplace. 

Solo practitioners, where close personal relationships with clients are essential, had been slower to embrace technology to replace things like office space, personal meetings and administrative functions. With the pandemic, solos suddenly found themselves in a “change or die” situation, and change they did.

And after they did, an amazing result became evident. By year’s end, many of the solo practitioners showed a higher disposable income than ever, says Reza Ghaffari, the CEO of XIRA, a provider of a fully integrated law practice management platform. According to Ghaffari, solos quickly learned that by shedding their brick and mortar overhead and embracing intuitive technology they can actually have a higher net income. 

Ghaffari believes that the future is already here and the past year merely accelerated its adoption. That future includes a huge change in how law is practiced. “Why would you want to get into your car, increase the carbon footprint to get yourself to an expensive stuffy little office, just to sit and wait for clients to come in or not? Take all that expense and spend it on a better home with a dedicated office space for you and keep most of the money you saved.”

The Covid year taught us that business interactions in person are actually not the most efficient way of doing business. While you sacrifice the personal touch, you used to have with your clients, once video conferencing becomes the new norm, online meetings will serve as the baseline. In person meetings will only rarely be necessary. 

I then asked Reza to predict the future of technology and law. “There are a lot of fabulous legal tech tools being built by innovative technology companies these days but what is missing is the will to challenge the status quo. The legal tech players should walk away from their financial masters and stop chaining their users to these ’90s-style subscription models.” 

He continued, “As a solo practitioner / business owner / entrepreneur your key to success is to unchain yourself from fixed overheads. With over $40b of unmet legal demand a year in the US, as technology providers we need to help our small firms and solo practitioners reduce their costs so that they can flourish, address more of the unmet demand and be more successful. At XIRA we have tried to build a platform that is free to join and doesn’t lock you to a subscription, and what’s more, the technology is designed to handle almost all of your non-billable tasks.” 

The future for lawyers who utilize new technology is bright indeed, and with Gen Z wanting to have more flexibility and mobility, the world of virtual law practice will only grow from here.


Michael Djavaherian is a San Diego attorney.