A virtual lawyer may need a physical office

I apologize for my absence last week. I had a greater than normal workload and spent most of the week fighting fires. I also closed the deal on my new office lease and needed to select vendors for all the normal office services.

So, why does a virtual lawyer need an office?

I started my own law practice five years ago, working out of my house. On the rear of the house is an addition with a separate entrance, which provided a perfect space for an office. The office looks out on the tall pines and mature maples trees in the woods behind the house. It is also separate from the main house so that I hear none of the family activities. And, the office has tall plate glass windows, which makes it look and feel like an office.

So, why leave? Why not just operate a virtual law practice with other professionals each working out of their homes? I did that for over four years. It was great! I kept my overhead low and built a corporate practice working with start-ups companies and entrepreneurs. Many of my clients liked the fact that my business felt like a start-up, similar to theirs. I liked the fact that I had no commute, no overhead, and more time and flexibility to spend with my family.

The problem is that after 4 years, I got to the point where I wanted to grow my business. I could have just focused on moving up the value chain, attracting better quality clients, raising my rates and letting the smaller fledging clients go. But that was not the kind of practice I wanted to build. I enjoyed working with early stage companies (as well as larger ones) and I believed that the market for small business legal services is underserved. I wanted to build a law firm that leveraged technology and provided high quality, practical legal services for emerging businesses.

To build a business, you need to work with other people. My home office could fit one or two other people, but having other people regularly show up at home would be an intrusion on my family. And no matter how great my home office was, I still had the image of working out of a “home office.” If I wanted to grow my business, I needed more space in a traditional office environment.

Last week, Chuck Newton wrote a great blog on the benefits of working at home. I agree with him and we had an interesting exchange about whether there is a need for a physical office. In my opinion, having or not having an office is all about choice. You have to decide what you are trying to build and whether a home office is a good place to start or a good place to end up. The good news is that today, with the advent of the Internet, you can choose.

In August of last year, I started to move the office out of the house. I rented a single office from another law firm that provides access to a conference room, copier, fax, and Internet. The space was great; I had the collegiality of working in an office with other lawyers without significant overhead. I also noticed an immediate increase in business. No matter how well people know your work or like you, they may not be comfortable referring business to you unless you have a traditional office.

However, there wasn’t much space to grow a practice; I had just one 10 x 13 room. I used the new office as a place to meet clients and business contacts. I used the old office (at home) to maintain files, billing records and primarily did my work there. Since the new office was less than 2 miles away, I could be there in five minutes. So, I ended up having two offices: a front office for meetings and a back office to do the work.

At the end of last year, I realized the business was growing faster than I thought. I had over seventy separate small business clients that actually paid money. That is a lot of clients for a solo practitioner. The dollar figures are not as impressive as the number of clients, but that is by design. As a small business lawyer, I constantly strive to provide value to my clients, partly for reasons of personal integrity and partly because I believe that technology should improve the efficiency of legal services and my goal is to build a model firm.

Although I enjoyed the simplicity of a solo practice, I decided that I want to grow the business and that I am ready to bring on additional people. The bottom line is that I need a physical office in which to build a team that can help provide legal services to clients. As the firm grows, I hope to add lawyers and associates both physically and virtually to the practice. For now, I plan to hire a paralegal who can handle more of the routine paperwork that cannot support my hourly rate.

I’m looking forward to the next step and would welcome your thoughts and comments on opening an office and growing a practice. Which do you prefer: a virtual office or a physical office? What’s the best way for you to grow your practice?

Thinking about sharing documents over the web?

In the spirit of collaboration, I have been looking at various technologies that would allow lawyers to share information over the web. How should lawyers share documents in cyberspace?

I am familiar with Wikipedia, but I don't know how to set up my own wikipedia page (and I'm not sure I want to collaborate with the whole world, just yet). Wikipedia has some information about contract law (e.g., Integration Clause), but I don't who is writing this stuff or for what jurisdiction.

Also, I have seen software demos and presentations conducted over the web using online services such as www.GoToMeeting.com and www.webex.com, but I don't use these services often enough to want to pay for them. I am more of the occasional user of document sharing tools. Once in a while I may want to share a document with another lawyer or review a contract with a client while talking over the phone.

One document sharing tool that I liked was "Conferral" because it was integrated with Microsoft Word and made it easy to share a document that was open on your desktop. Conferral has a number of features that allowed you to control what information was shared and when it was being shared. However, it made me nervous to be sharing my desktop over the Internet.

Today, I tried a new product called "Google Docs" that allows you to quickly share and edit documents over the web (for free!). You can limit the document sharing only to those people you select by sending email invitations or you can share the document with the whole world.

I just uploaded a document that I have been working on (it is still a work in progress and I disclaim that any of the information is accurate). The document is a Choice of Entity chart intended to help lawyers guide their clients through the various factors affecting the choice of entity for a new business. I posted the document to the web using the new Google Docs tool. You can find the Choice of Entity Chart at http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhntjthf_4g5t663.

I would like to hear your comments on the Choice of Entity chart. Is it useful? How can it be improved? What do you think of the Google Docs sharing tool? What do you use for sharing documents over the web?

Power tools for lawyers?

Some guys want to own a Hummer. Other guys want twin 500HP boat engines. Others want to own superfast computers. The truth is men (and women) like power tools. The tools I dream about (yes, this may sound strange) are power tools for lawyers. I enjoy being able to handle complex business transactions and being able to crank out piles of documents quickly and efficiently. The problem is that most tools for lawyers are pretty poor.

Why do legal publishers still call me by phone, trying to get me to “review” their latest book for a free 30-day trial? Is it because they know once they send it to me, I will forget to return it within the 30-day deadline?

Frankly, I don’t want any more books on paper. What I want is an online resource that is cheap, easily downloaded, and up to date. I want content that changes so frequently that it is not worth my time to download copies. I want to be able to search legal sources quickly to find answers before I forget my question. I want to be able to easily locate sample documents drafted (and used) by experienced attorneys actually practicng in my jurisdiction.

I also want to know what other lawyers use as primary tools in their specific areas of practice. I want checklists and document assembly systems. I want to do less typing and editing and more creative thinking and problem-solving. Why is it that these tools and information don’t exist in one nice easy to find resource accessible by a web browser?

I think the problem is with the centralized publishing model. Legal publishers don’t actually use most of the materials they sell. If they did, they would realize their materials are pretty poor (however, there are a few exceptions like Massachusetts Corporate Forms by Bohnen and Coggins). Yet, the best lawyers usually don’t share their “tools” with other lawyers, except on a limited basis as a “courtesy” or in the course of delivering the final work product to opposing counsel.

Too many lawyers think that sharing information means they are giving away their expertise. Well, I think the opposite. We all can benefit by sharing knowledge. If one lawyer shares information, that will encourage other lawyers to do so as well. One notable example is John Hession of McDermott Will & Emery (formerly with Testa Hurwitz and Thibeault). He and his firms have consistently shared and updated their venture capital financing documents with the MCLE. I'm not expecting lawyers to provide free legal advice, just to share with other lawyers the tools that they use in their practice.

Here is my challenge… if there is any document or information that you would like me to share with other lawyers, send me an email. I will post it on a site made available only to lawyers. The challenge for you is to either (1) provide thoughtful and critical feedback that helps to improve my document or (2) you offer to send me a document of yours that I am interested in seeing.

If you are interested in this challenge, send email to v-lawyer@lexpertise.com.

Will Knowledge Management drive law firms in the future?

There is no doubt in my mind that Knowledge Management ("KM") will drive law firms in the future. In the past, law firms were driven by recruiting the best and the brightest lawyers and developing a reputation for good work. Hiring talented lawyers will be important in the future, but not as important as developing the best KM systems. Why do I believe that? Because the Internet makes people and information more accessible. It's scary to say, but the Internet makes people more of a commodity (not that I believe that personally). With regard to professional services, talent will no longer be the differentiator. The biggest challenge for law firms will be to harness that talent and their reservoirs of knowledge in ways that improve product quality and efficiency. In other words, "Knowledge Management".

Ok, but what is KM? Here are some definitions:

According to Wikipedia, "There is a broad range of thought on Knowledge Management with no unanimous definition current or likely." Wikipedia itself defines Knowledge Management as a "range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning across the organisations." The fact that wikipedia spells the word "organization" differently than I do does not give me much comfort in their definition.

The definition of Knowledge Management that I prefer is "Capturing, organizing, and storing knowledge and experiences of individual workers and groups within an organization and making this information available to others in the organization." (Ironically, I found this definition on Google from a link that is no longer working.) It is the collaborative element of this definition that I find compelling. Lawyers sharing information will make all of us better lawyers and more efficient. KM will facilitate the process.

More practically, I think that KM encompases all of the systems, tools, and infrastructure needed to practice law effectively. In an upcoming blog, I will attempt to break down the concept of Knowledge Management into practical terms and identify how law firms can start to lay the ground work now for developing the systems, tools, and infrastructure that I (and most lawyers) will need to access in the future.

What do you think will drive law firms in the future? Will it be KM or something else?

Can blogging help grow a law practice?

This year, my New Year's resolution was to start writing a blog and to contribute regularly. Okay, I'm a little late in starting, but I'm finally ready to put my New Year's resolution in place.

The Plan is to use the blog as a motivator for building a law practice. Not just one that makes money, but one that looks forward, leverages technology, and anticipates new trends. If you will, the law firm of the future. That said, I am currently only a solo practitioner. What I know is that I want to grow my business. I don't know whether that means recruiting partners, hiring paralegals or associates, or adding other staff. I don't know whether that means growing the business physically, virtually or a combination of both.

So, how will a blog help grow a law practice? The idea is to write about one thing at the start of each work day that is critical to building the business. I have a vision for building a law practice. One that provides great quality, leverages technology, and emphasizes customer service.

I imagine that this is how IBM started. The founder of IBM, Tom Watson Sr, as quoted in The E-Myth Revisited, described how IBM built its success:

"IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream - my vision - was in place.

"The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.

"The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look like when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.

"In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

"From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, and discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.

"Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one."

Back to my New Year's resolution.... The promise that I made is that every day I would write about one new thing that would help build a law practice. I plan to focus on five separate areas: legal services (product quality and packaging), business development (marketing and sales), office management (technology, systems, knowledge management), recruiting (virtual and real team building), and finance (billing rates, pricing models, cash flow).

My hope is that by writing this blog everyday I will move my business forward and inspire others to do the same. I also want to encourage others to share their thoughts on growing a law practice, either by posting comments on this blog or by sending email to me directly at v-lawyer@lexpertise.com.