Starting a Law Firm | Building Law Firm | Starting a Successful Law Practice
Another cheat post – marginally related to starting a law firm – but interesting all the same. Check out this New York Times Article on criminal litigation at Britain’s Old Bailey courthouse.
The really interesting thing is not necessarily the Times article but the link to the Old Bailey.org website. If anybody out there is interested in the history of the law you have to check this website out.
Starting a law firm is all about gathering information and being aware of what other solos attorneys are doing. In that respect, it is very helpful to review a lot of different lawyer blogs to get information, new ideas on networking and marketing, and (for me) to know that there are other lawyers out there doing what I’m doing. I have a number of great blogs on my Google Reader list that I review daily. Sometimes the posts are not that great, but often I find some very helpful information on running my own practice.
In light of this, The Connected Lawyer had a great legal post about the use of public domain citations in Illinois. The gist of the change, as I understand it, is that the Illinois Supreme Court has adopted a public domain system of citation for appellate court cases in Illinois that have been filed on or after July 1, 2011. Rather than exclusively using the traditional court reporter citation with a year and page citation, the Illinois courts are now allowing the use of a public domain citation system. This is counter to what I would guess everybody learns in law school in the United States.
Ok, why does this matter? It matters because, in the view of Bryan Sims at The Connected Lawyer, and also in my view, the law should not be held in the hands of giant corporations – i.e.: Lexis Nexis or Westlaw (Thompson West). I would also guess that this is something that other states may start to change to. If one state does it, you can be sure that other states will take note. When I start a law firm in Minnesota, I hope Minnesota takes note.
Why does this matter to learning how to start a law firm? To me, it matters because a lot of solo lawyers cannot afford or, at the very least, don’t want to pay for expensive Westlaw and LexisNexis subscriptions. It cuts into overhead, something that all solos are keenly aware of. As a lot of other blogs have addressed, there are many other ways to conduct necessary legal research: Google Scholar, your state’s judicial and legislative websites, Findlaw, Cornell Law School website, the Library of Congress, Hieros Gamos, Public Legal, and many others. Are these websites as good as Lexis Nexis and Westlaw? No, not really. But, the law is the law and it can be found in places other than with big corporations. I will admit that I have difficulty sheperdizing cases with these free resources. Although, I do remember a reading somewhere that there is a way to sheperdize cases for free on the net. If anybody knows of a link, please post a comment here.
Learning how to start and run a law firm is difficult. There are so many different choices that must be made and a budget to stick to. Legal research is something I don’t want to have to think to hard about – I just want to be able to do it as quickly and as cost effectively as possible. Furthermore, I get irritated when I think about how the law is supposed to be accessible to everyone and yet that accessibility is greatly diminished due to the hording of it by two monopolistic corporations.
Starting a law firm means that you have to pass the bar exam in your particular jurisdiction. For most, passing the bar exam means that you are required to sit through mind-numbing bar review lectures for about two months. After passing the bar exam, character and fitness interview, and being admitted into your jurisdiction’s bar, you can open your own law firm. Caveat: if considering starting a law firm right out of law school, please read my post on getting legal experience first.
As I posted previously, I am taking the bar exam for the second time in the last four years. I feel that I have a little different perspective on taking the bar exam because I’ve already done it and I am going through the study process a second time. Hopefully, I can benefit my readers by sharing whatever knowledge I have gleaned about passing the bar exam.
One of the discussion points that I wanted to bring up is passing the Multistate Performance Test (MPT). The Multistate Performance exam tests the taker’s legal knowledge and ability to complete legal reasoning. The MPT is the portion of the exam that is most similar to what young attorneys will do in the real world. For example, the MPT is akin to a partner in a law firm coming up to you and giving you a problem and a case file that he or she wants you to write a legal memorandum or other legal document on. The assignment is similar to what I suspect a lot of law students did in their first or second year of law school to satisfy their legal writing component.
The MPT typically gives you information that is similar to a case file you will receive from a partner in the real world or when starting a law firm. The bar examiners will give you a letter, a short memorandum, maybe a legal opinion, a library, some law, and a smattering of other information. Basically, you will get: the facts, the laws, and instructions on how to apply the law to the facts to answer a legal problem. The MPT will have different writing projects which vary the approach on how to apply the law to the facts. Sounds simple right?
Of course, the MPT is only 90 minutes long and it bears no resemblance to what a private practice lawyer is likely to do in the real world. If you are starting a law firm, you need to be concerned with what to do in the real world. However, when you do pass the exam and work as an law firm associate, you will be expected to work quickly and efficiently. In most cases, you will also not be able to bill a client for five hours of your time for writing a simple legal memorandum to a partner. Clients don’t like paying those kind of bills – you are an attorney and they expect you to already know the law and how to use it.
In my opinion, the MPT is probably the most useful portion of the bar exam in terms of what it is like to be an attorney in the real world. If you are reading this blog about how to start a law firm, then you should know that MPT gives you a good example of the kinds of initial critical thinking you will have to do on a specific legal issue. If you hang out your own shingle and somebody actually walks in the door, you need to be able to meet with that person and know how to deal with his or her legal issue. Of course, you need to know how to draft and file legal pleadings, cut checks, pay bills, and a myriad of other tasks. But, at the end of the day, you need to be an attorney and think in a critical fashion. I think the MPT does a good job of meeting this important real world task.
Starting a law firm is all about gathering useful information and discarding useless information. That applies to every area of the practice of law – whether it is critical legal thinking or learning how to effectively manage your time so that you can ethically bill your clients.
This post is a little bit outside the peraminaters of typical start a law firm fodder, but I wanted to let the world know that there is a new legal journal called the “Journal of Law and Interdisciplinary Studies” at UND School of Law.
I was a member of the Law Review at UND and we did not have another competing legal journal at our small law school while I was there. Heck, we had trouble getting all the student writers we needed for law review. During my tenure, I always wondered why somebody (or, more likely, some faculty member) didn’t encourage students to start a new legal journal at the school. Well, they did, and I am excited about it.
It may not come as a suprise as somebody who is blogging about starting a law firm, that I am very into the exchange of quality information. I have always found legal research and the academic wherewithal it takes to formulate an interesting, timely, and scholarly article to be one of the hallmarks of the law. Even when I am at my lowest in terms of my faith in the law, I have always felt that my time on law review was one of the most worthwhile things I have done as a lawyer. I always hoped some other people would get excited enough to start their own legal journal.
I think a lot of practitioners of the law can relate when I say that our jobs often don’t seem to be based in the law at all. Rather, in my own law practice, I have often found myself bickering with opposing counsel about some minor fact or trying to help a completely unreasonable client see that fighting over the truck in their divorce just isn’t a good choice. Those kind of things aren’t about the law, they are about hand holding and trying win. That kind of thing can be extremely draining.
But, when I see that some bright, young, ambitious law students want to try and start something and contribute to the law, I get excited. There is hope out there. Am I being a little bit melodramatic? Yes, probably, but how can you not get excited by a quote like this:
“We are an innovative online publication that explores the various dimensions of contemporary legal scholarship and its relationship to other disciplines, working to provide a dynamic environment that fosters an evolving scholarly dialogue between practitioners, scholars in law, scholars from other disciplines, and the general public.”
While going down the road less traveled and starting my own law firm, I plan to take inspiration where I can find it. I hope you do to and I hope you check back with UND’s new legal journal.
It’s tough knowing where to begin when trying to start a law firm. I know I will be opening up my own family law firm once I become licensed, but I don’t know what the best route to get there is. There is so much information and it is hard to categorize. It is a lot like my frustration with the internet – too much information to comb through to get to something that is really useful.
So, I am going to try to come up with a listing or categorization of steps to take when planning to start a family law firm. One really helpful tool that My Shingle turned me onto is MindMeister. It is a graphing tool to help you brainstorm how to start a family law firm and organize those brainstorming ideas.