How I arrived at solo practice
In the middle of November I accidentally quit my job. I meant to ask my boss for a raise, but somehow those words never came out of my mouth. Instead, somehow I uttered something to the effect of, “Its time for me to follow a different path. I want to practice law full time.”
I don’t think this came as any surprise to my boss. He kept a straight face and said that he understood. I get the impression now that he may have been surprised I lasted as long as I did doing what I was doing: I had taken the job as HR Director for the company while I got my LLM and studied for the Texas Bar. I passed the bar in February and have been trying desperately to get assigned more and more legal work, and less and less HR work since then.
I gave 3 week’s notice at the time, and the split has been very friendly. Everyone involved has wished me the best and in many ways I feel like I’ll be part of the company I was with for the foreseeable future, just not officially as an employee.
And although I didn’t really mean to quit my job, I suppose I had kind of had
planned towards that end. I had been looking into other options and really walked out of the steady paycheck into some work of my own. I have no illusions that being a
solo attorney is going to be easy, but I really do feel like I left one full time job and jumped right into another.
Why am I writing all this?
For the last three weeks I’ve been pretty stressed about how this transition was going to go, mixed with a bunch of excitement about the possibility of being my own boss and getting to do nothing but practice law. While I was walking my dog this morning I was contemplating all of the “new solo” blogs, books, and podcasts I’ve been consuming over the last few weeks (honestly, months, even though I still contend I didn’t really mean to quit my job), I thought I’d like to document the journey as a new solo.
I’m setting a goal of writing 500 words, or creating an equivalently sized video or podcast, every day for the next year. I’d like to show anyone else who is contemplating going solo out of law school that it is possible, and not as scary as it sounds. Not to mention, memorializing my year will probably give me some good insights on what happened, what I did wrong, and what I want to repeat.
I also want to add at least one picture to each post. Not necessarily because I think the photos are going to be relevant to anything, but because taking a photo of something interesting every day seems like a worthy goal. Today’s photo is just a picture of me, after being a solo attorney for 2 days.
What is the blog going to be about?
The topics of this blog are generally going to be about practice management tools, technology that I have used or want to use to make my practice more streamlined, different areas of the law that I find interesting or frustrating, and maybe new developments in my legal career. I’m going to be very vague as to actual legal situations, because I don’t want to betray client confidences, not even as hypotheticals. I’ll probably complain about legal services venders a little bit, this is fresh on my mind because I had a trying experience with a lead generation service yesterday and might vent about it.
I am not an expert and I welcome advice
Like I said, this blog functions to memorialize the first year of legal practice. That said, I am going to make some mistakes and I want to be honest enough about them that other people can learn from them. I’ll probably leave comments on for these posts, so that anyone reading this can leave feedback, etc. I’ll leave constructive feedback up, even though it may be painful or humbling, but this is my blog and I am going to delete anything that I don’t think adds to the conversation.
I’ve reached over 700 words for tonight, not to mention the time I spent getting this page set up. Stay tuned for more installments.