My Shingle

June 2007

Yes, You Can Solo Part Time

June 29, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

Conventional wisdom used to be that if you’re going to succeed as a solo, you need to jump in with both feet. But the one rule of solo practice is that there are no rules, only millions of exceptions. And here’s one of those exceptions: Danielle Colyer, a teacher by day, busy real estate attorney [...]

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Walmart v. Neiman Marcus Pricing for Legal Services

June 29, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

Over at my Legal Blog Watch Beat, I posted about the Walmart v. Nieman Marcus pricing dichotomy, initially described by Mike Sherman of Law for Profit. Now many of you have heard about this model before: basically, you have a choice between selling lots of legal services (volume practice) at a narrow profit margin or [...]

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Announcing….SOLOFORMANIA – now in beta!

June 19, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

My site has been dead for so long, that I couldn’t wait to get some new content going. So here it is, in beta…SOLO-formania. What is SOLOFORMANIA? It’s a cornucopia of forms for the busy solo – ranging from FREE sample practice guides, fee agreements and retainer letters, to court forms for all 50 states [...]

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Make a positive contact, write away!

June 19, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

Perhaps you’ve just started your firm, and you’re already tiring of those “informational” interviews and “getting to know you lunches” with more experienced attorneys. Of course, you’ve met some jerks, but on the whole, they’re all nice enough, incredibly supportive and genuinely interested in helping you out with advice and war stories. But at the [...]

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Should We Rescue Biglaw, Part II?

June 19, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

A while back, I posed the question whether women at large firms have some kind of duty to rescue biglaw and save it from becoming the exclusive domain of white men. Well, here’s an article, Women Leaven which suggests that many women aren’t doing that. Instead, they’re leaving law firms in droves for greener pastures, [...]

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A Tale of Two Lawyer Ratings Systems

June 15, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

Imagine a lawyer rating system that assigns lawyers different categories of grading and purports to provide an objective way to assess a lawyer and through “third party validation of ethics and legal ability provides that extra level of confidence that the right lawyer or firm has been selected.” A ratings system that takes years of [...]

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What Judge Bork’s Choice of PI Counsel Says About Lawyer Rankings like Avvo and Marketing

June 8, 2007 by Carolyn Elefant

Over at some of the more conservatively inclined blogs, like Overlawyered, there’s some interesting discussion over whether conservative judge and jilted Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork betrayed his conservative principles by suing the Yale Club for $1 million (both compensatory and punitive damages) for injuries sustained following Bork’s fall from a dais a speaking event [...]

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