My Shingle

MyShingle Solo

Tax Day: A Reminder of The Ups and Downs of Solo Practice

April 15, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

With 2012 taxes now complete, I’ve officially marked the last action of the worst year of my practice in a half-decade. While I won’t discuss everything that went wrong, the problem is pretty obvious: more money out, less money in.  In my case, an office upgrade and more personnel took a bit of a toll [...]

Read more Marketing & Making Money 5 comments

ISBA Report on the Impact of Debt on the Legal Profession: Accurate Assessment or Unfair Assumptions About Solos?

March 21, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Via Scott Greenfield, I learned about this recent study by the Illinois State Bar Association on The Impact of Law School Debt on the Legal Profession. Whether or not one blames the debt crisis on law schools (for inflating employment results), the government (for essentially prohibiting discharge of student loans in bankruptcy except in very [...]

Read more Ethics & Malpractice Issues 1 comment

A Lead Generating Website Gone Too Far

March 12, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Update, 3/12/13 (3 pm) Solosez member and contract lawyer Lisa Solomon posted about this on her Facebook page and Richard Komaiko, Attorney Fee’s founder is feeling the heat. The emerging dialogue should serve as a warning to future law-preneurs you don’t go beta when people’s careers and livelihood (even lawyers) are on the line. About [...]

Read more Marketing Ethics 2 comments

Reinvent Law: Solos Lost in the Transition

March 11, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

I did not attend ReinventLaw, but would have liked to. With four matters pending in various stages at the D.C. Circuit and my daughters in the height of school activities, traveling cross country even for a day wasn’t in the cards this time. So I settled for tracking the conference via the #reinventlaw hashtag feed [...]

Read more MyShingle Solo 3 comments

Doing work that you love in your law practice when it doesn’t pay the bills.

February 25, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Starting and running your own law firm allows you the autonomy to pick and choose the kinds of cases you want to handle. But what happens when there’s no apparent market for the work that you love or where a market exists but the work isn’t financially viable? A lack of market refers to a [...]

Read more Business Models 1 comment

A Valentine’s Post: Business Porn and Putting the Magic Back in Starting a Law Firm

February 14, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Because of this blog and a national practice, I travel out of town several times a year for speaking engagements, conferences and hearings.  Rather than feign work on a long cramped bus or plane ride, I generally stay up until 3 am the night before I depart, scrambling to push assignments out the door.  That [...]

Read more Encouragement 9 comments

LegalForce: Forcing Law to Be Accessible

February 7, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

For me, the above LegalForce  brand concept — a scales of justice anthropomorphized — encapsulates all that excites me about the launch of the exciting new LegalForce business model conceived by lawyer/entrepreneur Raj Abhyanker that I attended last night in Palo Alto, California. For so long, images of the scales of justices have served as mindless [...]

Read more MyShingle Solo 12 comments

The Future of Law: Been there, done that, let’s do it better.

December 31, 2012 by Carolyn Elefant

As the saying goes, there’s nothing new under the sun.  What law profs and thought-leaders tout as “the future of law” — from non-lawyer representation or nonlawyer ownership of firms  and form-based, assembly-line style or virtual law practices (for the record, not all virtual practices follow this model) — have their roots in legacy models that the [...]

Read more Book Review 10 comments

Celebrating A Decade At MyShingle

December 10, 2012 by Carolyn Elefant

Ten years ago yesterday, I pushed the “enter” key and launched MyShingle.com on to the World Wide Web.  I didn’t know what to expect, but I fell in love with the medium and my solo/small beat so I just couldn’t stop.  But this blog has been so much more than just a place to write [...]

Read more Announcements 5 comments

The Miracle of the Solo (reprise)

December 7, 2012 by Carolyn Elefant

Editor’s note: Tomorrow night is the first night of Chanukah, one of my favorite holidays not because of the presents but what it stands for. Chanukah inspired one of my favorite posts in nearly a decade of blogging, and if you didn’t catch it last year, here it is again. Tonight marks the first night [...]

Read more Encouragement 0 comments

← Previous Entries