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Why Don’t Law Schools Invest In Law Firm Start Ups?

June 12, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Last weekend, I attended my 25th law school reunion up at Cornell Law School.  Considering that the Class of 1988 was Cornell’s centennial graduating class and that the silver anniversary is fairly significant, the turnout wasn’t great.  Out of a class of 175 students, only 19 of us showed up – a figure that’s even [...]

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Future of Law Fridays: When Every Day Is An Opportunity

May 17, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

By way of the  awesome Tim Baran (have you ever heard anyone say something negative about this guy?), Community Manager of our sponsor Rocket Matter, came this wonderful story  about the transformative power of social media by Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York. Stanton writes that after losing his finance job in Chicago, he [...]

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Lessons of Rakofsky v. the Internet: Be the Kind of Lawyer That Your Client Can Be Proud Of

May 13, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Avid readers may recall that two years ago, MyShingle and I received an “invite” to the defendants’ table  in Rakofsky v. the Internet. Roughly two years later, a decision is finally in.  Defendants prevailed; you can read others’ legal analysis here ,here and here.  Having spent two years reading through reams of pleadings, I see [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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