My Shingle

Practice Areas

Real Sisters In Law

August 28, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

Sisters don’t have to marry a pair of brothers to become sisters in law to each other.  As this article, Sisters in law:  Siblings Keep legal matters all in the family (Arizona Business Gazette 8/24/06), sisters Hope Kirsch and Lori Kirsch-Goodwin became sisters in law (or sisters at law)  when they decided to hang out [...]

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You Can Take It [Biglaw Practice] With You

August 16, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

Many large firm lawyers think that if they hang a shingle. they’ll have to throw away their biglaw specialities, like securities regulation or merger practice and trade it in for more general practice fare, like family law or criminal practice.  But at least one solo attorney, Walter James, of the newly created Environmental Crimes Blog [...]

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Client Service and More on Niches

August 10, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

I realize that my posts have been sparse over the past month.   The slow postings are explained by a couple of factors: my day job as a practicing solo has been fairly busy lately, a project that I’m close to finishing that I believe will greatly benefit MyShingle readers and my divided loyalties now that [...]

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Tips for Family Law Practitioners

June 28, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

Though not every family law case ends up like this one, nonetheless, family law cases are often fraught with more emotion and problems than any other type of case.  Clients often come with misinformation about the process and unreasonable expectations about how much the case should cost. While trends such as collaborative lawyering may address [...]

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A Niche for Lawyers Who Want to Get AHead (of lettuce, that is!)

March 13, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

Here’s an article, Lawyers’ ads seek to grow ag business, Silicon Valley (March 10, 2006) about a firm with an agriculture-based practice that’s embarking on a new marketing campaign that brands the firm as Lettuce Lawyers – Together We Grow.  It’s a neat name, with lots of potential for other taglines, such as Lettuce Help [...]

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A Supreme Solo No More

March 3, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

As more law firm bloggers turn solo (including this one), Supreme small firm lawyer Tom Goldstein, bucks the trend with his recent announcement that he’s moving on to join a large firm.  I’ve got mixed feelings about this one.  On the one hand, Tom’s move is testament to my belief that solo practice can take [...]

Read more Big Law/Small Law 56 comments

Counsel on “Of Counsel” Agreements

March 3, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

Frequently, either in emails to this site or on my listserves, I see questions by lawyers asking about “of counsel” arrangements, from how to find these relationships to what kind of contract should be used to memorialize them.  So I was happy to see that Dennis Kennedy has done the work for us with this [...]

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Two More Niche Practice Ideas

March 1, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

On the surface, the two articles that I’m linking in this post have nothing in common or nothing to do with solo practice.  But if you look deeper, you’ll see the obvious connection:  both offer ideas for niche practice. This article, Lawyer’s specialty:  Advice for gay, unmarried couples, Pittsburgh Post Gazette (2/27/06) describes a biglaw [...]

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Niche Blogs

February 19, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

Kevin O’Keefe of  Lex Blog has a post on niche blogging, summarizing tips by Darren Rowse on choosing a niche topic.  The tips include selecting a topic that interests you, where there’s not yet much competition and which will offer enough content.  These tips are particularly important these days in starting a law related blog, [...]

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Changing Practice Areas: Harder for Biglaw Than Solos

February 13, 2006 by Carolyn Elefant

It’s rather ironic that lawyers at a 1000 person mega-firm, with specialized departments galore, apparently have a more difficult time changing practice areas than solos.  At least that’s the impression that I gathered from reading this somewhat depressing article, Retooling Strategies by Gail Cutter (NYLJ Feb. 10, 2006), which discusses the difficulties and risks that [...]

Read more Big Law/Small Law 4 comments

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