Inspiration & Encouragement

Since time immemorial, law practice management advisors and business consultants and coaching programs have drummed into law firm owners’ heads the importance of valuing our services. Capturing every last little second of billable time for phone calls and emails by invoicing early and often and accepting electronic payments. Walking the fine line between putting clients…

Back when I started my law firm as a green twenty-something five years out of law school, I invited a partner to lunch who worked at a law firm where I’d coveted a job. Of course, when I was out pounding the pavement for work just a few months before, I’d never have had the…

Advice on starting a law firm abounds. All across the web – here, here , here  or here, you can find all kinds of tips and suggestions and plans on getting started. Have at it. But for today, let’s focus on a different topic: what NOT to do when you start a law firm. 1.…

Five years ago, life irrevocably changed when I learned that my beloved husband  was diagnosed with brain cancer.  In the few seconds that it took the doctor to convey the news, my optimistic plans for my empty-nest future with my husband — working on law-tech projects together (there wasn’t a computer language that my husband…

Every day, there’s one article or another about big problems with the legal profession.  Depression is rampant and young lawyers are stressed.  Access to justice remains a problem – one that’s heightened in rural areas where clients must often travel hundreds of miles to meet a lawyer.  And students still graduate from law school with six figure debt…

In today’s tech world, we celebrate the wunderkind – like the founders of Facebook or Google – who achieved so much at an early age. Law isn’t all that different when it comes to early achievement – which accolades like law review and judicial clerkship and second year jobs at biglaw often based entirely on…

For many lawyers, starting or owning a law firm remains at best, a consolation prize – sloppy seconds to employment as a lawyer – and at worst, an undesirable career path that ranks far lower than positions in legal ops or legal tech that don’t even require a J.D. At law schools, starting a law…