Your Future as a Lawyer: One BIG Reason You Should Romanticize the Law

I try really hard to make Legal Shoe's advice open to all types of entrepreneurs, but since law is my frame of reference, I find it pretty hard not to worry about the next generation of lawyerpreneurs. They are in for an uphill climb - that's the reality.

A propos of nothing, these thoughts occurred to me while I was writing a review of Private Lives, which for Pittsburgh area readers, is playing at the O'Reilly Theatre through June 24. It's a comedy about softening hard edges, attraction, domestic strife, and it struck me as a metaphor for my 50-year love affair with the law.

Don't forget that you can soften the hard edges of your legal career by remembering why the law seemed attractive to you in the first place.

But here is one reason. Lawrence Lessing's graduation speech and John Marshall Law School in Atlanta. It's your assigned reading for today.

Everyone is a little high after they finish any arduous graduate program. So it's easy to be filled with starry-eyed wonder that Lessing, a prominent Harvard Law professor, would encourage young graduates to hang up their own shingle without any business accumen or training. Practice for the people! Redefine what law means in the United States! Your children and your children's children will rise up and call you blessed.

There is ONE reason you should let this vision influence your thoughts about practicing law.

It softens the hard edges. Let me say that again:

IT SOFTENS THE HARD EDGES.

A law practice, or any entrepreneurial venture, has a lot of hard edges: clients don't pay on time if at all, it's touch to keep a consistent pipeline of clients coming through the door, and you may feel the incredible burden of losing more fights than you win.

But you also have an incredible chance to leave the lives of the people around you better, whether it's your family, your clients, or the people you meet while you're trying to hawk your wares.

So this Monday, two weeks into a jobless summer, or even two weeks into your dream job, take ownership of your decision to become a lawyer. Take ownership of your decision to be an entrepreneur. Get the help you need to make it happen. Or as Lessing says:

… as you begin your career as a lawyer, as you begin to dig yourself out of the financial hole that you are in, as you enter a field too many think is just corrupt, don't think just about your families and the pride they can't hide today.

…

Leave it better, lawyers, than we lawyers who have educated you have given it to you. Leave it in a place that your mother and your daughter, your father and your son, can respect. Not corrupt, but true. Not just rich, but just.

Is there any other reason to be a lawyer?

Three Strategic Planning Essentials to Make Your Practice Work

Have any of these things just happened to you?

1. I just graduated from law school and I have no job with anyone but me, a small law firm engagement, my dream job with a judge or BigLaw firm.

2.  I finished my first year of law school and still have most of my brain cells left. I have no job, a small firm engagement, or my dream clerkship with a judge or BigLaw firm (yay free baseball all summer!)

3.  I'm just starting law school in the fall and I have no idea why I signed up for this.

You can resolve each of these three situations with a simple acronym: PPM. In my environmental law world, it's parts per million, but do not get it confused. Rather, to make any business venture succeed, your PPM is:

PLAN

PEOPLE

MONEY

You must have each component of PPM in your practice. It's a really good idea to incorporate these during law school, too, just to get into the habit. Warning: this is a short introduction; I'll cover these in detail over the remaining week.

Plan

You will never get anywhere without a plan. Feel free to leave your disagreements in the Comments section. The fact is, you are always executing your plan or someone else's plan. If you're executing someone else's plan, it's likely you're an employee. If you're executing your own plan, you either a very smart employee, or you're working on developing your own practice. 

Your plan doesn't have to be long. It has to be good. It has to be clearly stated. It has to be workable. Don't fall into the trap that your plan needs to have graphs and projections, unless you're a visual thinking. Your plan is your roadmap, not a funding piece.

People

Without the right people in your practice, it will go nowhere. I can hear you saying to yourself "I have no employees; I'm a law student/associate/solo." Feh. You need the right people around you as soon as you start school. Build a network within your class and especially with upper classes. Learn how to gauge personalities. As an associate in a practice, you can network with other people in the firm and other young lawyers outside your firm. 

The people you choose to be with is a reflection of you and your practice. If you have the wrong people in your corner, your practice will be a confusing mess. 

Money

Money makes your plan function and pays your people. I hope you know that already. 

But you can bootstrap, seek investors, ethically seek sponsorships, and maybe even crowdsource to manage the bottom line. There are entire graduate programs devoted to raising capital, and I won't bore you with a crash course on fundraising (at least until Friday).

Today, just start with a plan.

12 predictions about your career in Law

I'm in Philadelphia. This week, Drexel and Penn graduated another crop of law students. They were bright-eyed and confident in their future careers, believing that they were going to really enjoy that summer clerkship at Walmart.

I didn't get invited to speak. Here is the speech I would have given.

Congratulations, all of you. You're justifiably proud of yourselves. Some of you graduated Summa Cum Laude. Others graduated Magna Cum Laude or even Cum Laude. Most of you, like me, graduated Thank You Lawd. All of you stand on the brink of the best of times and the worst of times.. You are facing a different world, and I'm going to show you 12 ways your future career is going to be different from mine. If you apply the ideas today, you will still be practicing law in 10 years. If not, the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse will ride you down. Here they are, without explanation or fluff.

1. You will be competing with a global workforce.
2. Your target demographic has changed A LOT.
3. Self-help Clients will shop for services, not lawyers.
4. Clients will want the lowest price, which means firms will "unbundle” their professional offerings, and outsource as much as possible. Many already do. See The modern bankruptcy practice.
5. Lawyers will have to learn how to commoditize some of their offerings. There clients will look for a package before they ask for a bespoke service.Lawyers will run to the Cloud for data sharing, collaboration, and the competition for attention there will be fierce.
6. The most successful lawyers will have to be entrepreneurial, which means they’ll be marketing their “product” not themselves. There is material for a week's worth of blogs in this statement.
7. Guidance from professional disciplinary bodies will become increasingly confused as the ways that lawyers solicit clients proliferate quickly.
8. Lawyers will be increasingly required to promote themselves and market their own practices, whether they’re in a firm or not.
9. The debacle at Dewey Leboeuf teaches us that the model for gigantic law firms is dead, and probably should never have existed in the first place. That is not to say that the model for a global law firm is dead. You just don't need to be Dewey Leboeuf to be one.
10. Lawyers will stop selling their time and will sell their knowledge instead. The billable hour, like the gigantic law firm, is dead.
11. The best lawyers will operate an enterprise that includes a sophisticated marketing plan promoting a unique product.
12. The Lawyer who does something different will succeed. Don’t follow the lemmings over the cliff.

These predictions are not meant to depress. What I want you to do with this is go forth. Be Creative. Change the World. Do it Differently. You can. You have to.

Thanks, and good luck!