Black Thursday
If you’re an attorney, you would have to be living under a rock if you hadn’t heard of Black Thursday, when many of the U.S.A.’s largest and most prestigious law firms went on a pink slip rampage. Nobody knows for sure how many bodies were thrown overboard, but estimates are anywhere from 800 to over 1,000 attorneys lost their positions.
What’s even more unsettling are the whispered rumors that this is just the beginning.
It’s not hyperbole to say we are living in extraordinary times.
I’m not saying any of this to scare you. Note the positive headline for this blog post. We feel that now is the time for unprecedented opportunity–for those brave enough to reach out and take it.
You know there are plenty of “solos” out there. Single attorney law practices have existed forever, but they were never able to really compete with the big firms.
Until now, that is.
Extraordinary Times, New Opportunities
There are two forces that work in favor of the solo practitioner, now: the rapid rise of technology and because of that, a sea-change in consumer behavior.
It used to be that a solo just couldn’t muster the kind of marketing money and muscle a big firm could. And that’s still true, in a sense. But what is also true is that it doesn’t matter, anymore, precisely because technology and consumer behavior are changing.
A solo does not beat the big firms by doing the same things they do. A solo beats them by doing things they could never do. Let me tell you a story as an example:
A woman (let’s call her Sarah) is beginning to think she needs to acquire the services of an estate planning and elder care attorney. Where do you think is the first place she is likely to begin her search?
If you guessed the internet, give yourself a gold star, you are correct. Sarah goes to Google and types some words into the search box. What words do you think she types in?
I’m not going to answer that here, but keep that thought in mind as we take a look at the strategies employed the Big Firm and the Solo.
The Big Firm
The Big Firm is as “old school” as it gets: posh offices, senior partners and partners up to the rafters, and a website that hasn’t changed in over five years. After all, to their thinking, what is a website but simply an online brochure? There is no need to change it: their services haven’t changed, nor has their phone number. If you could transform a stuffed shirt into a website, the Big Firm has managed to do so. The Big Firm can afford to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month to pay a marketing firm to run a Google AdWords PPC campaign to keep that phone ringing.
Almost none of the people in the firm know what AdWords is. Every little technological advancement is fought tooth and nail, and most of the firm’s senior partners can barely use email. The younger attorneys have their Blackberries super-glued to their hands, and they seem “with it,” but beyond email and FindLaw, they’re nearly hopeless.
The Big Firm still spends a considerable sum of money every year on Yellow Pages advertising and print ads in the local paper (which is filing for bankruptcy).
The Solo
The Solo, on the other hand, (let’s call her Amanda) works out of her home office. Amanda’s website is a blog. Every other day or so, she writes a new article and posts it, adding to her already considerable archive of previous posts–all about the same topics: elder care law and estate planning.
Other law blogs and even regular news sites link to her blog, sending her traffic. Reporters call her and email her to get her opinion on a proposed change in nursing home regulations in the area. Other lawyers and even judges in the area read her blog.
Amanda gets an email from the contact form on her blog. Sarah has written to her, saying she did a search online and Amanda’s blog came up number one. Sarah tells Amanda she spent a lot of time reading Amanda’s posts and they have already helped her make some important decisions regarding her parents. Because of this, Sarah would like to set up an appointment to meet with Amanda to discuss the possibility of engaging her legal services.
The Solo’s Secret Weapon
When Amanda first set up her solo practice, she did all the things she thought she was supposed to do… and it nearly put her out of business. Her “brochureware” website brought in no clients. Nobody found her online when they did a Google search. Nobody looked at the Yellow Pages and saw her expensive ad.
Luckily, a friend of hers who was into “techie stuff” told her about blogs and how single-person and small businesses were using them to market themselves. Amanda looked into it and soon found Blawging Lawyers.
At first, she didn’t know a lot about blogging or how to market a law practice with one, but with the educational materials and support from the instructors and her fellow Blawging Lawyers members, Amanda got up to speed in only a few months.
Now, she’s even using social media networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, which she’s using to send potential clients who also use these services to her blog. Amanda can hardly believe it. The country is slipping into a recession, but she’s doing better than ever.
Meanwhile, the Big Firm is thinking another round of layoffs will be necessary. The senior partners are discussing it.
We invite you to learn more about Blawging Lawyers.
This is an excellent example of how lawyers who find a door closed can open a new door to their professional lives…and the tools to do so.
Great post!
Grant -
While I appreciate your optimism, there is a fundamental flaw in your posting. That is, solos and big firms do not compete for the same clients. In fact, I would hazard a guess that there’s virtually no overlap whatsoever.
Companies like Microsoft, General Motors, Dell and Coca Cola do not use the internet to find clients. Skadden, Sidley and Dechert are already permanently inked in the big company rolodexes and in the minds of their board members.
Even if these big companies do find themselves unhappy with their current legal counsel, they can pressure their big law firms to lower prices or they will switch to another big law firm or mid-sized law firm that will. Few if any big firm clients will elope with a solo, even if he/she was a former big firm partner. Didn’t you see the movie Jerry McGuire?
Big firms and solos are no more in competion than elephants and ants.
There is a more compelling issue that needs addressing. That is, what do all the existing solos do to survive as laid-off big firm lawyers invest their golden parachutes in practices and unwittingly flood the solo market?
Anytime Grant, just let me know. Also thanks for leaving a comment, I just realized my first post of Monday morning was chocked full of grammatical errors :-).
Anyway, great article, subscribed, look forward to more great information.
Grant,
Great post. I can certainly attest to the fact that blogging and social networking helps a solo practice grow by leaps and bounds. These opportunities can easily move you ahead of large law firms on nearly any relevant Google search.
Brett
Having worked at a couple of large firms, I have to disagree with Marshall. While large firms certainly have large corporate clients, they also serve smaller businesses and individuals. In my big firm years, I spent at least as much time working on smaller cases for smaller clients as I did working on cases for big companies. And many of those smaller cases could have been handled by a solo or small firm. Also, while big companies may still want big firms to handle their mergers and acquisitions and multimilliion dollar litigation, I think they’re going to be more and more likely to shop around for a smaller (cheaper) firm to handle routine transactions and repetitive litigation.
I agree with Marshall’s premise to some extent. I do compete with biglaw, not for big clients - but rather, I often find biglaw trying to poach on my turf. In my field, there are hardly any energy regulatory bloggers. When I started FERC Fights (now in abeyance), it wasn’t but a few weeks before a very prominent staffer at FERC told me that he’s a huge fan of the blog. That’s a great marketing tool when I can say that I have the ear of X. Also, you’d be surprised at how many large companies visited my site and spent significant amounts of time there.
At the end of the day, Marshall is right though. Whereas consumer clients will hire people off of a blog, a large institutional client is unlikely to do so. But, industries change - and in my industry, smaller and more tech savvy companies are entering. And at least the blog gives some exposure and a foot in the door.
I think the truth about overlap in client markets lies, in most cases, somewhere in between Marshall’s position and Jane’s, and will depend to a large extent on geography and area of practice.
GEOGRAPHY
Some of us have no “big firms” to compete against locally. Or the demographics of the area mean there are few clients who will be shopping for big firms. For those of us who can handle matters from a wide geographic region, we are competing with larger firms in that region even if there are few or none locally. My own practice, which consists primarily of appeals, can easily take on cases from all over California in state courts and, in federal cases, from all over the western states comprising the Ninth Circuit. That’s an awful lot of competition from big firms.
AREA OF PRACTICE
I’ve had a wide range of clients inquire about appellate representation, from individuals who want to appeal a small claims case to companies in cases concerning 6- or 7-figure dollar amounts. That’s not going to happen in all practice areas, though.
Estate planning, for instance, strikes me as an area of practice where a personal relationship between client and attorney is especially important. Thus, the amount of money at issue (i.e., the size of the estate) may have far less to do with the size of the firm engaged than it does in other areas, like business litigation. Xerox simply isn’t likely to hire a solo, or even a small shop, to handle a case with tens of millions of dollars at issue.
That said, as a former general counsel, I can tell you that the cost of outside counsel is closely watched by corporate clients. Large companies still aren’t likely to go with solos (except on smaller cases), but smaller companies may, especially on smaller cases, which may help a solo get his or her foot in the door as a means to more, and bigger, cases.
Wow, great comments, everyone! I realize many of you have heard about this post through Grant, but I’m the one who wrote it. Not to take offense, but so that Grant doesn’t get blamed for misunderstanding the relationship between solos and big firms. If there is blame to be had for this, it rests squarely on my shoulders.
The important take-away from this post is that the consumer’s behavior is changing, but the behavior of law firms is not–or, is not keeping pace. I’m not qualified to disagree with Marshall–I’m the blogging/SEO person here, not a lawyer. Jane’s and Carolyn’s experiences are enlightening, though.
I think Marshall’s last point is the most important. The take-away from that is this: Start your blog now if you haven’t yet, because there will be many more solos in the next few years. And it won’t be just because firms are firing people. This is where ALL of business is going. If you poke your head up over the fences, you can see this mega-trend everywhere.
People will either profit from it or get run over by it. I have the feeling a lot of people aren’t even going to know what hit ‘em.
Great discussion here. My $.02 to add - we are so wrapped up in the online ways of connecting that we sometimes forget the personal touch. I’m involved with a GREAT business networking site called Biznik (www.biznik.com). Their tagline: “Business networking that doesn’t suck.” They are a marriage of the online networking (like LinkedIn) that has, to a large degree, taken over recently AND the in person networking (like BNI, LeTip, or even your local chamber) that is so important. Members host events and there are people who clearly contribute to the community there.
My point is that all the online “stuff” in the world can’t replace a real face-to-face meeting. I recently had a contact share that she hired me because she had a chance to meet me at one of my regular networking lunches. Many more clients are people I met in-person first, who then checked out my website and blog and appreciated the content there.
Blogging is great, and so is much of the other social media stuff out there. I use it as another means of letting people get to know me. The end result is that I’ve never paid a dollar for advertising (or Google AdWords), and yet clients find me - online and in person.
I disagree with Marshall entirely. I practice estate planning and I am 100% competing with BigLaw for clients. I can do the $100,000 estates and the $10,000,000 estates just as well as they can.
Except I can do it faster and cheaper b/c I’m not dictating my documents for some crotchety word processor who car barely use the computer but am doing them myself.
Excellent post. Plus, there are plenty of inexpensive resources (in addition to blogging/social meda) that can help reach customers and page one of google for their practice area & geographic location. It can be done!!!
Two points . .
The size, number and viability of big corporates is going to continue to decline rapidly over the next 10 years and big firms will have to adapt accordingly and find new markets.
This post is about the behaviour of the lawyer, whether he be solo or in a big firm i.e. does he extend a hand out to assist people looking for advice (and thus market himself) or does he sit back in his leather chair and wait for them to come to him. The latter, which was the norm, is going to be a continually shrinking business model in future. Remote, inaccessible ivory towers of expertise will become less and less viable. Lawyers who extend a hand of assistance on the Net build networks of people who trust them; this will eat into the big law firms clientele over time.
Thank you to everyone who has commented on Michael’s great post. It is comments like these which really add to the conversation and enable us all to learn even more.
Wow! I was directed to you by many people and I am glad I took the time to stop by. I am a former prosecutor who recently opened my own firm. I have quite a bit of business, more than I ever expected. It keeps me so busy, but i still cannott afford to increase my small staff of three. My website (still in progress) is something I have been waiting far too long for one of the expensive creative web people to finsih. I have almost completed one on my own. I started toying with a blog a while back, but made the number one mistake of only logging in or blogging sporadicaly. I also mixed way too much stuff into one blog. Hey, I am learning!!
I just wanted to let you know that after reading your post for the last few hours, it is now 5 a.m; I am beginning to believe that even I can find the time to learn to properly do this. Before I just assumed that any time spent learning to blog was time taken away from cases I needed to work on. You have made a believer out of me. The time it should take me to learn will be worth the payoff. Thank you again
Melissa Sugar
Shreveport, La
http://www.legalnewsandmommyviews.typepad.com
I can’t comment on Marshall’s points about whether we compete for clients with larger firms. But there is one thing about his post that’s been keeping me up at nights recently.
What about the new flood of solo practitioners?
The ugly truth right now is that the ABA is handing out school accreditations like they were cheap door prizes, the existing law schools are under huge financial pressure to continue increasing 1L admissions, and the big law firms just decided to jettison their associates so the head partners could feather their nests.
Where are all these new people going to go? To the thriving US job market? Fat chance of that. Last I heard, the local McDonalds was pulling in over 100 applications for each advertised job opening.
How many current solos ended up doing what they are doing purely because they had no choice? Sure we like it now, but let’s not forget that a lot of us were forced into this career path.
I mention at a CLE around here that I started a solo bankruptcy practice back in 2005 and you can see heads turning everywhere and suddenly a whole lot of interest is being directed at me.
I a way it’s flattering. But at the same time, it unnerves me. It has made me painfully aware of how many people are looking for work right now - and how many of them are going to end up competing with me for the same market. People ask me for advice, and I’m not certain how helpful I want to be. After all, I got young kids to take care of. More than my future is riding on this practice.
And being a bankruptcy attorney, I know exactly how bad the job market is out there right now. These laid-off associates, these starry-eyed new JDs… They aren’t going to find jobs outside the legal field. At least not in my state, not that easily. And now the legal field just dropped a LOT of it’s positions in BigLaw.
Maybe some here are feeling a bit of schadenfreude right now, but I’m sure not.
This is not going to get better. The big firms will discover they can do more with less, and will be slow to up hiring again. The ABA will continue to accredit redundant and unneeded new law schools because they’ve never given a damn about solo lawyers to begin with. And with state budgets crashing around the nation and universities finding themselves without funds, law schools will be under more pressure than ever to increase admissions (JD students are probably some of the highest profit-margin grad students a school can have).
The legal services field is going to have to be reinvented at ALL levels. This is not just a BigLaw problem. This is our problem.
Unless we want to see more and more JDs (solo or not) working at minimum wage, we’d better figure out something fast.
This is a very insightful post.. a must read for all lawyers
3 Comments:
1. My solo, general practice does not compete with Big Law for clients. That’s why I am a solo. I have seen several new solos “hanging their shingles” lately and how that will affect my practice in the near and long term is unknown — I will keep an eye on it.
2. In general, it is good for your business (and your reputation) to be helpful to other attorneys starting out (or finishing up) in solo practices. Don’t underestimate the potential for your business if you become known as a lawyers’ lawyer.
3. Be mindful of your local ethics rules and interpreting opinions concerning attorney blogs.
Thanks for the interesting insight, ideas and hope for those of us who are beginning our solo practices and wondering how on earth we are going to survive out here in the real world without the big (or even small) firm safety net!