Why I Practice Alone in a Small Law Firm
I practice alone because I can do a better job for my clients at a more reasonable price and have some independence and “leeway” in how that is accomplished.
One of the great benefits of practicing alone is the independence it gives me to serve my client the way I think is in their best interests and bill what I think is fair. It allows my great staff and me to bring you “big firm” quality services at a reasonable price.
It might help, though, if we understand the general attitude of the Bar toward its clients in California today. In my humble opinion, greed has gotten in the way of doing a good job for the client.
I was “raised by” very old lawyers who thoroughly believed that an attorney’s first duty was to his client and a reasonable amount of money would come because you are very good and your reputation would bring more and bigger clients. I still believe that, though less so today than in my younger years.
Right now, California is flooded with lawyers, all trying to make a living, all trying for the “home run” because lawyers are entitled to be wealthy, ain’t they? Therefore, all are manufacturing “cases” from which to make money. The fact is that California will license anyone to practice law who can pass a single exam. Ask me sometime and I’ll tell you that story. Neither the population nor the business population of California grows much anymore, due mainly to the extremely hostile governmental attitude toward business. Consequently, all the new and many of the older lawyers have to find another way to wring money out of the society around them. It’s just simple economics.
The Rules of Professional Conduct for the State of California are codified law as opposed to other states where they are merely advice. Rule 4-200 dictates that a client must not be overfilled for any given item, based on ten criteria. What it doesn’t tell the public is that just about any split of that billing AMONG LAWYERS is permitted, as long as certain criteria are met. The most popular method for doing that is to “bill the devil out of that file.”
In a law “firm,” a hierarchy is established where one or older or more aggressive or more personable attorneys become “rainmakers.” They seldom touch substantive legal matters because they are mainly promoters and promotion takes a lot of time, effort and money. They may not even be competent to counsel clients on the law anymore. The rainmaker gets a percentage of the fees billed to any client he or she brings in. It may not be called a “percentage,” but it is.
When a case is brought in by the rainmaker or anyone else, it is then assigned by the firm manager or managing committee to a partner as supervisor who “is best suited” to handle the matter.
He also has a staff of from one to many young associate attorneys who also “bill the devil out of the file." The secretaries keep time and anything that they do that could have been done by a lawyer is billed to the file as “support staff.”
Copies are billed to the file at a very high rate based on the very high cost of the copier operator.
Faxes are billed the same way.
Telephone charges are billed.
And on and on and on.
The argument is always, “We have a right to recover our costs of operation, don’t we?” Well, yes, but this is what my mother would have called picayune and I call petty. If the firm can’t cover its overhead out of the very high hourly charges it bills to clients, maybe those attorneys are in the wrong business.
The system is dead because, in each firm, there is a “review committee” made up of senior attorneys, who get a percentage of everything billed. They review the bills each month. Bonuses, salary advancements, promotion, firm department chairmanships (more money), and “partnership” status are all decided based on how much you bill to those files, not on how good your work is. Consequently, the entire culture of the firm is based on billing, not service.
That committee can raise a bill if they don’t think it is high enough. “High enough” tends to be driven by how much money the client has, though it is always blamed on the value of the service.
I like my independence. In the old days, the independence of solo practice was dangerous because it was the hallway interaction among attorneys that kept you on your toes intellectually with regard to substantive legal subject matter. No longer. Now there are extensive seminars, some of them online, and thousands of internet web sites containing extensive substantive material.
The independence allows me to do two things that I could not do when I practiced with my brethren in the big firms: it allows to me to give more service to my clients than the review committee might have though appropriate for the fee. It also allows me to set policies for my business clients that would get me fired from a big firm. For instance, we don’t charge for copies, faxes, postage, secretary time or mileage. I know I resent that kind of overhead charge when it is billed to me, so I don’t bill it to my clients. It’s just the old golden rule, and we try to live by it.
Solo practice also allows me a little flexibility that is important to me. First, it allows me to set a reasonable fixed fee when I know the hours I want to spend on the matter will overshoot what the services are worth to the client. It is my way of helping clients who might not be doing very well right now but need the service. The hope is that when the client is doing better, he or she will remember the reasonable cost of former days and give us the rest of his or her work. In a normal, “large” firm, that client would be turned a way or billed until he couldn’t afford it anymore and then turned over to the bankruptcy department to be billed even more.
It allows me to go home early some days and take weekends “off” to do church work, work on my airplane or spend time with my wife and grandchildren. When you are judged each and every month by a committee of nonperformers who get a cut of everything you do and the standard is how many hours you billed to a file and how hard you cracked the whip over your younger counterparts who all have families themselves, you don’t go home early and neither do they. After all the senior partners need more money, don’t they?
Well, there are probably other reasons dealing with my John Wayne reaction to having my life controlled by people less bright than I am, diverse interests that do not include the economic interests of pomposities, having to deal with egos that argue with each other over the size of the offices and so on.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve done it this way for so long that fitting into someone else’s harness isn’t comfortable anymore.
Whatever the reason, my great staff and I will continue to bring you the very best “big firm” quality service without the big price.
Let’s do some business.