For the handful of you who just passed the bar, and for the tens of thousands getting ready to take the July bar, if you are wondering if it’s possible to open your own law firm right out of law school and be successful, the answer is – yes, it is possible. The odds are stacked against you, but it’s possible. You’re going to need to figure out a lot of things, like office space, having a mentor, getting clients, etc. This guide is going to help you worry about one less thing: how to outfit your new practice.
The key to just starting off is to be lean and mean. Don’t sign that expensive office lease at first, and don’t buy a bunch of things until you get a good pace going. Here are some cheap and practical things you can and should get right away.
Phone ($0 to $25 a month)
Don’t use your cell phone as your business line, even if you are working from home. It’s not confidence inspiring. A better way would be to get a cloud phone number. It’s a cheap solution to get a business line that forwards to your cell phone. You can make and answer calls from your cellphone and have a separate greeting for your law firm and for your personal cell phone.
One option is to go with Google Voice. You can sign up for a free number online, get your voicemails transcribed and emailed to you. You can use the Google Hangouts Dialer to dial out from your Google Voice number. If you wanted to go one step fancier, go to Ring Central. They also give you a virtual fax number (send and receive faxes through your email). If you go to their website and see their pricing, they make it very difficult to find their secret pricing menu that is much cheaper.
Legal Research ($0 to $120)
The good news is that as a solo, you can get some good deals from Lexis or Westlaw. The even better news is that you can keep your head above water with cheaper legal research alternatives like Casetext or Fastcase. You don’t necessarily have the same pool of secondary sources that you can get with a Westlaw subscription, but you can research primary authorities cheaply or for free.
Domain ($12 a year)
Absolutely get a domain. With your first $12, go to godaddy.com and buy a domain. That’s not only going to be your website home, but it’s going to be your email address. You should not practice law and represent to the public that you are a professional if you are using an @gmail.com email address.
Office ($5 to 12.50 a month)
The next thing you should get is Office 365. The Business Premium plan is $12.50 a month, and it includes five installs of the perpetually updating Office suite, including Word, Outlook, OneNote, Excel, etc. That plan also comes with one email license. That means if you bought the domain SmithAwesomeLawyer.xyz, and you wanted your email to be [email protected], you can set that up and get your emails online or through Outlook. You also get 1 terabyte of cloud storage. If you already have Office and just want the 1tb of cloud storage and email hosting, there’s a $5 Business Essentials plan.
Adobe ($15 a month)
Adobe Acrobat is the best program for turning scanned pages into text-searchable files (which is required by a lot of courts before you can efile), annotating, and viewing scanned documents. It also has a nice set of legal-specific tools, such as Bates stamping and redaction. Go here for the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog.
Conclusion
If you want to open your practice with wet ink on your bar card, you are going to have a lot of headaches, so use this list to avoid the headache of essential tech for your office. And godspeed.
Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner at the Law Office of Jeff Bennion. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at [email protected].
