How You Will Spend Your Time?

If you love the practice of law and want to spend as much time as possible in the technical work of lawyering, consider whether a job in an associate attorney’s role is a good option. If you want economic rewards and autonomy, you may want to aim for government lawyering, of counsel, or an equity partner. If you have a vision for your own business, want to spend time on administrative and operational tasks, or are an insufferable employee and unwilling to let anyone be your boss, consider managing your own law firm.

Solo attorneys act as managing partners, equity partners, and associates. If your motivation to go solo is more about not working with or for others, then the decision to be both a managing partner and an equity partner is easy. If your motivation is otherwise, you may want to either delegate the office management to someone else, which should minimize your role as managing partner, or hire associate attorneys to do the legal work, which should minimize your role as the associate attorney.

Many entrepreneurial people like to do it all instead of delegating. A typical entrepreneur thinks he can do it all, so he does not want to pay someone to do things like make a website, design a logo, or write a firm operating agreement. Extrapolating, the entrepreneur has page after page of things to do. Extrapolating from the giant to-do list, the entrepreneur needs to research, read, learn, and practice how to do each task, none of which will make them better at a lawyer’s technical work. Then, in a few years, the entrepreneur may come to appreciate that the do-it-yourself version of what he made was of inferior quality and feel slightly embarrassed that they have been using it for the past three years. It will all need to be done again. Without adequate staff support, attorneys should expect to spend 50 to 80 percent of their time on tasks other than billable attorney tasks under most law firm models. Solo attorneys may spend one-third of their time on business development and between one-third and nearly half of their time on administrative tasks, such as invoicing, collecting, and working on the technology. One recent study found that solo and small firm lawyers spend an average of only 2.3 hours, or 29% of an 8-hour workday, on billable tasks.

Working In and On the Business

In Gerber’s words, working in your business is doing the technical work, while working to improve the business is working on your business. You cannot be so busy working in the business that you neglect to work on the business. Like a strong, visionary managing partner, the entrepreneur works on the business to improve it. Also, read my post on three roles in a law firm.

The biggest danger is that, after obtaining a few clients, the technician takes over and uses up all the workday, the manager works in the late hours, and the entrepreneur is never heard from again. Unless you balance the three roles to keep letting the entrepreneur work, your business starts to feel just like a job. If you take a day off, nothing happens, and the firm does not make money, then in reality, it is not a business; it is a job for which you are self-employed. Your firm will become the worst job you ever had. The small firm must reserve time to work on the business, not just in it. You would be better off folding up your practice and working in someone else’s law firm. To sharpen our vocabulary from our earlier discussion: some lawyers are solo because they want or need to be self-employed, and some go on their own to be entrepreneurial and start a business.

You will be tempted to do the legal work in the business to the exclusion of thinking about and working on how to make the business better. This phenomenon is part of human nature. It is a problem to be managed rather than cured. Do not beat yourself up for failure here. Instead, build time into your schedule and build business planning into your goals to keep you on track.