When you graduate from law school (or even as you enter your third year), it will suddenly occur to you that you really need to decide how you’re going to spend the next forty years of your life. The whole “go to a firm or go solo” dilemma. It happens to everyone in one way or another. And it’s happening even more often now with the big firms putting their budgets on the chopping block and making fewer offers to bright young associates. If you’re not in the top 1% of your graduating class from one of the top law schools in the country (or your mom or dad isn’t a partner at a firm), a job right out of law school isn’t a sure bet.
That means that you may need to hang out your shingle and open your own firm. And the idea of doing that without any law firm experience may give you night sweats. But I’m here to tell you that it shouldn’t. Working at a firm before you go out on your own really doesn’t give you that much of an advantage. You’d spend a few months to even a year or more doing research, maybe handling a few motion hearings, or just drafting documents. You won’t be meeting with clients, you won’t learn a thing about law practice management, you’ll see nothing of the administrative side of the practice and you’ll have very little input from the partners you’re assigned to. They can’t bill for mentoring a new associate so they won’t be spending much time on it. And besides, if they had free time to devote to mentoring and training, they wouldn’t need you to begin with.
If you’re going into litigation practice or working with the courts on a regular basis, you can get just as much information on forms and procedures from the Court Clerk’s office, from form books or from hanging out at the courthouse and talking to other attorneys as you would have from working at a firm. The amount and type of training you would get from a partner at a large firm won’t really help you enough to justify delaying hanging out your shingle on your own.
The fact that you haven’t done time at a big firm should not stop you from starting your own law practice. If anything, that lack of experience may be a blessing. You’ll start with good habits instead of trying to erase bad ones. You can start your practice your way. Organize your files to suit yourself. You can market to reach the clients that you want to work with. Do work you want to do and not what some partner is passing off to you because he or she doesn’t want to deal with it. And you’ll be starting a new business while your brain is still in learning mode from law school and studying for the bar. That fresh disk space between your ears is a great thing to have when you’re learning the business side of running your own practice.
Listen, you’ve passed the bar and been licensed by your state to practice law. You have the legal knowledge to start your own firm. You just need to learn the administrative and business side. You can hire someone to teach you those sides of the practice or even to do it for you. And once you put all the pieces together, you’ll have something you will always be proud of.
And, best of all, and I hate to quote Sinatra, but “You Did It Your Way.”