I had big plans for my one-year solo law practice anniversary, which came on August 16, 2022. I had the perfect blog post planned to coincide with it.
Unfortunately, I was too busy with client work to write the blog post in time.
And that kind of tells you how the first year of Zach Wolfe Law Firm 2.0 went. Business development was largely a success. I mean, it could always be better, but I had no shortage of paying client work to do. The only problem I really had was keeping up with all the work.
More about that later.
Now that I’ve had a chance to catch up, I’m going to share the lessons I’ve learned from one year of solo law practice. With a little help from my Twitter friends.
If you happened to see my presentation at the 2022 Texas State Bar Annual Meeting, these lessons may sound familiar.
I will also confess that you can find better tips just by following @gokpkd on Twitter.
Spoiler alert: I think you’ll find these lessons apply to any kind of law practice, not just a solo firm.
Do you need traditional office space?
Lesson 1 is that you don’t necessarily need traditional office space.
I had a few options on this front: lease some traditional office space, lease an office at an “office suites” kind of place (like Regus), get a “virtual” office through the same kind of office suites arrangement, etc.
I settled on sharing office space with a firm I knew. To be honest, I hardly ever go there. The main thing I like about it is having a conference room available for meetings and depositions. But even that I’ve rarely needed (partly because of Covid and Zoom).
The bottom line is to think about what you really need your office space for. Don’t just assume you have to spend the money on traditional office space.