Myth #1 If you are a good lawyer you will have a successful law practice

I created this blog post to share some insights I have gained in the last thirteen years in the trenches of running a law practice. I started out as many of you have, as a solo practitioner. When I first started, I was the receptionist that answered the phones, the lawyer that prepared and filed cases, the bookkeeper that processed payments, the administrative assistant that made photo copies and the chief marketing officer that created marketing strategies. I remember one weekend that I spent photo copying pages for a brief – too vividly because my ex-girlfriend made the astute comment “why are you making copies when an assistant could be making them?”

Well at the time I was taking on cases that my mentor did not want to take on (the most difficult cases) and I had just enough money to pay the bills. Having an assistant was not an option. So there I was wondering the same thing. I thought that I was “paying my dues”. That is what we were sold on in law school. You just need to be an excellent lawyer, pay your dues and then you will get all the clients you need. Well, that bubble was burst in my first year out of law practice when I spent one too many weekends making photocopies.

I had no idea of how to get clients except putting an ad in the yellow pages and joining the San Francisco Lawyer Referral Service. When I first started my practice, I missed the yellow pages deadline and the LRS cases were often low fee cases.

After a year I began to astutely study marketing so that I could serve my clients in a more effective manner than doing administrative work. Marketing has become a passion of mine and I spend every day (Except Sundays) reading or listening to some type of business or marketing book. I am grateful that I now have six team members that help me support my law firm’s vision.

What they did not tell us in law school was that we needed clients in order to run a law firm. Yes, we learned how to perform legal research and writing, but there was not even one class on running a law practice or on how to get clients! I do not want my fellow lawyers to go through the trials and tribulations that I have gone through in my last thirteen years, so I hope to share some fun stories and insights on this blog. In my next blog post I will discuss the big myth about brand building.