"I graduated from law school 20 years ago to no avail. I was in law review, I worked for Citibank, edited law books at Matthew Bender, and was a grinder at white- shoe law firm for a minute. I did debt collection, demoralized, and went to Wall Street as a broker. Now I would like to set up a solo practice and full hustle mode if it makes sense. Do you recommend a good resource for the basics of building a niche towards employment law?"
I don't know the best type of solo practice to open. One thing I will say about opening these solo practices is it can be difficult to get hired or to get paid.
You need to find the right practice area and the right location. That's going to be the crux of how successful you are, how well you choose the practice area you're going to open. If you do open something where you do like personal injury, you have to remember, you're going to be going against insurance companies. Insurance companies are experts in getting D stands for defense, meaning and delay, and delaying cases making them expensive for you before you get paid. That can be difficult if you do employment law, same thing. If you're filing cases, if you're defending employers, that can be a good thing, but it's very difficult to get employers as clients. So you have to think about what is the best practice area for me. That's when you start a solo practice.
That's my opinion what the most important question is. Some solo practices, that I think are good, are ones where you can charge flat fees many times. Those are things like bankruptcy sometimes, or even trusting in the states can be good. Getting clients in those practice areas can be much easier than some other ones. Other practice areas that can be good are often family law. People can come to get up to speed very quickly in those practice areas. I've seen people take a long time off and then go back and start their own practices, doing those and ended up doing very well. I would think about it. You could potentially do a solo practice in those types of practice areas. Everything you're saying here like you run law review and you didn't like the firms you were at and stuff.
None of that really matters if you have your own practice, no one cares about any of that. You're just a business person. The nice thing about practicing law is what a law degree is, it's a license to open your own business. People never think of it that way because now there are these big firms, but for hundreds of years, that's what a law degree has been. It's a license in the state bar. Licensed to open a business can be very lucrative. No one teaches the stuff I'm teaching to some extent right now, but you have a license to open a business, which is hard to get. You should use that license. If you want to have your own business, that's great; you should do it. I would be very careful about what practice here you choose when you open your own business.
