The Question Every Attorney Has About Going Solo
I was at Campbell Law School recently talking to a room full of students who were seriously considering small firm practice or going out on their own after graduation. The questions I got were not about choosing a practice area or setting up an LLC. Almost every question in that room came back to one thing: money.
How long until you felt financially stable? How long before you were actually profitable? How did you pay your bills in the meantime? What about lines of credit?
These are the right questions. They are also the ones most practitioners dodge with some version of "it all worked out." That answer is not useful to anyone.
So here is what I actually told them.
My Honest
...The Firm Was Paying It's Bills. My Life Wasn't Moving Forward
A few years into running my own firm, everything looked fine from the outside. It was me and one partner, an office-sharing arrangement, a shared paralegal. We were covering expenses. We were paying ourselves. Nobody was in crisis.
But I had this nagging feeling I could not shake: I was not getting ahead. Revenue felt like it had a ceiling on it. Most of our business was coming through referrals, and despite our marketing efforts, nothing was moving the needle. I started quietly looking for a way out.
The moment that made it undeniable was when I tried to buy a house. We had a child on the way, and I needed to qualify for a mortgage.
