As of a couple weeks ago, I am no longer a solo practitioner. Although I’m joining a great firm, there are many things I’ll miss about solo practice, including the opportunity it gave me to grow as a leader, test myself in new and unexpected ways and help people I would otherwise not be able to.

As a solo attorney, you are the one leading your law practice, which is a business, just like any other professional services organization. You are frequently the CEO, CFO, CTO, and marketing director all rolled into one, and how you balance those roles will determine your business success. But while you’re juggling all those things, you first have to do good legal work and give your clients great customer service.

Fortunately for me, I had a number of years of experience before I went solo. This not only gave me a level of comfort with the legal work, but it also allowed me to tap into a network I had cultivated over that time.

These days, times are hard and a lot of lawyers are hanging their own shingle fresh out of law school. My advice for those young lawyers is to carefully prepare and consider writing a business plan that includes answers to the following: what resources do you need (office space, phone, computer, etc.), what area of law will you practice, how will you attract clients and market your services and how much income do you need to survive.

There’s plenty more to think about but also plenty of resources to help you figure out the answers to your questions and help you develop a successful business plan. One place to go is the Law Office Management Assistance department of the Maryland State Bar Association. There you will find a wealth of resources to help you develop and design your law practice. While it will not always be easy, it will be liberating.

My own experience as a solo was both rewarding and challenging and took me to places I’d never thought of, including the opportunity I have now to be a part of a new office within long-established, reputable firm.

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Forgive me for what will be a short post. Forgive me for any lack of wit. I’m tired.

Why? I was really sick for a week in January and had to take a week off at the beginning of this month to deal with some family stuff. What does that mean, really? Working lots and lots of hours to try and close the gap in my goal numbers. And that means… I’m TIRED.

Due to the lackluster job market, people are doing whatever they need to do to keep their jobs.

“If you’re lucky enough to have a job right now, you’re probably doing everything possible to hold onto it,” Sara Robinson wrote recently on AlterNet in an article titled “Bring Back the 40-hour Work Week.” “If the boss asks you to work 50 hours, you work 55. If she asks for 60, you give up weeknights and Saturdays, and work 65.”

Studies researching the results of the 40-hour work week and overtime productivity repeatedly show industrial workers have eight reliable working hours in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day. Likewise, the overall output for the work week will be exactly the same at the end of six days as it would be after five days.

So, paying hourly workers to stick around once they’ve put in their weekly 40 is basically nothing more than a stupid and abusive way to burn up profits. Let ‘em go home, rest up and come back on Monday. It’s better for everybody.

This is truly enlightening if you consider the number of hours an attorney at a big law firm puts in per day, per week, and per month. Above the Law reviewed Robinson’s story, concluding “one should work to live, not the other way around.”

However, it seems like the majority of working Americans are “the other way around.” I watch as my friends in law firms toil for 12 hours a day, only to spend their few, free waking moments drinking and venting about how they have no lives.

What do you think? Do you think American working culture will allow a return of the 40-hour work week as the norm?

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When I began preparations to go solo four months ago, the most important thing I did was to create a business plan. I didn’t think I had time to do it— I would have rather continued to prepare my forms, create procedures and protocols, work on the website and try to secure more referral sources.

I do mostly plaintiffs’ personal injury (auto accidents, workers’ compensation and medical malpractice) and I was of course wanting to hit the ground running because of the long lead time for income in those cases. Settlements don’t typically happen for about nine-to-12 months in a routine auto case, and it can take longer if a lawsuit needs to be filed.

Four months out, however, the business plan is something I refer to at least once a week and I’m glad I made it.

My bank required one to accompany my application for a business line of credit. They told me to hire an accountant, an expense that was not in my budget (even before I made a budget), so I did it myself. Creating a business plan took me a full week of work and my line of credit was approved (I haven’t tapped into it yet, and I don’t intend to; it’s a nice safety net). An accountant probably could have made it better, but this is where the law of diminishing returns comes into play.

My business plan followed the pattern of “worst-case scenario.” (Worst case except for abject failure, anyway.) I tried to be conservative with all of my expectations; I deliberately underestimated the number of new cases I expected to receive every month, the amount of time from intake to resolution and the likely fee for each of those cases. I tried to overestimate my expenses. This is the plan I submitted to the bank.

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Did you get your NCAA tournament brackets in on time?  Thanks to a timely reminder from a colleague, I got mine in with 11 minutes to spare.

I doubt that anyone would argue that March Madness directly impacts workplace productivity. Actually, of all of the major sporting events, March Madness seems to have the most significant, negative impact on workplace productivity, followed by fantasy football and the Super Bowl. In fact, 86 percent of U.S. workers expect to devote at least some time at work this week to follow the games. Forty-five percent of Americans are likely to enter at least one college basketball pool between March 11 and March 18.

According to the Baltimore Business Journal’s non-scientific poll 69 percent of voters (220 as of Friday morning) thought that March Madness activities in the workplace were nothing more than harmless fun. Of course, the fun is no longer harmless when your office network grinds to a halt because of unusually high number of employees covertly streaming the games on their computers.

At least one social psychologist reads significantly more into March Madness-related activities. Don Forsyth says employers can learn a lot about their employees by observing how their employees fill out their brackets

“You could tell how each person made decisions, how they exhibited bias, whether their choices were rational or irrational, if they used mathematical analysis or if they based on emotions,”  he says.

Wow.  I hope no one is analyzing my March Madness picks that closely.

While I have yet to find a company that analyzes its employees’ brackets in any kind of detail, I think most firms have decided to embrace March Madness. After all, a large number of employees are going to watch at least some of the games. Having a TV on in the break room should help ease network traffic, at least to some extent.

More importantly, the tournament provides a natural ice breaker and can encourage a sense of community and the building of relationships. And rivalries. (Friendly ones, of course.)

Now, excuse me while I go spend some time plotting my chances of moving up in the rankings — I’m sure I can get out of this 10-way tie for 149th place. (Hey, it’s a big pool!)

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One of the partners at my law firm is a walking legal database. Whether I need to know a case dealing with fiduciary duties of a prior owner of a company or the last case in Maryland dealing with notices for mechanic’s liens, there is a high probability that he will know the case (or have information to quickly locate the case).

We all know of these individuals (and some of the readers of this blog may be those individuals). I’ve heard of stories about recently retired Court of Appeals judge who could not only cite cases regarding various legal topics but provide footnotes and pin cites.

Alas, I am not one of those individuals. To make up for my inability to recall the specific passage and verse of every single case I have ever read, I needed to develop a system to ensure that I was up to date with each new opinion pertinent to my practice. Fortunately, as a business attorney with a focus on construction law, I do not need to read every single opinion that is drafted and published (though I enjoy reviewing some of the criminal law opinions because they made for some good story telling).

So, I’ve developed a personal law library. In order to keep track of new opinions, I initially review the Maryland Lawyer section in Monday’s Daily Record, which provides a list of all of the previous week’s cases and a handy summary for each case. I circle cases I deem important for my practice and then have my legal assistant download them from the Judiciary’s website (a process that is free and environmentally friendly).

After I review the case and make electronic notes (I’ve only scratched the surface of PDFs’ wonderful features, though John Cord has written about this), I save the electronic version of the case in a folder in my Dropbox account (a cloud account that is free for the first 2GB).

Over the past few years, I have created an online, readily-available personal law library for myself. If a legal issue comes up, I can quickly determine if it’s something I already have researched. Obviously, I make sure the law is still good, but its the start that saves me time and our client’s money.

While this method works for me, are there any other methods that you use to help organize relevant cases you use?

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After approximately 10 years of teaching, a profession in which being a good colleague means showing up at an occasional department meeting, maybe cracking a few jokes and not offering any substantive comments that force the meeting to last any longer than absolutely necessary, I found myself in the legal world, where colleagueship has a completely different meaning.

All of a sudden, there was work to be done on deadline and I wasn’t the only one who would be doing it. Where I used to mark up students’ papers with abandon and be the final (and only) arbiter of quality and subpar work, I would now actually be working with other people who would mark up my work product (gasp!) and make suggestions for improvements to opinions, briefs and everything else I drafted.

Do I now know what it means to be a good colleague after a couple of years following this somewhat uncomfortable transition into the legal world? To see how much (or how little) I knew, I asked several attorneys I know — one government attorney, one at a large national firm, and one at a small firm — what they believe makes a good colleague.

Surprisingly, all of us (yes, even me) produced similar answers. So, with spring training right around the corner — Orioles pitchers and catchers report Feb. 18 — I have craftily compiled the main measures of attorney colleagueship into measurable statistics based upon familiar baseball stats. These can be used to evaluate all attorneys — new associates, senior counsel and even partners.

1. ERA (Earned Run Average) = meets Expectations, is Reliable and Accountable

In the feedback I got from almost every attorney I asked, these three traits appeared the most. Just like the baseball stat (which, yes, I know, is already a thing of the past) measures a pitcher’s reliability, this colleagueship statistic measures how well you do what you say you are going to do so that others can rely on you.

An implicit part of this aspect of colleagueship is actually understanding what you’re going to be able to accomplish over a specific time period and communicating that effectively to other colleagues. Unlike baseball, a high ERA as a colleague is a good thing. It means your colleagues can count on you, which means they will like to work with you.

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