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Would you do it again?


BCLaw2021

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BCLaw2021
  • Lawyer

To solos and small firm partners who have made it past 5 years, and worked in private practice before, putting your ego and pride aside if you were given the chance to go back and choose again, would you make the same choice or go a different route?

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OntheVerge
  • Lawyer

This is oddly phrased with the inclusion of "ego and pride" as though sole practitioners are only soles because of such pride and ego making them unwilling to work for others. I'm not sure if that's the intent or just how it's coming across, but it might be why no one has responded to it yet. I'm also unsure of why there is a 5 year time period caveat on this question. Is the implication that only sole practitioners who have ran their practice for longer than 5 years are thus "successful" and the only ones suitable to answer the question?

I'll chime in regardless, although I'll admit to not being in the game for five years. There are pros and cons to running your own practice. I'm an associate (soon to be partner) at a small firm. There is a lot more administrative work that needs to be done, banking, paying bills, overseeing staff's pay and vacation, not to mention marketing and advertisement. You're not only working on the files and dealing with clients, but you're also responsible for running the business. Some sole practitioners I know (mostly crim defense) have low overhead and no staff, so there's not as much "running of the business" as there is when there's an office and 4-5 clerks working. But there are other big differences in an area of law like crim defence versus areas of transactional law and how sole practitioner operates in these respective areas. 

In one way, it's easier to be a lawyer at a big firm where you can just focus on your files and clients and call it a day. Someone else is dealing with everything else that comes up. But in another way, working in small firms or on your own...you don't answer to anybody. You set your own hours, work on your (and your client's) timelines, and you don't need to worry about getting assigned a file on Friday night that needs something handled over the weekend and due Monday morning. Or, as some friends tell me, running out the clock on a Friday afternoon when the work is done by 2:00 p.m. but they can't leave until 5:00 p.m. 

I personally don't think I could go back to a work environment where I don't have as much control over my day. I have flexibility in my hours and over the work that ends up on my desk. The trade-off is, as mentioned above, being responsible for the business and administrative side of things. But I don't think the reasons I prefer my work life now has anything to do with pride and/or ego. It's not a sense of ego that makes me like being able to control my work and my hours and learn how to run a business. 

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BCLaw2021
  • Lawyer

Hi there - the "ego and pride" comment, whether fair or not, implied that there might be some solos who quite frankly did not achieve the goals or purposes they set out to. It wasn't to imply that lawyers chose the solo route, because of their ego and pride. Was just curious to hear both success stories and non-success stories to get a better understanding of the varied experiences. Often times in social media there are selection biases, where we only hear of the success stories. There are several articles whether online or in lawyer magazines touting these successes, but very few on ones that didn't succeed. 

the "5 years" comment is to get a sense of the varied experiences of solo practitioners after they have had a chanced to get "settled in", it was purely an arbitrary number.

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33 minutes ago, BCLaw2021 said:

There are several articles whether online or in lawyer magazines touting these successes, but very few on ones that didn't succeed. 

The soles I know who didn’t succeed (insofar as they struggled to get work, didn’t like working alone, didn’t like all the administrative work, etc) mostly just got jobs at firms, clinics, or the government. As long as you keep your overhead low and don’t do anything that gets you disbarred, failing at sole practice can just mean closing your practice and moving on to another role. 

Edited by realpseudonym
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OntheVerge
  • Lawyer

@BCLaw2021 Ah, I see. Thank you for the clarification. I don't have any personal experience, but I do have a friend who opened up a sole practice right before Covid hit, and unfortunately, the timing was such that it never really got off the ground. He would have kept at it, as it takes time to build a successful practice but due to his family situation (newly married, wife unexpectedly pregnant, and other issues), he couldn't take the time to try to build it up like he'd been planning...especially with Covid throwing a wrench into things for the first few months. He's now a lawyer at a big corporation doing an area of law that he doesn't particularly like, but the pay is twice what he would be making if he'd continued as a sole. He's of the mind that the job is worth it for the pay cheque and his hobbies are the passions now, as opposed to pursuing the area of law that he was passionate about in law school. He tells me that he's glad of where he ended up and it works out well for him and his family, but that he still wishes the timing hadn't been so bad as he'd have liked to have given sole practice a fair try. So in his case, the regret is that he never felt he had a chance to give it a fair try.

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BCLaw2021
  • Lawyer

quite interesting - I've seen statistics online that suggest 20% of businesses fail in the first year and 60% within the first three years (for a variety of reasons - for your friend, it appears timing of entry was one of them). I'm curious about the failure rate in the legal profession. Once would think it would be lower, since there's an extra barrier of entry of getting licensed. In the US, there are approximately 1 lawyer for 300 people, that's a 0.3% ratio. According to FLSC, in 2019 there were 9,268 practicing insured lawyers in BC and 26,557 in ON. Without doing the math, that's still a lower ratio than in the US. 

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