Legal News

Your Life Now? Working in a Virtual World

By Dan Slater

Imagine this: You’re a corporate lawyer living in Tiburon, a bucolic suburb of Marin County. In the morning, your lawyer friends don office-appropriate garb, hop the ferry, and then wend their way through the bustle of city life, arriving, ultimately, at a fancy San Fran firm, where their billing rates must be high enough to cover the costs of fancy offices and legions of fancy associates.

Now your life: After taking a few client calls from your home that overlooks the water, you see that it’s another beautiful day in the Bay Area. (After all, it’s incontrovertible fact that there are no bad days in the Bay Area.) So you pack up your laptop and a few files, walk down the street to Sam’s Cafe, take a table on the back deck, order Sam’s fish & chips, and finish up the day’s work as you communicate with your “partners” through a virtual law firm.

“It just seems like an idea whose time has come,” Craig Johnson told the Recorder. “Billing rates at large law firms have just gone up and up — it’s not unusual to find partners in the Bay Area billing $600, $700 or $800 an hour … They have to pay high salaries for associates, high profits per partner, and they feel they have to have prestigious offices — it’s just a situation that can’t continue.”

Johnson, 61, the Silicon Valley heavy who in 1993 founded the Venture Law Group — the firm that repped Yahoo! in its 1995 IPO and eventually merged with Heller Ehrman — is joining up with 14 other lawyers to unveil, this Friday, a new firm called Virtual Law Partners. The idea, reports the Recorder, is to have more work-life balance, work from home, save on overhead and charge clients less. VLP, says Johnson, aims to be like the other top firms in the country, with hundreds of lawyers, just without offices.

Will Virtual Law Partners take off, or has Johnson been enjoying too many of those tasty margaritas at Sam’s? Peter Zeughauser, a law firm consultant and founder of the Zeughauser Group, said that while he thinks Johnson is “brilliant,” Virtual Law Partners isn’t necessarily the next big idea. Zeughauser said that while the office-less model works for smaller matters and small groups of lawyers, heavier infrastructure is necessary for the type of work done by big law firms.

LB’ers: Check out the VLP Web site. One of the co-founders, Andrea Chavez (Harvard, Stanford law), is pictured, presumably with her significant and their dogs. Does VLP look good to you?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 16, 2008 (boomark / email).