Practice Management

And no, I am not talking about a stat in the World of Warcraft, and I am not talking about the grandmaster pimp daddy of cheese and all things cheddary.

I am talking about the power of moving quickly and easily. The act of being nimble. A kind of practice dexterity. Quickwittednes. Acuteness. Alertness. Hustle. Readiness. Velocity. Intellectual acuity.

When you think about it, agility is really the greatest aspect of the Third Wave practice of law. It is the thing that both distinguishes the possibility of law today from the past, and it is what offers the greatest reduction in failure of lawyers and law firms today. It is what makes the solo practice of law enjoyable.

It simply did not exist when I started my practice in 1986. Then you could not change quickly regardless of what people thought. The reason was that we were tethered to everything. There was nothing that did not take long term planning, long term contracts, long term commitment, and long term expenses. Starting a practice really was more a gamble than it is today.

To open shop and to compete we would need to enter into a long term lease, so changing locations quickly would be difficult if not impossible.

Establishing an office phone took expensive equipment, which was generally leased long term, and long term contracts as to usage.  The space had to be wired to accommodate it. And, you could not easily leave the office because the phone was the lifeblood of the practice and it, along with the fax machine, was tethered to the wall.

Computers were expensive and huge. The printers were worse and noisy. They were not hooked to something called the "Interne"t. There were a couple examples of what they claimed were portable computers, but they were outrageously expensive, had small green screens and hardly any memory. The "floppy discs" were the size of a small pizza.  Hence, nobody I knew had a portable unit. You exchanged information in the office on those discs. And, the truth of the matter, there were not that many computers. Most of the law office world was still tied to IBM Selectric typewritters and CPTs.  (I gave my giant CPT the name "Bart" and made it wear a giant cowboy hat).

You sent out for pre-printed business cards, letterhead, envelops, and even pleadings and standard contracts. The cost was not necessarily cheap. They did not ship back to you in 24 hours. They were designed, proofed, corrected, proofed again, mostly by mail or repeated trips to the printing company.

Files were really physical files in physical file cabinets in physical space. If we took the file from the space nobody else would know anything about the case and could not do work on the case.

Law libraries constituted shelves and shelves of reporters. Think about what the law library looks like and then take away the Internet, broadband and computers. It was all manual, bulky, and took a long time. The pocket parts alone took many hours to maintain of the library was not useful.

All of this took a lot of space and it took a lot to manage. In short, it took a lot of dedicated staff. This all took a lot of overhead.

Most advertising constituted yellow pages. The ads grew increasingly larger and more expensive. Because of distribution we had to buy the space and design the ad six to eight months before the book came out and was distributed, and we could not change it for a year. If the ad did not work effectively because of its placement, content, or because we decided against pursuing the practice area, tough. We were in for the long haul.

Everything, and I mean everything, was tied to long term contracts.  Further, these contracts were never completed at the same time. They overlapped. A change of any type took forever to accomplish.

Because of the tethered and manual tasks, coupled with the lack of tech and no pliable equipment, we did not have the option of working from home and without a lease.

We did not have the option of working without hourly staff.

We did not have the option of changing the direction of practice decisions and practice area on short notice.

We were stuck.

Think about it today, tech,the Internet, accommodations, the attitudes of people in accepting alternative practice solutions, we can avoid the overhead, the leases, the equipment, the staffing and all of those things that tether us both financially and emotionally. We literally have the power to wake up in the morning and change your minds about marketing, direction, practice area, practice location, and change it by the afternoon.

I know we are still bound by the emotional aspect and uncertainty of it all, but it is not only imaginable - it is not only possible - it is readily doable.

It can represent the practice of law on a whim, and there is nothing wrong with that. Decide we do not like family law, then we can start a new blog, change our website, alter our voicemail message, and by the afternoon we can be a real estate lawyer starting anew.

Now, that is agility. And, it is what defines the Third Wave practice of law.