The perfect practice should mean something.  What I mean is this:  what you do as a lawyer should mean something.  Now this varies from person to person — not everyone feels that you need to champion some cause or work for the greater good of humanity with every breath — but it should mean something to you.

I bring this up because it’s a problem I’ve been having at my job recently.  As I handled what seemed like my bazzillionith commercial landlord-tenant case, where the goal was simply to stall and let the tenant (our client) stay as long as possible, I realized how little I cared for what I was doing.  Sure, it’s important to our clients — the longer they get to stay somewhere, the longer they stay in business (for some clients, like some restaurants we work for, leaving a location is basically the death of the business).  It’s not important to me however.  I feel like I’m not really doing anything but pushing some papers around and asking for adjournments.  Not a great feeling.

So what do I consider important?  I’m not totally sure.   I’ve yet to find that area of civil law where I can honestly say that I’m doing something important.  When I was working in a prosecutor’s office, it was easy to find that.  So what am I destined for?  Maybe a job with Child Protective Services?  Maybe guardian ad litem work for children?  Who knows.  Maybe I’ll find it in PI work.  Whatever it may be, it needs to be important.

The firm I’m currently working at is a litigation based general practice firm.  Basically, if it’s litigation, we take it (along with the rare transactional matter for our long-term clients).  This is a great thing for me — I’m getting exposure to a number of different areas of litigation practice.  Of course, this philosophy of taking it all has me thinking about the future launch of my own practice.

When you open up your own small firm, you have to ask yourself — do I want to be a generalist or a niche-ist?  That’s right — niche-ist, not specialist (I steer clear of the term specialist because a number of states are considering having “specialist” certifications for different practice areas, a philospohy I’m opposed to for a number of reasons I’ll discuss at a later time).

The answer to that question really comes down to several different factors.  First, you have your desired practice areas.  You may only want to do estate planning, or criminal defense work, or you may want to practice in a large number of areas.

Second, you have your target location.  This can be very important.  If you’re planning on running your practice in a small town/isolated community, you’ll probably have to be a generalist — there likely won’t be enough business in a particular practice area to support you.  Of course, if you have a working spouse and only want to practice a little on the side while raising kids (or some other situation akin to this), you can probably then get by limiting your practice areas.  If you plan on practicing in a large metropolis, then you’re probably better off finding a niche.

Third, you need to consider your future clientele.  Who do you want to serve?  If you want to serve Fortune 500 companies, you need to figure out what they’re looking for in outside counsel.  Are they looking for someone who has a niche practice in commercial litgation, or someone with a practice that does criminal defense, personal injury, commercial litigation, estate planning and elder law, among other things?  If you want to serve the poor/underprivileged/disenfranchised, look at the practice areas they’re most likely to need representation in.  Large scale commercial litigation, insurance defense and intellectual property law are probably not their biggest concerns.

Of course, what it really comes down to is which of these factors is most important to you.  Perhaps you really want to do estate planning — you’ll fnd a location that makes it work and an appropriate target market.  You’re from a small town and really want to spend the rest of your life there?  You’ll open a practice that provides a broad enough range of legal services to support yourself.  You don’t care about money — you’re still that bright-eyed, bushy-tailed idealist out of law school?  You’ll open a practice to serve the people you want to help.

The important thing is figuring out which of these factors is most important to you, and defining your ideal practice in such a way that it address all three factors.

So what do I think would make a perfect practice?  Well, there are a number of factors.

First, technology.  I want to utilize technology as fully and efficiently as possible, in order to streamline business and legal processes.  In a perfect practice, business processes would be streamlined to the point that they require de minimus time and could be resolved with a few keystrokes.  Legal processes would also be streamlined, so time could be sent resolving client concerns.

This of course, leads into the second factor: clients.  A perfect practice acknowledges a simple truth — we, as lawyers, exist to help clients.  My perfect practice will be client driven and results oriented.  While I do believe that the practice of law is a business as well as a profession, I also believe that when diligent, professional and quality service is provided to clients, money will follow.  The primary drive of the practice should be to provide the proper service to clients.

The concept of money and clients leads to the third factor: alternative billing.  The perfect practice uses the perfect billing method.  I’m planning on using some form of value billing, though I’m still working out the details.  This of course ties back into streamlined processes — value billing requires less paperwork than something like hourly billing.

There will be more components to this philosophy, which will be dissected and discussed further in the future.