By the time I had my heart attack last year, I was already in the process of transitioning out of legal practice. I had dissolved my law firm a few months earlier and was wrapping up the last remaining cases and taking on only a limited amount of simple, flat-fee work. There were several reasons for this change, but the most important one was that after 7 years in practice, the last 5 of which were with my firm, I just didn’t enjoy it any more. In fact, I’d grown to hate many aspects of it.

A Failed, or At Least Flawed, Experiment

As it turns out, all those folks who warned me against the experimental, non-traditional business model on which my law firm was based were kinda right. I guess all the other lawyers in the world aren’t just greedy bastards or something. Sure, some of them are, but most are just following a business model that ensures the continuation of their practices.

The majority – at least a simple majority – of our clients were diligent about making monthly payments. I don’t want to make it sound like everyone we represented ended up stiffing us, but the longer we were in practice, the more often it seemed to happen. Most people would keep up with their monthly payments at the start, but by the time we were done representing them, they were done with bothering to pay us. In most cases, the monthly payment amount was little more than our hourly rate; since basically no case gets done in an hour a month, virtually all our clients ended up owing us monthly payments for a year or more after their case was complete. A hefty percentage of our clients failed to honor that obligation.

I don’t believe the cause of nonpayment was malice or dissatisfaction with our services. Our clients were very complimentary about our representation. I received thank you cards and referrals throughout the tenure of the firm. One lovely former client even sent me flowers when she heard about my heart attack. I’m not really sure how she got my home address, but it was a day-brightener. She still sends me encouraging cards periodically to cheerlead my recovery. Even in a case where I failed to achieve the result my client wanted and in which the outcome was tragically unjust, the client wrote me a touching letter afterward, thanking me for working so hard for her cause.

Of those who didn’t pay, I think the reason for most of them was twofold: (1) our target market was people who were of modest means to start with and (2) the economy tanked. Also, we’d shown concern and sensitivity to their financial situations from the start, insisting that they propose a monthly payment that would not affect their ability to pay their rent or feed their kids. We went so far as to have a policy that if they had an emergency or something like a child’s birthday, we would permit them to skip a payment so they could take care of their family. They just needed to tell us in advance and not simply disappear. I routinely excused my poorest clients from their December payment so they could use the money for the holidays. I tried to be clear that their payments literally kept the firm’s lights on, but in retrospect, I suppose our flexibility on such matters may have given them the impression that their payments were not as necessary as they actually were to my firm’s month-to-month survival.

Finally, one of the ways we kept costs down was to not have a billing/collections employee. That meant when people didn’t pay, my partner and I were the ones with the awkward task of collections. As I handled the accounting and the majority of the administrative tasks for the firm, I wrote all the billing and collection letters to people. It was challenging. On the one hand, I was grumpy with the people who flaked; I’d performed my half of our deal and, in most cases, got them exactly what they wanted. It felt disrespectful and like a betrayal of my trust when they didn’t perform their part. On the other hand, these were people whose lives I knew intimately. I knew their financial struggles, their tumultuous relationships and, in some cases, the abuses they suffered.

Dunning them made me feel bad. But the truth was if people didn’t pay their bills, there would be no firm to provide the services and flexibility we did. Intellectually, I knew that what I was doing was reasonable; emotionally and psychologically, though, the process was draining and made me dread a fair portion of my workload. Eventually, we had to change our model a bit.

After one winter where it seemed like 90% of our clients were MIA, it was too much. I worked long hours, diligently advocating for these people and their behavior was threatening my kids’ ability to have a good Christmas. I struggled with feeling bitter and angry with the people I was representing and had represented in the past. We ended up raising our hourly rate to be in line with the low end of what the traditional firms were charging. We started insisting on retainers that would cover the entirety of the first wave of work we’d have to do, just so we’d be guaranteed to be paid at least for those hours. We cut our pro bono practice down significantly. We couldn’t afford to have so many voluntarily free cases when we were also ending up with so many involuntarily free cases.

We probably changed things too late to make a difference. We began to have a slightly different clientele, one that never blinked an eye at our new hourly fee or retainer requirement, but we still had a roster full of folks from earlier who paid very small monthly payments or who weren’t paying at all. Despite the advice of every lawyer I knew, I never fired a single client for non-payment. I knew that I should. I knew that I was being taken advantage of. But I couldn’t do it. We only accepted cases where we believed our client’s cause was just. Our clients didn’t come to us expressing a desire to hurt their ex or manipulate their kids. Aside from the money business, these were folks with legitimate, meritorious cases – and no money. If I fired them, they were not going to find representation elsewhere.

By the very end, paychecks were an infrequent luxury. My last year in practice, I made less than minimum wage – about $10k for the year. It was clear to me that I was not cut out for being a business owner in this profession. Whereas I had excelled working at the non-profit, I became miserable with stress of running a private practice. I was reminded of this routinely, as I still volunteered at a pro se clinic once a quarter. Clients came in, I helped them, and they left. No money changed hands. It was so simple.

Next time, Why I Stopped Practicing Law, pt II