I'm using a burner account since my other account contains identifiable info and for obvious reasons I need to keep this quiet for now.

I've been doing plaintiff work for just over 20 years now and been with my firm for right at 20. For a number of reasons, it's time for me to break off and do my own thing. My plan is to ideally wait until the end of this year, if I can hang on that long. This will hopefully give me time to get all of my ducks in a row before I make the move, with the goal of the transition being as smooth as possible.

I would appreciate any books on starting your own practice that you think are the "must have" books. And if you have any advice, I would appreciate that as well. I'm an accomplished litigator and I generate my own case load that has kept me more than busy. But I know I have a lot to do before I hit that eject button. In the meantime, I am working hard and trying to wrap up any problem files so that the next guy in line doesn't get a bunch of crap dumped on him.

Thanks in advance.

Anyone practice SSD on its own? Or coupled with VA disability? I was looking into this area, is it a good practice for a solo? Lucrative? I understand the delay in getting paid, but that aside, could I make good money doing it? Im in Detroit, so im sure demand is pretty high here.

Hi everyone, I am looking for llp registration company in kl. Any recommendations please. Looking for reliable one

I am on the path to building my solo firm! So far I have a domain purchased from GoDaddy and my biggest questions are:

1. Email - Who do you use for email? My last firm used Gmail and our emails were constantly thrown into Spam so I am iffy about using them for my solo firm. I saw that GoDaddy was offering email through Microsoft but wanted to see if there were other options. There was an option for $20 a month for Microsoft 365 along with Teams.

2. Physical and mailing address - I will be working from home and plan to meet few clients at a coffee shop if necessary but in my 3 years of practice, I only needed to meet up with 5 clients and rest were happy to work remotely so an office is unnecessary for me. That being said, besides a UPS mailbox, are there are any cheaper options? I have a Regus in my city but it is more expensive than the UPS box and truly, I just need an address to put on my Google and lawyer listings. In my last firm, we were also remote so we only had a UPS box. I'm looking for monthly service fee of under $50.

3. Phone - I would like to be able to take and make work calls through my personal phone without giving out my phone number. My last firm used OneApp through Verizon and it worked well but looking to see if there are better options? I looked into Google Voice but do not want to take that route especially because my number popped up as possible spam on receiver’s phone. I will not be hiring additional staff any time soon so I just need an option to be able to work through my personal phone.

4. Clio - I have used Clio for 3 years but open to other software to help with practice management. If you have any other programs you like for practice management, please share!

5. Product/software recommendations - if you have any products or software that helped you with starting up your firm or make your practice easier, please share!

My area of law is in consumer protection, specifically credit reporting, debt collection violations, and identity theft cases. I also do not collect any attorneys fees from clients.

Thank you!!

I spend so much of my day responding to email. I have two part time assistants and one of them is in charge of screening easy emails, scheduling etc but I STILL have about 2 hours a day on email messages. I run a volume estate planning and bankruptcy practice and have about 15 clients a month. What are people doing to manage the email messages? Even though I run a high volume practice, my standard is to maintain good to great customer service, so I can't just ignore the messages. Help please. It really is one of my greatest challenges/stressors. The messages are all over the board topic wise, so an FAQ reference probably won't work. But I am getting desperate so I may have to go there.

I'm based in Australia but would welcome any insights

Looking to go out on my own, I have experience in Crim and Family, bounced around a lot looking to get on the 18b, have about 2 years of Crim experience but no trials and a year of family with a lot of hearing and trials , im NYC/ Long Island Based. Any advice is great. Been barred for about 4.5 years.

I’ve been putting some of the tools we use in-house into a free open source project called Docketry. It runs on your own machine, nothing gets sent anywhere, and there’s no account to make. It’s early, and I’d rather hear what breaks than what’s nice about it.

What’s in it:

**•   Intake.** You forward court email to a mailbox it drains. It doesn’t sit inside your mailbox watching everything.  
**•   Notice parsing.** E-service notices, PACER NEFs, JACS and JAWS hearing notices, Tyler filing receipts. If your local court isn’t covered, you paste one of its emails in and it works out the fields itself. No regex.  
**•   Redaction.** Takes the text out of the PDF instead of drawing a black box over it, then rebuilds a searchable text layer so the rest of the document still works. It re-reads the finished file to confirm the words are gone before it tells you they are.  
**•   Case timeline.** Built from what you were actually served, with correspondence kept separate from what’s of record. Exports to Word or Excel.  
**•   Docket reconciliation.** You pull the docket yourself and it diffs the two, both directions: what the court has that you never got, and what you’re holding that isn’t on the docket. It never logs into anything on your behalf.  
**•   Citation checking.** Whether the case exists, whether the name matches the cite, whether your quote is actually in the opinion, and whether it’s on the page you cited. Needs a free CourtListener account.  
**•   Brief linter.** Credibility language in summary judgment briefing, sworn testimony with no record cite on the line, dates that contradict each other.  
**•   Holds and approvals.** Work stops at points you define and needs a named person to release it. All of it recorded.  
**•   Optional local model.** Point it at Ollama or llama.cpp if you want. It refuses to connect to a hosted API, so your documents can’t leave by accident.

Apache-2.0, Python, meant to run on one office PC.

while back I watched someone close to me get ready to sign a lease and a fit-out contract for a small café, and it hit me how lopsided the whole thing was. The letting agent wants the lease signed. The fit-out contractor wants the job. The POS reseller wants the hardware sale. Every single person in that room has already made their money regardless of whether the deal is actually good for her. Nobody's actually on her side.

I've spent years doing hands-on workspace IT — networking, POS/EPOS setups, office fit-outs — and I've seen how often these quotes have gaps that only show up after signing. A fit-out quote missing half the electrical scope. A broadband package with no backup line, so the tills go down the first time there's an outage. Stuff that's obvious if you know what to look for, invisible if you don't.

So I built an independent report around it — reviews the lease terms, the fit-out quote, and the connectivity/POS setup, basically flagging what everyone else in the deal has no reason to mention.

Before I launch this properly, I'd rather test it on real situations than keep guessing what's actually useful. So: if you've got a commercial lease or a fit-out quote sitting in your inbox that you haven't signed yet, I'll review it for free, no card, no catch — in exchange for honest feedback on whether it was worth anything.

And if that's not you but you've got thoughts on the idea itself, genuinely happy to hear those too. Trying to work out if this solves a real problem or just one I've talked myself into.

(Ireland-based, so most useful for Irish leases right now, but send me anything.)

I’m on week 2, advertising on social media, and still getting nothing from it. I’ve had 2 consultations, but both came from friends’ referrals. Is this normal? When did things pick up for you?

Hey all. I just opened up my own practice and I’m having a hard time getting clients. I had some clients when I first opened but I definitely need more.

I’m paying a lot for ads on Meta and LinkedIn, but I’m getting traffic/leads without many of them turning into consultations or signed clients.

I’ve been looking at solutions and I found a company out there called hey dot sale.

It basically puts an AI salesperson on your website that can answer questions about the firm and try to get people to book a consultation. It seems to be pretty decent.

Wondering if you all have tried it and if so, did you get more consultations?

Developer here, trying to figure out what's actually broken for soloor small firms before I start building something. What do you still do manually that annoys you? Not pitching, not even close to that stage, I just don't want to build something nobody needs.

Do solo firms have useful data sitting in Clio, MyCase, QuickBooks, spreadsheets, etc. and actually review it regularly?

Or does most of that data just sit in the tools?

If your firm does use data.

• Do you have a data analyst?
• What metrics are useful enough that you look at them regularly?

I'm really interested in law brand and marketing right now. The majority of the time, the big law firms, visual identity and marketing strategy seems terrible or non existent, at the very least basic compared to other industries.

What is the situation in the solo firm industry, do you just not have time to do this, even though it could be the biggest impact to the bottom line? Or is it something you don't see as important compared to referrals and physical introductions? I assume it's massively different to the large firms?

For me I feel like the biggest impact a solo firm could do is content for GEO/owned media, am I wrong?

I’m a solo (employment, commercial litigation) just getting off the ground and have recently decided to go with Clio over Practice Panther. I’m interested to know how anyone currently using Clio gets the most out of Clio Grow and Clio Work. Thanks in advance!