Most law firms are pyramids. One or two lawyers at the top, and each layer below has more lawyers than the layer above. The lawyers at the top are the big names, the one clients associate with the law firm. Here's the thing: the larger the pyramid, the less the lawyer at the top actually practices law. In some firms, the lawyer at the top of the pyramid works almost exclusively on client relations, generating new business and law firm administration. It doesn't matter how good that lawyer is, because it's very unlikely that he or she is actually going to handle your case.

Here are a couple of true stories.

In the first case, I had a client that did something really strange. A couple months after I filed his lawsuit in Federal Court, he went out and hired a second law firm, which filed his case in State Court. He didn't tell the second law firm that he had already hired me, and he didn't tell me that he had gone out and hired a different law firm. I didn't learn about it until the lawyer for the defendant brought it to my attention.

A client can fire his or her attorney at any time and hire another attorney, that's not a problem. The other firm that he hired was a familiar name that comes up in Google searches for employment discrimination lawyers. It has a fancy web site with an annoying "instant chat" (I'll write about the instant chat scam somewhere else) and boasts 12 lawyers. The lawyer that drafted my client's other complaint was somebody right out of law school, and the complaint had some serious flaws. My client decided to stick with the other firm, and his complaint was dismissed. Eventually he hired another law firm to do the appeal. The appeal was successful, but three years have gone by. This would have been avoided if the complaint had been drafted properly in the first instance.

The second story is even more heartbreaking. A potential client consulted with me on a very meritorious case. The problem was that the case had been mishandled by her previous lawyers, and it had been dismissed from Federal Court. A portion of the case had just been refiled in State Court. (When a case is brought in Federal Court, sometimes the judge will only decide the Federal claims and dismiss the State Law claims without prejudice to being refiled in State Court. You might get a second chance, so to speak, but only after a great deal of time has gone by.) Her previous lawyer was also a name that comes up in the searches all the time, with an even fancier web site and even more lawyers. Her case had been handled by a junior lawyer who left the firm in the middle of the case. An appeal had been filed in the Federal case, but the appeal brief was a disaster, because it had been written mainly by a law student and not a lawyer. Ultimately, I was unable to take on the case because of the errors of the previous law firm. This was a hard decision for me to make, because the client really needed and deserved proper representation.

Why does this happen?

When a lawyer has had a little success and his or her case load grows, it's only natural to hire another lawyer. As the practice grows, more lawyers will be hired. When you hire inexperienced lawyers, you have to supervise their work very closely if you want to maintain the level of quality. Supervising inexperienced lawyers is incredibly time intensive. I've found that supervising just two lawyers with modest levels of experience would take about 50 percent of the workday. This leaves just 50 percent of the day to work directly on cases.

Of course, if you're willing to let the quality of the work product slide, you can get by with spending less time supervising.

At some point, you have to decide: do you want to practice law, or do you want to grow a law firm? Believe me, you'll make a lot more money if you succeed at growing a law firm. Building a law firm is hard, and I give a lot of credit to those who can do so. But it is almost always the case that a firm with five to twenty five lawyers will be very inconsistent in the quality of its work.

Often building a law firm is done with the help of professional marketers. You always hear from these guys "you have to invest more time in marketing your firm." You're never told to invest more time in becoming a better lawyer. In fact, you're told that you're already good enough, that clients can't really tell the difference between good and great. If you're already good, don't worry about being great, focus on getting more clients.

When you go to a law firms's website, 99.9 percent of the time you are seeing the work of some marketing firm. I do things a little differently. Every word on this website is written by me. Ok, not quotes from cases or newspaper articles, but you know what I mean. This takes more time, a lot more time. I do this, because my name is on the website.

The same goes for handling cases. My name is on the door. I handle every case in the office. Your case won't get pawned off on some newly hired, minimally supervised lawyer. You hire me, you get me.












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