🔒Lawyer-entrepreneurs face growing pains

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After working in consumer protection, Hartford attorney Sarah Poriss started a solo practice 11 years ago when she realized that people sued for unpaid debts needed legal representation.

To get her business off the ground, Poriss kept rates low and minimized overhead costs by working out of her house, gradually moving into more professional offices to her present Farmington Avenue location. Since 2014, she's slowly grown her practice, hiring a paralegal and administrative assistant and adding a second lawyer in January.

Finding a legal niche, in what is now largely defending people facing foreclosure, was the easy part, she recalls.

“The biggest challenge was establishing myself,” Poriss said. “In law school, you're taught: 'You're lawyers. You're smart. You're elite. Clients will fall over us to pay us.' It doesn't work that way. You have to learn how to run a business.”

Poriss represents what some say is a growing number of Connecticut lawyers who own a solo or small legal practice, and whose challenges of running the business end of the profession is as important, if not more complicated, than practicing law itself.

That's led to a rise in programs and incubators — including ones established by UConn and the American Bar Association — that aim to assist lawyer-entrepreneurs in getting their business off the ground.

Small by choice

According to the American Bar Association, where membership is voluntary, more than 975,000, or three-quarters of the nation's 1.3 million licensed lawyers (including non-members), work in private practice. Of those 975,000, 49 percent are solo practitioners, and three-fourths of the rest work in small firms of two-to-five lawyers, the ABA said.

In Connecticut, membership in the Connecticut Bar Association is also voluntary, and about 9,000 members represent half of all the attorneys in the state, said Vice President Jonathan Shapiro. Of those 9,000, nearly half — 47 percent — work at solo or small practices, he said.

Exact data on the total number and/or growth of small practices in Connecticut aren't readily available, but anecdotally some lawyers say they're growing.

Stephen Curley, a Stamford solo attorney who left larger law firms in 2002 to start his own practice, said he sees more solo practitioners in Connecticut than ever before, along with an increase in very small firms amid a consolidation of larger practices. He attributes that change largely to technological innovation.

“The big firms no longer need the huge classes of newly minted lawyers coming into their ranks because research can be done more quickly,” he said. “One person can do research electronically with greater efficiency and you don't need that army of attorneys to do [it].”

In 2015, four lawyers left midsize Hartford law firm Rome McGuigan P.C., which had 14 attorneys and 11 partners as of Oct. 2016, to form a boutique firm, Ruel, Ruel, Goings & Britt.

“We wanted to create our own infrastructure,” said Dara Goings, who with Deb and Jim Ruel focus on family and matrimonial law. (Rob Britt works in criminal defense.)

“Divorce clients like the privacy [of a small firm],” Goings said. “Personal matters are taken care of in a private and sophisticated setting.”

Britt said she has set up cloud-based software so the practice is paperless. The team also outfitted their own office suite at One Constitution Plaza in Hartford.

James Leipold, executive director of the National Association of Law Placement (NALP), which monitors what jobs law graduates take 10 months after receiving their degrees, said under normal circumstances 3 percent to 4 percent of recent graduates open their own shop.

Most recently, in 2015, 3.4 percent of recent graduates started solo law firms, while 40 percent of graduates took jobs at small firms with two to 10 lawyers.

Those numbers were down from their peak in 2011, when the legal industry was still reeling from the Great Recession.

‘The business end of things’

Attorneys and other state experts note that what is consistent is the need for lawyers starting out to get help with the business end of the job.

Challenges include not only paying rent for office space, but managing billing and documentation systems, having health insurance and a retirement plan, managing time off and attracting clients who need and can afford services.

“Many law firms fail because they're not focused on the business end of things,” Goings said. “It's all about being able to be in control and design your own business and have it be a custom-built law firm. We all know how to be lawyers, but lawyers are not trained to be entrepreneurs. So you have to figure that out.”

One place where a handful of solo practitioners are getting entrepreneurial training is at the UConn School of Law's new Connecticut Community Law Center in Hartford. The center, which opened in March, has five solo attorneys who over the course of two years will use the center's offices as they work to establish practices focused on social justice and affordability for clients of modest means.

“Incubators have been growing and getting stronger and there's a movement afoot supported by the American Bar Association to sustain these incubators and help people sustain their own solo practice,” said Law Center Director Mark Schreier. “This is an opportunity for people to be their own boss and get the opportunity for training and mentorship.”

David Wolf, 46, of Oxford, recently set up his law office at the UConn incubator, and said just getting the right Internal Revenue Service tax identification and learning about how to keep client funds separate from earnings — a legal requirement — were eye-opening.

Wolf is a full-time police officer in Westport who has always had a yearning to be a lawyer and address legal matters in court. He earned his law degree in 2015 from UConn and plans to retire within the next five years and run a part-time solo practice until he can pursue it full time.

Learning more about the right ways to establish a startup firm that operates effectively as a business is part of what the incubator can teach him, he said.

Cynthea Motschmann, 36, of Farmington, also just started at UConn's incubator. She said she values the mentorship, office space and other types of support the center is providing.

“Working at a [small or large] firm you have these challenges, but it's a little difficult when you're a solo attorney because you don't have the staff to help you, so you have to rely on networking and colleagues,” Motschmann said. “This program is a great idea and it's definitely fostering a support system for all of us here.”

Growth tips

Growing from a solo to small practice also can be a challenge, albeit one many would like to have.

Meghan Freed of Freed Marcroft LLC in Hartford originally started a solo practice, but then partnered with her life partner, Kristen Marcroft, to grow the firm.

“I had done big firms and needed to decide what was next, and I really wanted to take the skills I had learned in those large environments and translate them into skills that would serve individuals instead of corporations,” Freed recalled.

Figuring out health plans was a major challenge, along with how to switch gears from corporate finance to marital and family law, a decision she and Marcroft made together.

“We hired a business coach [who] said you absolutely have to focus your practice; that's critical to thriving,” Freed said. “We both instantly said [we wanted to focus on] divorce and family law.”

For Poriss, managing growth also means learning to say no to some clients.

“We don't take everybody who wants to work with us,” she said. “Lawyers who do that are going to be broke and burnt out and make mistakes.”

Nationwide, American Bar Association President Linda Klein, who last year met with solo and small firm attorneys in small cities all over the country, followed up by launching “ABA Blueprint” in the fall — a suite of virtual and practical products and consulting services aimed directly at the solo and small market.

That relatively new program, available to ABA members and nonmembers for various monthly fees, integrates tools so attorneys don't have to try out products on their own that later prove incompatible.

“I'm very excited about this program, because I believe it will enable the lawyers at smaller firms to compete with larger firms and bring access to justice to more people,” Klein said.