🔒West Hartford law firm’s growth strategy targets solo practitioners

During his more than 40-year career in law, Bart Halloran grew accustomed to 80-hour work weeks.

In that time, he’s litigated hundreds of cases and handled thousands of negotiations, mediations and arbitrations. He also served as the district counsel to the Metropolitan District Commission, overseeing all aspects of the $2 billion Clean Water Program.

But these days — having seen the educational challenges his seven-year-old autistic grandson has faced — Halloran is looking to focus more of his time and legal expertise addressing education law and less time on the business side of running a law firm.

So earlier this spring, he and his daughter and law partner, Kaitlin Halloran, consolidated their practice under the banner of BBB Attorneys, a West Hartford-based criminal defense and personal injury firm founded by Peter Bowman and Peter Billings.

The move reflects both a growth strategy for BBB Attorneys as well as a broader trend among law firms over the past decade toward consolidation, particularly among smaller one- or two-person practices with both younger and aging owners.

In 2010, according to the American Bar Association, there were just 39 law firm mergers. In 2019, there were 115, according to data from Altman Weil, which tracks industry mergers nationwide.

During the first quarter of 2021 alone, there were 26 merger announcements, following a slowdown in M&A activity during the pandemic.

Bowman is not surprised by those trends.  He says while solo legal practitioners are hardworking and dedicated, it’s becoming a model that is hard to successfully maintain long term.

He says the challenges of balancing running the business, litigating cases, addressing cyber risk and dealing with the consumer demands and expectations of a 21st-century client base are hard to balance.

“It’s a heavy burden to maintain,” Bowman said. “And solo practitioners are going to be at a disadvantage.”

Practice diversification

To increase its internal efficiency and external client communication and education, BBB has invested heavily in its technology and customer relationship management systems.  It’s a necessary investment, Bowman says, as technology becomes a bigger component of the legal system.

A 2020 Thomson Reuters report found that 82% of small U.S. law firms were planning to invest in technology, with 73% doing so to cut costs.

“The [technology] has been a big change to us, but it makes life easier,” said Kaitlin Halloran. “It’s enabled us to see assigned tasks, document the work being done, and track when people [on our team] are reaching out to clients.”

Bowman says BBB is also looking to make the law easier to understand for clients as part of an educational series of videos on a YouTube channel the firm launched.

“We want clients to get straightforward answers to provide some education about the [legal] system and how the process works, so we’re setting expectations,” Bowman said.

The first series was focused on real estate law. The next will feature personal injury law and probate — or the legal process for reviewing wills and trusts. Through another recent acquisition, Bowman says his firm is developing a probate litigation practice to assist clients with wealth-transfer planning.

“We’re going to see one of the largest generational transfers of wealth,” Bowman said. “And we want to be focused and prepared for the litigation needs of clients there.”

And as BBB Attorneys builds out its practice areas through mergers or partnerships, Bowman says, he’s finding more collaboration and benefits among his colleagues.

Bowman said he hopes that collaboration will translate into more referrals and business for the firm, which is one of the advantages of having legal expertise in several areas under the BBB brand.

“We want to make sure if we represent someone in an injury case, that they come back to us if they have [future] litigation needs [in another legal area],” he said.

To date, Bowman says, BBB’s approach to consolidation has helped increase revenue, which he declined to disclose.

BBB has grown to include eleven locations — mostly one-person satellite offices — with four main offices in Cheshire, Milford, Stratford and West Hartford.

It’s made three acquisitions in its history and is open to more deals and/or partnerships.

Those opportunities, Bowman predicts, will become more prevalent as seasoned attorneys, like Bart Halloran, look to scale back and younger attorneys look for more work-life balance.

For Bart Halloran, the move has been particularly gratifying, not only because he’s been able to transition to more of a consultative role and focus his time on education law, but also because he’s found fulfillment and energy being around younger attorneys.

He says his work on education law has exposed the gap he sees in the ability of people to afford legal representation when they need it.

Bowman said he hopes his firm’s consolidation approach and emphasis on technology will continue to drive more interest.

“We want to make it easier for lawyers to focus more on the practice of law and less on the administrative side of [it],” he said.