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Bar News - January 20, 2006 2006 Midyear Meeting: 5 Questions for CLE Speaker Jay Foonberg
Q# 1 How did you become interested in law practice management? I am a lawyer, but before I became a lawyer, I was a CPA. It used to be that the ABA had a rule that if you were a lawyer and a CPA, you had to give up one license or another. I became concerned that lawyers were calling us lawyer/accountants bad guys. After a few years in practice, a group of us who were both attorneys and accountants decided to do something to show other lawyers we were not bad people. All of us had started our own law practices, so we put on a program to help other lawyers with how to start a practice – dealing with malpractice issues, building a library, the economics of buying books, how to get clients, and so on. Then, as now, most lawyers knew nothing about how to start a practice or how to satisfy clients. Q#2 Why don’t lawyers know how to run law practices? Law schools don’t teach anything about how to start a law practice. And lawyers don’t have a place to learn how. Today, if a new lawyer is lucky enough to get a job, they might go to work for a law firm where they spend three years hidden from clients, with no training or contact with them. In law practice today, no one has time to teach them. The people who tend to come to my seminars are older lawyers for whom the phone has stopped ringing and they don’t know what to do, new lawyers who are out on their own, and lawyers who have been in practice three to five years – they hate what they are doing, and they are either going to get out of the law, or start their own practice. Q#3 What’s the most important thing people need to know about how to practice law successfully. You need to satisfy clients. Almost all of the complaints filed against lawyers are by mistreated clients –most problems are not due to problems of competence. Q#4 Why should people come to your program? Anybody who comes to my program will come away with at least one idea they can immediately put to use, and they will see their practice grow. I believe in positive motivation—the promise of reward is better than the fear of punishment. The most common questions I get in my programs are: “How much cash do I need to start my own practice?” and “Where do I get clients?” I always ask the audience for questions and I will answer them. And what we talk about is applicable to so many attorneys – after all, 85 percent of attorneys practice in offices of five or fewer attorneys. And a middle-size law firm is just a group of solos. Q#5 You don’t do consulting and you aren’t running for President. Why are willing to travel to New Hampshire in February for a CLE? I really want to share this information with other lawyers so they can enjoy the practice of law, grow their practices, and not have complaints filed against them. Besides, I really want to see a moose. Bar News: We’ll see what we can do.
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