Planning Your Practice

"Planning Your Practice" is a practical guide to creating and
operating a private law practice of your own. The social and economic
forces that drove the creation of industrial-scale law practices in
the 20th century are offset by the technological and economic changes
of the 21st. In the post-epidemic economy, small legal practices and
lightweight collaborative organizations straddling the
for-profit/non-profit line will flourish. Learning how to plan a
career of self-sufficient law practice, mixing specialties that can
support you and specialties that can bring about positive social
change, is good for you even if you are sure that you want a job in
someone else's law practice, or to work in a public agency. Sometimes
we change our minds, or history changes them for us. Self-sufficiency
is the way most lawyers in the Anglo-American tradition practiced law
over the last thousand years. One whole course in law school is not
too much to devote to the idea.

The center of the course is the hypothetical future law practice each
student is planning, and the real one I built. We read about law firm
management for small practices. We study the way the real-life
decisions (about personnel, about office space and virtual
alternatives, about partnership and lifecycle, about IT and financial
management) are actually made, and how to make them. We discuss how
to balance the book and the nut so the lawyer has a life and work she
enjoys.

Enrollment by permission.