Hanging Your Shingle with a Shoestring Budget: 10 Tips for Starting a Solo Practice

Whether you have been thinking about going out on your own or were recently laid-off, you may be planning a start-up solo practice. The problem may be starting as a pauper on a shoestring budget. "When Abraham Lincoln was an attorney he was able to do it," so you could be saying to yourself, "why can't I?"

The truth of the matter, as with starting any business, is that undercapitalization is a serious disadvantage to overcome. It can mean a swift crash-and-burn for any enterprise that is starting out. And there is the competition to deal with.

Here are 10 tips for the pauper-start-up, solo practice on a small budget:

Can a Lawyer Be Hired as a Paralegal? Adaptation in the Evolving Legal Environment

An interesting question posed by JDs and attorneys who no longer wish to practice is, "Can a lawyer be hired as a paralegal?" Or put another way, "Can a lawyer find work as a paralegal?" There are a few factors that can give rise to these questions: (1) the poor economy and downsizing of firms that are hiring paralegals over attorneys, (2) attorneys who are retired or relocated outside the jurisdiction where they used to practice, (3) attorneys who simply no longer want to practice law. The obvious negative factors are the attorney is disbarred or suspended and/or perhaps has some serious disciplinary actions on his or her license. Somewhere in the middle is the factor where an attorney is chronically unemployed and cannot get hired.  Underscoring all of these is the troubling "question" of the future for the "legal environment" and its "food chain" from which practitioners are to survive. Such is so because the above questions are being asked more frequently now than before.