Are you Passing – On the Benefits of Being a “Home Office Lawyer” to Your Clients?

I have asked RJon Robins Founder of How To Make It Rain to provide guest post and other information for the Home Office Lawyer on marketing and rainmaking.’ This is the second and I hope you enjoy it.’ Please post comments and questions to this post and RJon will expand on his ideas and suggestions.

If a tree falls in the woods but there’s no-one there to hear it, does it still make a sound?

As anyone who is a regular reader of Grant’s Blog can tell you, there are plenty of benefits to practicing law from home. And these benefits get plenty of press. . . everything from being a living room rug commuter, to being able to practice law barefoot, and of course, one of my favorites: lower overhead!

But what does NOT get a lot of attention is whether or not any of these benefits are ever actually passed-onto clients in any kind of meaningful way. That is, not only whether or not the benefit is actually being passed onto your clients but also whether the benefit is being passed onto the client in such a way as to be recognized and appreciated by them.

Being A Better Lawyer Doesn’t Help You Get More Business

That’s right! Being a better lawyer doesn’t help you get more business. Like it or not, people generally do judge a book by its cover. And for the most part, clients have no way to know what a great lawyer you are unless and until they hire you and find out for themselves.

So you post a bunch of comments to this blog about why you’re a better lawyer because you get to avoid the morning commute in traffic. Maybe you even have a blog of your own where you make the case. But guess what? Most of your clients don’t read this blog, or even your own blog! So if you don’t tell them what the benefits are, they will have no way of knowing.

• No Commute = Lower Stress – If you believe that it benefits your clients to have a lawyer who arrives in the office at 8am with an extra hour of sleep, no stress from traffic, and with the peace of mind and positive feeling of having just dropped off his or her own kids at school instead of letting some stranger enjoy that important bonding “together” time, then tell them so!

• Lower Overhead – So you are of the opinion that not having to bill the first ten hours every month just to pay a landlord empowers you to make more objective strategic decisions that benefit the client? Most clients don’t have any idea, unless you educate them, how much cash-flow pressures can influence a lawyer’s strategic-decision-making abilities.

• Ability To Ramp-Up Quickly – It’s a fact that being a solo practitioner who practices from home has its limitations. It’s not like we have a bunch of partners and associates down the hall, to bring into our clients’ cases when there is a need for additional skills and expertise. . . or sometimes just for more physical labor.

But you have taken the initiative to make strategic relationships with other lawyers and law firms (yes, even big law firms) in order to ensure fluid delivery of service across a wide range of skills, expertise and practice areas.

What most of your clients won’t understand or appreciate, unless you explain it to them, is that even in big law firms the most successful Rainmakers usually have only a narrow area of practice in which their expertise runs deep. And just like you, they are focused on helping clients to solve their problems and maximize their opportunities. So they assemble and manage teams of the most qualified professionals for a given client’s unique needs, from both within and outside of their law firms. . . just like you do!

In a future blog posting I’ll cover Who you should focus on delivering these messages to (the answer may surprise you). I’ll also address some questions of How to go about delivering your message in a very professional, highly ethical and extremely profitable way that will produce repeat business, trigger referrals and reduce your stress.

By the way, in the works, is a little book Grant & I are collaborating on titled “Ten Benefits Of Being A Home Office Lawyer” in which we will identify ten of the most under-utilized benefits of practicing law from home. And by “under-utilized” we mean benefits which you can use to distinguish yourself from lawyers who practice in traditional offices so as to generate more and better business for yourself. Click HERE to learn how to reserve an advance copy for yourself, because the publisher will only make a limited initial printing.

Scott Bassett

Lower overhead allowed me to reduce my hourly rate to $225. Before I moved to Florida from Michigan in 2002, my hourly rate for appellate work was $300. That was based on the need to maintain an office in an upscale Detroit suburb.
I practice a very narrow specialty - Michigan appellate family law. There are relatively few attorneys who are well-known for this type of work, so the rate reduction was not necessary from a competition perspective. I continue to be offered more work than I can handle. The same is true of my colleagues back in Michigan who do family law appellate work.
Some of the clients who contact me question how it is possible to handle Michigan appellate work long-distance from Florida. They wonder if the cost will be higher. I explain to them how the use of technology in my practice, combined with my home-based operation, allowed me to reduce my hourly rate by 25% and save them substantial fees.
A typical Michigan family law appeal involves one trip to the Court of Appeals for oral argument. Most of my arguments are in Detroit or Lansing. In either case, I fly into Detroit because of much cheaper fares. Airfare between Tampa and Detroit is very reasonable, except for certain peak periods. I generally fly in the night before, staying at a budget hotel and renting a modest car. It is not uncommon for the entire cost of travel to be well under $400. Although I charge the travel costs to the client, the lower hourly rate more than makes up for it. In fact, some lawyers based in Michigan actually charge more that I do to handle an oral argument. I charge only for time at court, not for travel time to and from the Court of Appeals. Many Michigan-based appellate attorneys bill portal-to-portal. With their generally higher hourly rates ($300 plus), their fees for oral argument often exceed mine.
In addition to lower fees for the client, I can also respond more quickly to emergencies. I do all of my own typing, copying (Michigan does not yet accept electronic filing), shipping, etc. I am not dependent on anyone else's schedule. However, I must balance my heightened availability to work on emergencies with my family obligations. Although my kids are in high school and my wife works full-time for local government, life is much better if I can avoid having to work too many nights or weekends.
And as the holidays approach and the family obligation schedule becomes full, I tend to cut back on new matters so that I have more time to spend with my family (especially during the kids' school breaks). With my low overhead, choosing not to work as hard during such periods is possible. It would not be as possible in a traditional office setting. Fortunately, I maintain contact with my colleagues in tradtional office settings in Michigan. If I can't (or choose not to) take a case, there are several referral options available.
Overall, I think my home office arrangement, although long-distance from my client base, serves my clients very well.

Lisa Solomon

I hope that one of the benefits you will be discussing in your book is the ability to work during non-business hours when necessary. Working from home has allowed me to take on some urgent matters that I might otherwise have had to decline, because I knew that I could put in long hours without having to worry about: (1) who would be watching my children (because, for example, my husband was out of town and I had to work at night, while the kids were asleep); (2) driving late at night when I'm exhausted from work; or (3) my personal safety in and around an otherwise deserted office building.