One curious reaction to my post yesterday about what it means to be a lawyer in the Age of Layoffs was to read into my message that I was another voice in the chorus of “Go Solo, Young Lawyer.”  This is not entirely surprising, since I was Professor Number 1 of Solo Practice University, before being summarily booted out on my butt for being far uglier than the shameless marketers distinguished faculty.

Since I’ll never have the opportunity to shape young minds and help them to take charge of their futures at SPU, I’ll have to make do with an occasional post here to address some of the points that I would have made over there.  It’s just as well, since Susan Cartier Leibel would not have been completely happy with me anyway, my charming personality notwithstanding.

Not everyone is cut out for solo practice.

There.  I’ve said it.

While the practice of law, what we as individual attorneys do on behalf of a client, is unchanged regardless of where we happen to call our home, the nature of our surroundings varies wildly.  Whether we work within a corporate structure, or in your basic 7000 person law firm, with one old friend in the next office or all by your lonesome, we remain lawyers. 

But not everyone is temperamentally suited to being on your own.  Some thrive on the risk and excitement of flying without a parachute, while others can’t bear the pressure.  Some enjoy the control over their world, small though it may be, while others hear only the echo of an empty room ringing in their ears, and that echo can be deafening.

Even those of us who have spent our entire career as solo or small firm practitioners have days when we think about how wonderful it would be to get a paycheck at the end of the week rather than sit staring at the phone, willing it to ring, knowing that the electric bill was due.

The argument that some suffer the burden of crushing law school debt, making it impossible for them to enjoy the panacea of solo practice with the bells and whistles that the solo apostles inform them are minimally required, misses the point.  There is no assurance that you’re going to earn the monster salary that Biglaw dangled before you, but there’s no assurance you won’t either.  If you’re as good as mommy told you, then why fear the marketplace for your talents?  

But it can be lonely practicing solo.  When you hear a funny joke, there’s no one to share it with.  When a client makes your life miserable, who do you turn to?  If you’re pondering deep legal thoughts, where’s the friend to tell you you’re nuts?

There are ways around all of this, of course.  The Sages of Solo will tell you to create a “network”, because the word “network” is one of the premier buzzwords intended to make you overlook your well-founded discomfort.  Networks can be wonderful.  They can also be a disaster, depending on how useful, honest and worthy your network turns out to be.  Most likely, they will have attributes of both, and it will be up to you to figure out which is which.  You’ve got to have great risk tolerance to be a solo.

None of us is so brilliant that, left to our own devices, we will always get it right.

Yet the solo practitioner can take no comfort when the day comes that he screws up.  And it will.  No matter how hard we try, no matter how risk tolerant or risk averse, no matter how deliberative or active, a solo practitioner must ultimately make his own decisions and will make some wrong ones.  Some will make a lot of wrong ones.  These decisions will affect clients.  They will impact business.  It’s tough to come home after a hard day and explain to one’s spouse about the horrendously stupid thing you did today.  It’s much nicer to come home a hero, but it isn’t going to work that way every day.  Get used to it.

The difference between screwing up in a law firm versus screwing up solo is that there’s no one else to blame.  It’s all you, baby.  While some mistakes will be annoying, and some will affect nothing besides your own wallet, some will have dire consequences for people who have bet their life on your making the right call.  These are the hardest, as you can shrug off the consequences of your own errors when you’re paying the full price, but you know, in your heart, that a mistake that affects a client is the one that crushes your very reason for being. 

Then there’s the ringing phone syndrome.  The only proper way to describe this is as a chronic disease, as it never quite goes away no matter how long you practice law. 

Large firms represent large clients who have a never ending stream of legal work to be performed, more closely resembling a never-ending merry-go-round than individualized representation.  Of course, that stops when the large clients goes bankrupt and the firm collapsed under a huge pile of monogram-embossed redwelds, but that’s a story for another day.

Solo practitioners live case by case, client by client.  Some days, the phone rings 10 times, and each ring brings a person in need of your services.  Some days, the phone is silent.  No matter how many years and phone calls you enjoy, no matter how many times you’ve been asked to appear on Fox News or MSNBC, no matter how many notches in your ever-increasing belt, there is one fear that every solo practitioner shares.  That the phone has fallen permanently silent.

It’s not a phenomenon afflicting only lawyers, but having company spanning all professions makes this no more comforting.  After 25 years of living this way, one might assume that I’ve been cured of this chronic disease, knowing that the phone will assuredly ring again, if not today then tomorrow, and bring with it some great new case that will keep me far too busy, giving me yet another reason to complain.  But it doesn’t work this way.  No one is ever cured of this disease.  It stays with you until the day you take your shingle down. 

For those well-suited to a solo practice, the ringing phone syndrome is more of a nagging pain, radiating from your frontal lobe to your fingertips.  You know it’s there, but can shake it off and work through the pain.  For those who are less-well-suited to solo practice, the disease can become a deep fear, causing shuddering, uncontrolled twitching and inexplicably watering eyes when the end of the day rolls around and the phone has yet to ring. 

This is the fear exploited by the marketers, by the way, who promise that they have the secret to making your phone ring.  How wonderful to have someone else take the horrible weight off your solo-shoulders of making that telephone emit the most joyous of all sounds.  One reason that lovers o’ marketing turn sycophantic is that they are no longer truly solo, having found broader shoulder than their own to carry the burden of overwhelming fear.  If the weight of this fear is too much for you to carry alone, then it is likely that you are not cut out for solo.

Perhaps the interested opponents of these thoughts will provide you with a pep talk full of many thousands of warm words and fuzzy ideas.  But I’m not part of the chorus.  I’m a solo.