Speaker 1: I started my own law firm, and in this video, I'll go over all of the tools and software and things that I use to start my law firm, as well as how I'm actually starting to get clients right off the bat. I'll try to link to anything that I'm using in the description, and those may or may not be affiliate links. So if you do sign up with those things, it might help out the channel. So thank you for that. I'll start with the legal entity that I'm using for this law firm. And when I say law firm right now, it's just a solo practice, though I do envision having someone joining me in the near future. But with that said, I chose an LLC for my legal practice. You can choose whatever you want if you're trying to start your own law firm. I chose an LLC because I'm a solo actor right now, so I can't do a partnership because you need a partner to do that. So an LLC is nice and flexible in that I could add another member in the future. Members of an LLC are the equivalent of partners in a partnership. And for me, I'm using a Texas LLC since this law firm is based in Texas. I personally am licensed to practice in both Illinois and Texas. I'll get back to that in just a second. But to set up my LLC, I use a service that I've used many times in the past, and that's Texas registered agent dot net. They're really easy to use. And I like having kind of one place for all of my LLCs since I have multiple beyond just this law firm. They're also the registered agent for my LLC because every LLC needs a registered agent, at least in the state of Texas. Now, I mentioned that this LLC is technically based in Texas, but because I'm also an Illinois attorney, I want to be able to practice there under my law firm name. And in order to do that, I needed to register this Texas LLC as a foreign LLC in Illinois. That's a whole separate filing. And I had to get a registered agent in Illinois as well, also using Texas registered agent dot net. So it's pretty easy to do all that. But it's just more things to worry about as I sort of expand the complexity of setting everything up and getting the LLC up and running in Texas took about a week and then it took another week after that to get it registered as a foreign LLC in Illinois. So we're looking at really a couple of weeks total. Now, I wasn't done there with registering the entity because I needed to do some extra steps for Illinois specifically. One of those things was to file this special form that they require for LLCs wanting to practice as a law firm in Illinois. It was a paper only filing in that I could not register online. And instead, I had to actually send in a physical piece of mail asking them for the right to practice law as my new LLC within the state. And the form basically just had me reiterate that I'm an Illinois attorney and that I have insurance, which are both required by Illinois law anyways to practice law. But they just really needed that piece of paper saying the same thing. Now, I'll get back to that in just a second. But I did mention that that form required me to confirm that I was insured based on the minimum standards set in the state of Illinois. So that meant I needed to get insurance from my law firm before I could send this form in. Now, right after I got confirmation that my LLC had been formed in the state of Texas, I went on over to Chase Bank and set up a business checking and saving account with them. And I also took out a credit card so I can start spending money in the name of the firm, not my personal name. And in order to open those accounts, I had to show proof that the LLC had been formed in Texas and that I had an EIN, which is a tax ID number that I got through the IRS. But once those accounts were open, I made a deposit into them and I got my credit card in the mail shortly thereafter. It was only a day or two later since they express shipped it to me and I was ready to start spending some money. One of the first purchases I made was for my domain name. DuffleyLaw.com did not want anyone to take that. Now that I had the entity set up, I bought it through GoDaddy and I used that for a number of other domains for other sites. And while we're on the topic of a website for web hosting, which is the service that sort of keeps your website alive and well on the Internet, I personally use Cloudways and I use them for other websites as well. And I haven't had any problems to this point. And I was specifically to host a WordPress site. DuffleyLaw.com currently is a WordPress site, and I use WordPress for a number of other websites as well that I run. So I was already pretty used to it. And the WordPress theme that I'm using on the website at the moment is Astra Pro. And Astra Pro is a relatively fast theme compared to many others. That's something I really value in whatever theme I'm picking. And it seems to be pretty customizable. I've only been using it for a little while, but so far so good. I plan on adding a lot more content to that website as time goes along. But I set up a quick contact form and put some information on there about myself and my law practice so that anyone who came to it could see what I'm all about. And if all looks good, they can potentially ask me for legal services, which is the whole point of this operation. Now, after I bought my domain, I also subscribed for Microsoft 365, which is sort of their suite of products, including Outlook, Microsoft Word and all the other Microsoft products. And it allows me to access it online as well. So you get a copy of the office app, but also can access it remotely as well, which is important for me since I do sometimes find myself doing work on the move. But that's not really any different than G Suite, which is the other option I was considering. But a lot of stuff in the legal world does tend to lean towards Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word and all those Microsoft tools. So I wanted to lean in that direction. And if Microsoft could somehow find a way to integrate the search capabilities of Gmail into Outlook, that would be super wonderful. A man can dream. But signing up for Microsoft 365 also allowed me to get my custom email address set up so that it was custom to my website name and it wasn't just an ad Gmail or at Outlook dot com. And one other tool that I signed up for was Adobe Acrobat. And that would allow me to edit PDFs, rearrange documents and do a number of things that are very useful in the practice of law. So I signed up for that. But the biggest purchase I had to make while getting everything started was for insurance, specifically professional liability insurance. And I also added a cyber insurance policy on top of that to make sure that I would be covered in the event of some disaster during the practice of law. Now, every state's going to have different insurance requirements for attorneys, some more stringent or more lax than others. And in the case of Illinois, specifically, in order to finish filling out that form to get the right to practice law under an LLC, I needed to attest that I had insurance that met the standards set by the state. And the insurance provider that I used was Embroker. And it was a pretty straightforward process. I don't have really any complaints about it. It was pretty easy to get going. When it comes to getting a professional liability policy as an attorney, they're going to have questions about what kind of practice area are you going into? Are you currently doing? Do you have past cases or things that we should have to worry about or anything like that? So you're asking a lot of those questions because I was a new practice. It was a little bit hard to say exactly what my split would be on the types of work I'd be doing. But I gave my best estimate. And personally, I'm mainly a real estate attorney, but I'll be doing some small business and corporate work as well. So I made sure to let them know that I wanted to be covered for those areas. And if I wanted to add any very different practice areas, maybe something on the criminal law side of things, I'd probably want to make sure I talk to them and make sure that I'd be covered. And if I needed to adjust my policy, then I'd have to do that. But either way, I want to make sure that I'm covered not only for regulatory purposes, but also for my own practice purposes, because if something bad were to happen, I'd want to make sure that I'd be covered and that my prospective client would be covered as well. If I made some silly mistake, they'd at least have some significant recourse there. That's the whole purpose of professional liability insurance or malpractice insurance, and that's why it's required in so many different industries. But anyways, once I was insured, I could finally send that piece of paper off to the state of Illinois, that literal piece of paper in the mail. And that took about two weeks or so from sending to get a response back. I actually called them to confirm that they received it and that everything was OK because they had to send the confirmation back to me by mail as well. So there was a delay there. So I wanted to make sure that I was good to go. So I called them. They said I was. And I was officially up and running in both the state of Texas and Illinois. All in all, that process took about a month from start to finish to get up and running. But I still needed something to actually run my practice through. And the software I chose and so far I'm quite happy with is Clio. Clio is a management software for law firms, and you can use it for a lot of things from tracking time to billing clients, to making a calendar with all sorts of tasks and activities to pay attention to. So it's just a really all in one solution compared to many of the other things that I've seen and some of the things I've worked with in the past as well. It's a really fairly easy to use, but fairly deep piece of software. And I got some positive feedback about it from some other attorneys who use it. So that was a good vote of confidence. It also integrates well with Microsoft 365 so I can upload my emails that I want to file there as well as documents as well. You can upload documents into Clio and set up templates and forms and just a lot you can really do with it, which is really nice to have it all in one place. But it also integrates with QuickBooks, which is a piece of software I didn't mention. QuickBooks is what I'm using to track my books to get going. And by books, I mean tracking income, expenses and all that good stuff that I'm going to need come tax time and making sure that that is all clean and tracked. And QuickBooks integrates with Chase so that if I make a transaction on Chase, it'll show up on QuickBooks and I just have to categorize any transactions that come in and I can set up auto filters for that, too. So I could do a lot of that automatically, but that's what I'm using there. But anyways, back to Clio, I might do some sort of deep dive onto Clio, maybe how to use it, maybe a full review or something like that after I've used it for some time, because there's definitely a lot there and it is a pretty powerful tool and it might be worthwhile to give it its own dedicated video. So let me know if you guys want to see that in the future. But that's pretty much everything I'm using to run my law firm. I might be forgetting some item here, but that should be all the big ticket ones at least and a number of the smaller ticket ones. But I did promise that I would talk about how I'm getting initial clients because I am starting to bill already, even though we're only less than two months into getting this practice going and really only a month since I've been allowed to practice once I got my permission from the state of Illinois. But one of the more obvious sources of business would be my existing network in that I know people who are buying real estate, selling real estate, who are starting their own companies and need help. So there are a lot of people that I know that are doing things and they need help with those things, at least on the legal side. I can offer my services that way. So that's one way I'm getting initial clients. Haven't gotten too many of those quite yet. But one area I didn't think of until after I started this process and after I kind of let everyone know that I was going to be starting my own practice was actually getting work from other law firms. And I guess this is pretty common for small law firms in that rather than hiring a full time attorney or full time employee, they will instead have an independent contractor arrangement with another attorney or another law firm, and they'll send excess work to that attorney. And in that way, the law firm has some excess capacity to take on new work, but doesn't necessarily have to take the risk of bringing on a full time employee when they're not sure whether they can meet their hours or give them enough hours to make them a profitable hire. So it's an interesting strategy that apparently a good number of smaller law firms use that I really just wasn't aware of before I started this. But that's how I'm getting a good chunk of hours off the bat. So it should be a nice way to sort of supplement my initial runway, I guess, as I try and bring in new clients from other areas using we'll call them my own efforts rather than just having excess work from some other law firms shared to me. Granted, it's all good work. And it's a tool I'll consider using the other way around as my practice grows. And if I get a bunch of work and I'm worried about whether I can justify bringing on another associate, it's good to kind of know some other law firms or solo practitioners who I could send that work to. They could kind of help me out by giving me some extra capacity, maybe some extra experience. It's all good stuff. And if everyone kind of share that work, it should make everything better in the long run, both for my own practice and for their practice. So I'll definitely be keeping that in mind in the future. But in the meantime, I've been letting more and more people know that I now have my own law practice, and that should be a pretty effective way to build more reach and potentially land some more clients. I'm pretty confident about things going forward. Everything's gotten off to a pretty good start, all things considered. So I really just want to keep pushing forward and trying to build the practice But above all, the most effective marketing strategy will be to do good work. So that's everything I used to start my own law firm and how I got things going. Be sure to subscribe if you enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next one.