Speaker 1: So I just saw this douchebag with a V8 Audi and his license tag said Lawyer Up. This is going to be a series of vlogs about starting a law practice. What I'm going to do is, on my way home on Friday afternoons, kind of give you an update about how it's going. Put my seatbelt on so we don't have to hear that the whole time. I'm about six weeks into it right now and talking to a buddy, we thought this would be a pretty good idea for a vlog. So we'll drive home with me and I'll tell you how it's been so far. It's been really slow, I've got a brick and mortar office here downtown and I've had a few cases here and there, a couple of people want to write contracts, little bitty things but getting repeat referrals is something that doesn't happen obviously in the first couple of months. I've got a couple of appointments to this week and those are good but the thing about those is you don't get paid right away because number one the case has to be finished before you can submit it for billing and number two it's you bill the state so it takes from what I heard it takes three months or so to get paid for what I did Wednesday. What I did today, the case is still open, so as long as it stays open, you can't bill for it. So, in the long run, those will be coming in from past business, you know, so hopefully it'll be some kind of regular income. While you try to drum up your clientele, and with a referral-based business, it seems like that's something that takes a while. Some weeks I had to make a penny. What I did was I sold a couple of Harleys, kind of get a little bit of cushion money to live on until I actually start making my own money. And so I can make it feasibly till around, you want your lane or my lane? For about a year with making no money. Hopefully I make some money and I don't have to deplete my whole life savings. That's the goal. Hopefully I can start replenishing actually my life savings. That would be in excess of my goal. But you know I was realistic going in knowing that I had to have this extra money so I would be able to live at least somewhat comfortably. I haven't turned off my cable yet or anything like that, but it's slow going. For the past 15 years, I was an IT manager, and that's a comfortable job, but it turned into a dead-end job because I haven't got us a nice bike. I don't know if you can see it. I haven't got a race in two years because it's the economy, I guess, or maybe I was at the top of my pay scale, whatever it was. So I said, well, I'm glad I was in law school at the time and I graduated, took the bar and on December 31st was my last day of a steady paycheck. And I started on January 4th as a lawyer. So what's going to happen is every Friday I'm going to make a video. Hopefully I posted it that Friday, but if something happens and I have something going on it'll be later in the weekend or you know as soon as possible thereafter. We'll probably take this same route every time because what we're going to do is drive from my office to my PO box which is right on my route to the house pretty much. And uh you know kind of discuss how the week went. I don't know if anybody be interested but it seems to me that uh it's something interesting to chronicle whether or not the firm makes it throughout the year and who knows by uh october i might be riding around in a 1994 honda civic that i had to sell this car to get so i could have a little more money to live on or i might be riding a nice motorcycle if things go really exceptional it'd be nice to have another one again uh like i said i got a brick-and-mortar office. I'll post some pictures so you can see on the video here and I'll also try to keep you know whatever anybody wants to see about it. Obviously everything has to be things that are not confidential. I can't discuss anything obviously about case or anything. Just the general vague aspects of opening a law firm and solo practice straight out of law school. And that's gonna be, I wonder, like I said, about every Friday. If anybody has any questions, feel free to post them and I'll answer them as we go. And we'll just go from there and see how the year, you know, how the year goes. It's a nice day today as you can see. I figured I'd do it on the, you know, give you the driving view because why the hell do you want to look at me the whole time? So I just stuck the phone over here on the windshield And it's kind of like a scenic little view while we're driving, discussing things. So I got a P.O. Box because I don't know how long I'm going to be in the office where I am. The P.O. Box is very affordable. It's like a hundred bucks every six months or something like that. And then I got my office. I got, you had to buy, the first initial costs are just outstanding. You gotta pay $300 for your license and $200 if you wanna have a federal court, you know, to be able to go into the federal district court, which I don't need right now, but it's nice to go ahead and get it, so I got it. Then it's about $1,000 in office equipment to get started, unless you already have it. Furniture, if you don't have suits you need a couple of few suits, I had a few I had like seven suits so I guess that's not, I try not to wear suits unless I know I'm going to be in court or meeting judges. So the first week what I did was go around and meet every judge that you can meet, you just knock on the door go under there, they're called the chambers but it's really the office. meet the judicial assistant, give your card, ask to be put on the rotation for appointments for indigent defendants or whoever and we have here in Alabama in Jefferson County a public defender's office so they get most of those cases in the criminal court unless there's something where they have a conflict of interest something like they would have a one person they're prosecuting that was arrested at the same time with another person obviously they can't prosecute they can't defend both of them at the same time unless both defendants agree and you know waive the right to have independent counsel and then you lose some confidentiality there so it's best to have separate defense attorneys so when that happens it's nice because the court has to appoint an independent lawyer, and usually that's one that is on the appointed list. I've found that is probably one of the best ways to get cases initially, is to get appointed because like I said, you're not going to have referrals coming in right away because nobody really knows you're practicing and it's hard to just, you can't just stop and buy TV time and billboard time because you don't have the money for that so I set up a website and I got all my specific social medias for my that are related to my law website which is not related to this site at all I'm Greg Alabama here and you know I guess if you're a sleuth you can find where my real law site is and look around. But I'm not going to put links to that on here because this is not an attorney advertisement. This has nothing to do with referring clients. This is just kind of a day and a week in the life, I guess you'd say, of somebody starting a practice. So I'm about to turn into my mailbox and I'll see you guys next week. Please like, subscribe, link, and share, and have a good day.