Speaker 1: Hi, and welcome to today's program. I am your host, Cliff Enico, and our program today is Starting a Solo Practice, Business, Legal, and Ethical Issues. A couple of words about me to begin with. First of all, my name is Cliff Enico, and I've been an attorney now for 40 years. That's four zero. I find it hard to believe it sometimes. For 25 of those years, I have been a solo practitioner, an extreme solo practitioner, working out of my spare bedroom, otherwise known as the home office, in Fairfield, Connecticut. I've actually not left the home office in 25 years. My wife is very nice that way. She puts food under the door. She checks to make sure I'm still breathing. It's nice that way. Obviously, I'm kidding about that. But seriously, I have been a solo practitioner now for a very long time. What I'm going to be sharing with you today is some of the real world stuff that I've learned over the last two and a half decades of practicing solo. My practice tends to focus ... Let me tell you a little bit about myself and my practice. I'm a small business attorney. I work primarily with small businesses, entrepreneurs, people starting tech startups, that kind of thing. I'm really an entrepreneur's lawyer. My claim to fame back in the 1990s, I was the host of the very first Shark Tank type TV show on television. It was called Money Hunt, and it ran on public television, PBS, from 1994 to 2003. Not exactly the same as today's Shark Tank, but widely considered to be one of the precursors of the Shark Tank type reality shows for entrepreneurs. That's my claim to fame. Over the last 40 years, I have probably worked with well over 30,000 startup businesses of all kinds. That is my practice in a nutshell. It's relevant to you because when you're starting a solo practice, you are an entrepreneur. You are just like my clients in many ways. One of the reasons I became a lawyer, when I came out of college in 1975, I really didn't know what to do with myself. I was thinking about going to law school, but there were other things that attracted me. I was very big into broadcasting. I did a lot of radio in college, and I was thinking about maybe going into that. I spoke to a bunch of people about this career choice, and I'll never forget, I did speak to a lawyer, and I do not remember what his name was, and I regret that. This was back in the summer of 1976, but he told me something. He goes, Cliff, the thing about being a lawyer is if things just don't work out for you, you can always hang out your shingle and go on your own. Lawyers may not get rich. They may never be 1%, but they never starve. Even a small-town attorney in nowhere upstate New York may be making a low six-figure salary doing what he does, he or she does. That was impressive to me. With a degree in broadcast management, if I got laid off by a TV station, where was I going to go? With the law, you always had that fallback, that plan B. It was one of the reasons why I became a lawyer. You are an entrepreneur. You are starting a business from scratch, just like all of the last 30,000 clients that I've worked with over the last 40 years. The law is a profession. It is. There are some very strict ethical rules involved here, which we're going to be talking about later on, but it's also a business in many ways. As I always tell people, lawyers always get hung up on ethical stuff, especially when they have to market their practices. They think, oh, I can't do that. I can't do that. It's unprofessional. I always tell people it is impossible to commit an ethical violation if you don't have any clients. If you don't have any clients, who's going to sue you? Who is the plaintiff here? There is none. I tell people, by all means, you must practice ethically. You must practice professionally, but you have to market your practice. You have to get out there. You have to build that book of business. Otherwise, the phone stops ringing after a while, and then you starve. It's not a good thing. You have to run your practice the same way that you run a business. Again, being mindful of the rules of ethics, but making sure that you always have a flow of business, a pipeline of business to keep you going. Like any business, any startup business, if you don't plan, you don't succeed. Every startup business needs a business plan, and a solo law practice is no different. If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland says that. My personal favorite is Buckaroo Bonsai, the Zen superhero from the 1980s. He always used to say, no matter where you go, there you are. That's it. Where do you want to be in 20 years? If you're starting a practice right now, where do you want to be? Do you just want to be making a living? Do you want to grow a practice, have associates and partners, and ultimately cash out by selling to somebody else, or have another generation of lawyers take over? This is the kind of business planning you have to do.