Going Solo

Cam HallA Seattle Partner Retrieves the Cheese
By Steven T. Taylor / Law Practice Magazine

On many a workday in the late 1990s, Camden Hall found himself recalling that famous line from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  Hall was a long-time partner at Foster Pepper, one of Seattle’s larger law firms, and had been with the firm since he joined as an associate back in 1966.However, he was becoming increasingly disenchanted by forces in the changing big firm environment.

Among other things, Hall was disturbed by what he perceived to be the firm’s transformation into an eat what-you-kill culture. “I was generating work for others but it wasn’t reciprocal; I felt this wasn’t right,” he says.“So more and more, I disliked coming to work, and that’s not like me. I didn’t want to become one of those quietly desperate people.”

Then one day Hall read Who Moved My Cheese?, the lighthearted parable about change by Spencer Johnson, M.D., which shows readers that, like the mice in the book, when someone or something deprives you of happiness, or moves your cheese, you need to adapt. “That book basically changed my life because I realized that the reason I was at this law firm didn’t exist anymore,” he says. “Someone moved my cheese. So I said the hell with it. I need to take a big leap.” A big leap, indeed.

After more than 30 years as a partner, Hall quit Foster Pepper and set up a solo practice (www.camdenhall.com) in October 2002. It’s a diverse practice that encompasses complex business litigation, family and media law, alternative dispute resolution and appellate work.

Such a move doesn’t come without anxiety, of course, even for an established lawyer like Hall, someone with a big book of business and the ability to develop a strong client base. “I had many times,” he explains, “when I’d wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning and say, ‘I move to this new office and I have these bills—jeez, what if the phone doesn’t ring?’ But I did it anyway. And my only regret is that I didn’t do it 10 or 15 years earlier.”

Hall used $50,000 from his savings and took out a $50,000 loan to bankroll his business. That initial funding carried him through the first few months until he started generating income to pay back the loan and his savings account.

In the scheme of things, Hall realized that an investment of $100,000 wasn’t really all that much to get his own office going—and that’s true with the start-up costs for most solos. “When it comes down to it, you’re not talking about big dollars,” says James Orlow, a Philadelphia-based immigration lawyer who wrote the chapter “Capital and the Capitalization of the Solo Law Practice” for the 2005 ABA book Flying Solo: A Survival Guide for the Solo Lawyer, 4th Edition. “Sometimes attorneys have to ‘take a haircut,’ as they say in large firms, when you short-pay partners and pay them what they’re owed later. The same is true for a solo; some months he doesn’t take a regular draw.”

While all law firms experience lean months, Hall knows that solo practitioners are especially vulnerable. And that’s why early on in his new venture he set up a business savings account, which tides him over in the “thin times, and it’s there for me to pay my taxes,” he says. “If I get $100,000 from a client, I’ll use some of that to pay my expenses, some to pay myself and put $50,000 or so in the savings account. I
like to have a balance in the savings account to cover at least two months of expenses.”

Those expenses currently total $40,000 a month and include the salaries Hall pays his two paralegals, another lawyer and a secretary-receptionist he calls a “jack of all trades.”

His most important strategic move, Hall says, was to create a business plan. Any such plan must address several essential concerns, such as: What kind of business do you want to create and with what type of clientele? How will you attract those clients? How many staff will you hire, if any?

What might your expenses be? What sort of office space is compatible with your practice? Hall thinks this is something that anyone considering a solo practice should undertake. He admits, though, it wasn’t something that came naturally for him. “I didn’t know a business plan from a hole in the ground,” he says. “So I just got online and Googled ‘business plan,’ came up with some forms and went from there.”

Hall offers another piece of sage advice for those who want to go solo: “Don’t burn your bridges,” he counsels. “The attorneys at Foster Pepper and I have a cordial relationship. One of the senior partners refers a lot of business to me. There’s no reason to leave on a sour note.”

As published in the January/February 2007 edition of Law Practice Magazine