According to the latest US Census, 2% of lawyers now telecommute. That’s up 166% in the last ten years and it’s one of the fastest growing categories. But it’s still a small number.
I’m guessing that most of these lawyers don’t see clients. They write, research, and perform other functions that don’t regularly require meeting people in person.
I’m also guessing that if The Census had used a different word than “telecommute,” the results would have been different. I think a lot of attorneys do at least some of their work from home. They don’t call it telecommuting, however, a word that is not usually associated with professionals.
I also think a growing number attorneys, sole practitioners primarily, work almost exclusively from home. They see clients at an office suite where they have so many hours a month available for that purpose, or other arrangements, i.e., using a conference room or spare office in another attorneys suite.
I work from home. When I “see” a client (lawyer), it’s done over the phone. My overhead is a fraction of what it was when I had an office and I love not having to commute. If I was practicing today, however, I would still have an office.
For one thing, I got a lot of walk-in clients in my practice. Existing clients would bring their papers to the office when it was convenient for them and if they needed help with those papers, someone needed to be there to provide that help.
In addition, my clients needed to see me in person, even if it was only greeting them before turning them over to a member of my staff. They needed to see me wearing the uniform (suit and tie) and to see that I was successful (i.e., nice furniture, etc.) Most of all, they needed to see that I was physically present, committed to the community and niche market that I served.
Over the years, I’ve talked to attorneys who have an office in their home and see clients there. I think this is a mistake. Clients have expectations about what an attorney does and they expect attorneys to have an office. When you deviate from what they expect, they get nervous. They may not say anything but they are surely wondering why you can’t afford a real office.
Without an office, it’s more difficult to attract clients. There are exceptions–entertainment law, for example, where working from (an expensive) home may actually provide even better posture. But for most attorneys, not having an office, in my opinion, costs more in terms of lost business and referrals than the amount saved by working from home.
I would probably have a smaller office today, however. You don’t need as much space today because a lot of work attorneys need done can be outsourced to virtual assistants or employees who work from home. I talked to a secretary for a California attorney recently. If she hadn’t told me, I would never had known she lives in Florida and works from home.
How about you? Do you do some or all of your work from home? Do you have a smaller office than you had in prior years? Let me know in the comments.
Can you imagine a world without lawyers? I’ll bet Amanda Knox can’t.
Lawyers are routinely vilified. Epithets abound. We are the subject of the cruelest jokes.
And yet, where do people turn when they are in trouble? Whom do they go to for advice when they want to protect their rights? Who defends the indefensible?
Amanda Knox was just released from an Italian prison after a four year nightmare. Without lawyers, she would still be languishing in her cell.
Without lawyers fighting the good fight, our rights, our entire way of life, would devolve and anarchy would ensue. We must never forget how important we are, not just to the individuals we serve, but to the society we live in.
In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Dick the Butcher says, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. This is often quoted as a denouncement of lawyers but it is a misreading. Dick was referring to ways a rebellion in the planning might be successful. He recognized that to succeed, they must get rid of those who know and enforce a system of laws. It is, in a roundabout way, an endorsement of lawyers.
Lawyers, be proud of what you do. Defend not just your clients but your profession. Educate your clients and your friends about what you do, but also why it matters.
But don’t stop there. When you see a colleague behaving in a way that belies the dignity of our profession, call him on it. Counsel him. And, if necessary, report him.
Be a champion of the high standards our oath demands and exemplify those standards in your words and deeds. Our profession must police itself. The alternative is a Bar that does it for us, but too often, they go too far.
In a victory for common sense, a Florida court just struck down as vague one of its Bar Association’s limits on lawyer advertising. A bar association should enact rules of professional conduct that define standards of behavior and it should provide redress for the most egregious transgressions of those standards. But when a bar association imposes vague, arbitrary, and unreasonable standards upon its members, as Florida has long been criticized for doing, it says to the world, “We don’t trust our members and neither should you.”
Bar associations can improve the image of lawyers not by policing them more but by trusting them more.