The Accidental Solo

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Roberto Allen had thought of going solo in the past, but it wasn’t part of his immediate plans until the economic reality hit him.

Roberto Allen should not have had trouble finding a job.

Allen was general counsel at Alba Therapeutics Corp. and has worked at Saul Ewing LLP and other big firms as an employment lawyer. In January, Alba, a small Baltimore pharmaceutical company, had to lay off more than half its workforce, including its in-house lawyer.

When Allen looked for work at another biotech company, he found that they weren’t hiring, and he soon saw that the general legal job market was clogged with thousands of other laid-off lawyers.

“I think my observation at the beginning of my job search [was] that if something didn’t happen in the first couple of months, it was just going to get harder,” he said.

Allen decided to do what many lawyers unable to find employment in this economic climate have done: he started his own firm. The Law Offices of Roberto Allen LLC opened for business in June. He had thought of going solo in the past, but it wasn’t part of his immediate plans until the economic reality hit him.

He will focus on employee-side employment law and consumer bankruptcy, two areas of the law that are strong in a recession. He is fluent in Spanish and hopes to further boost his practice by marketing himself to Spanish speakers.

Allen is optimistic but admits that launching his practice has not been easy.

“Like starting any new venture, you’re a little nervous because you don’t know when the phone’s going to start ringing,” he said.

From clerkship to shingle

Allen had years of experience practicing law before taking the solo plunge, but some are starting their own firms right after law school.

One 2008 Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law graduate is finishing up a judicial clerkship; when she’s done, she will open her own practice. The lawyer, who asked that her name not be used, said she thought a clerkship would give her a leg up in the job market, but “attorneys, whether small firm or larger firm, are just not hiring.”

She has leased an office and plans to start her criminal defense practice by signing up with referral services and putting her name down as a panel attorney with her local public defender’s office. The pay won’t be great, but it’s something.

She has attended a Maryland State Bar Association seminar called Hanging Out a Shingle, which gave the basics on starting a solo practice. Clerking may not have worked to her advantage when she was applying for jobs, but she said she thinks seeing the justice system up close and getting to meet local practitioners will help her in her new venture.

She said starting her legal career as a solo practitioner is a risk, but she said it’s better than the alternatives. Some of her law school friends are talking about applying for non-law jobs; one has mentioned the possibility of working as a salesclerk at Borders.

“I have been told by many different levels of attorneys, basically, you have balls to go out there and do it,” she said.

He is his own people

Kevin Joyce, also a 2008 Catholic graduate, said the lack of jobs drove him, too, to solo practice.

“I’d always wanted to go solo, not necessarily this early in my career, but the way it worked out is, frankly, there are no legal jobs for the people who graduated in 2007, 2008,” he said.

He had a clerk position at an Annapolis law firm last year. After he passed the bar exam, his supervisors talked about getting him cases to work on. But “a couple of cases went south” and Joyce was laid off in December.

For a few months, he did contract work for the firm while looking for another job, but he got frustrated with trying to convince potential employers that he was more qualified than the other 60 or 70 applicants. A recruiter told him his was the best résumé she had seen lately from a young lawyer and predicted that he would find a job within two months, he said.

That was in February.

He decided that now was the time to open his practice, Joyce & Associates LLC. He leased space from his old employer and started with one client, a friend of his, and now has seven, some with multiple cases. He is relying on word of mouth, Craigslist postings and online ads for clients.

He said he thinks it’s easier now than ever for a new lawyer to go solo. One Friday, a woman contacted him and said she needed a lawyer to go with her to a custody hearing Monday. Via e-mail, Joyce put the word out that he needed advice on the case. Two experienced family lawyers contacted him and briefed him on how to handle the matter. After a weekend of preparation, he went to court Monday and kept the woman from losing custody.

He does wish, though, that law school had prepared him for practicing in the real world, he said. He said Catholic has a reputation as giving students a better practical education than most schools, but it was still inadequate. Even as they struggle to find employment in a sour job market, new law graduates may be afraid to go solo because they are unprepared to manage a practice, he said.

“You don’t have someone else worrying about your trust account,” he said. “You don’t have all the services that being an associate or a partner in a law firm has. You’re your paralegal, your secretary — you’re everything.”

Thinking about it

Jeremy Robinson, a 2009 University of Baltimore School of Law graduate, is on the fence about opening his own practice. He and a couple of friends have talked about going into business together; none of them have found jobs.

“There just isn’t any work out there and the pay is depressed,” he said. “I certainly didn’t anticipate the market crashing and these large firms … sloughing thousands of lawyers inside of a couple of months.”

Plus, he’s always liked the idea of working for himself and keeping the income.

But he worries that starting his own practice won’t help him pay back Sallie Mae for those law school loans. He wonders about the wisdom of starting a practice when there are already so many solo lawyers out there, fighting for the same pool of clients.

Missing the office life

Mareco Edwards practiced with DLA Piper US LLP for two years after law school, but he left and went back to his pre-law school industry, the risk management business, where he was for nine months, until December of last year. He said he and his employer mutually decided that he would leave; he said he was frustrated because the company was not letting him hire new employees to work on a major project.

He assumed that with his years in business and his law degree, he would find a job. It didn’t happen.

“I would either get no callbacks or I was overqualified,” he said. “Everywhere I turned, it was a dead end, and it wasn’t because of me, it was because of the economy.”

In March, he took what little money he had, bought malpractice insurance, and started The Law Office of Mareco U. Edwards. Working from the basement of a friend’s house (it is closer to the courthouses in Ellicott City than his own), he has been doing civil litigation, both for plaintiffs and defendants. Much of the work has been on contingency, a problem, since he has a big family to support.

“There is some opportunity out there for me to have,” he said. “I just have to keep plugging away.”

Edwards said he misses the office life.

There are “times where I would drive by an office and I just want to say, ‘Just give me a corner, someplace to call home, something,’ ” he said.

Serious, but receptive

Some of the new solo practitioners say that while they are serious about making their new ventures work, they might still be receptive to job offers.

“I could do this for a couple of months and if someone swoops in with a great biotech job, I would have to give it a serious look,” Allen said.

Joyce said he is excited about his new practice but also ever-mindful that he has a wife and baby to support.

“Would I still like to have an associate position now?” He said. “Maybe just for security purposes, since I have a family, but if I was just sitting here on my own, no way.”

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