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This is a unique position.
I am looking for a young attorney who would like to help grow an actual business - the practice of law.
To apply, please read the material below - if it sounds like a good fit, send me a resume and a short letter pitching yourself to me. I hate stuffy cover letters filled with fluff. Talk to me - don't dictate to me.
A few notes:
- This is a Bring Your Own Device work place - I use a mac. We have a lot of online software we use that I'll set you up with.
- You'll get a desk in my office (I have a corner office with floor to ceiling windows on the first floor of a small office complex - the office space is decently nice with some interesting industrial/copper mining styling to it). We may eventually move you into your own office, but as you'll see below, I'm largely trying to insulate you from demands other attorneys in the firm may place upon you. Work should flow from me to you, so we can focus on developing a transactional practice.
- This position could provide a lot of flexibility and I am not going to demand normal law firm hours. I want a life. I also hope we can enjoy our working relationship.
- I am likely to want to start you on a trial basis, while we determine if we have a good working relationship. Thereafter we could renegotiate.
What I really need is this: I do a lot of work for my managing partner, and it makes it difficult sometimes for me to service my own clients. However, recently I got pretty sick and haven't been in to the office for literally months. In this time however, my own practice has exploded. It's been one of the best things that could have happened for my actual business. This happened, in large part, because I wasn't getting much work from my partner - and I was able to focus on and get work for my own use.
What I'm looking for then is someone who will be willing to work under my wing - you would report directly and only to me. I would often source you work coming from my boss, but you would not directly report to him. I need someone to help me with my own clients, or to redirect work from the firm so I can work on my own clients. I'm hoping you will be that person.
A problem here however: my own clients are not sufficient to give you a full time job - not yet. I want it to be though. So my proposition is this: you work for me, I try to give you work, and we work together to build the practice. As work comes in, your plate gets filled up more, you make more money, etc. etc. If the relationship is good, I am happy to pay well and maintain a long term relationship. Fortunately, where I am unable to provide you work directly for my practice, I believe I should be able to redirect firm work to you. We have NEVER lacked for work in the firm - my boss put in over 2400 hours last year. He is a business generation machine.
My clients and work range from very small to very large. I represent an exotic car dealership, a small real estate investor, I do some probate work, I represent a non-profit, and just this week largely wrapped up an over $1 billion loan transaction. My practice is largely transactional, but my firm is largely litigation based, although we do have some transactional work (my main project with the firm is a $20 million hospital project). I have some solid ideas on how to build a more robust practice and I would like you to help with that. My boss and I have a side project that I believe could also be lucrative related to Probate law.
To understand better, some context on me may be helpful:
I myself am a younger attorney - I graduated in 2014 from the University of Chicago where I attended on a full-ride scholarship. I struggled to find a job after law school and ended up working with an unusually flexible attorney. We then started our own firm two years ago. I largely get to make my own hours, come to work when I want, travel, work remotely - sort of do whatever. I get the job done and do all sorts of random things probably not expected of a normal big law attorney, but it's worked relatively well for me. Importantly to me, I'm not putting in as many hours as a big law attorney typically - which I appreciate.
Now - because of the way I started out, I basically did anything and everything for this attorney (my present boss). I would run errands, get things notarized, mail stuff - just do whatever it took to help the business succeed. I was an attorney, licensed to practice, but I recognized that we also ran a business. I was paid the same regardless of whether I was mailing documents or writing memos - so I didn't care.
In contrast, we recently had a young attorney working for us who just didn't like doing this business stuff - he just wanted to be an attorney. He was fired.
