i could never girlboss too close to the sun because i have no idea how to boss
what seven years of ivy league education + six years of "elite" work did NOT teach me
If you’re a creative or run a creative business and want a crash course on legal issues, don’t miss Legal for Creatives on Tuesday, October 17! My law firm, Studio Legal, will be presenting an overview of legal issues and best practices. The event will be held both IRL (from 7-8:30pm at Index NYC) and over Zoom (with a recording of the event emailed to all registrants after). We’ll also be grabbing drinks afterwards, so come by and say hi if you’re available!
I did the one thing I thought I would never do: I started my own law firm.
When I was about to start my first big-girl, full-time job at 25, I was on the phone with my mom. She was excited for me—because what immigrant mom wouldn’t be excited to see their child starting a job that paid $180,000 a year?—but also added, “And then you can start your own law firm and run your own business!”
I scoffed. Why would I want to be in charge, when I could just be an employee and collect a large paycheck? Who cares about “having your own business?” My mom had been obsessed with “having your own business” ever since several of the pharmaceutical startups she’d worked at either downsized or folded. I found the entire notion silly—like many, I thought law was a stable industry. (Which, by the way, is a bit of a myth—if you’re a biglaw industry nerd, I write more about how I think AI will substantially displace junior associates in my recent guest post for
.)I wanted to be an employee and have someone else tell me what to do and then do that thing really well. Being a good employee was the perfect evolution of my only skillset: being a good student. There was no need for me to worry about ownership, of all things.
Oh, how the turntables have turned.
The thing is, I never intended to open my own law firm—or be entrepreneurial at all. Why? I learned a lot of things in school—how to analyze discrimination and legal discrimination using economic equations, how corporate law and tax law incentivizes creating businesses, and why the state cares about marriages and families so much—but I did not, not even in a single class, learn how to start or run a business. I couldn’t have hung up my own shingle even if I wanted to.1
I would hear about new law grads or second-year associates starting their own legal practices and think to myself, Uhh how? I’m more senior than them, and I don’t even think I know enough to start my own firm. This is malpractice waiting to happen.
But then I became a senior associate and got closer with partners and realized: No one really knows enough to do anything. I knew biglaw firms who pitched services to clients in which they barely had capabilities for. I heard of overworked, stressed-out partners giving work product back to associates and saying, “I hope this isn’t malpractice.” And I saw partners fail upwards, continuously and continuously.
This isn’t to say that all biglaw firms are a racket. Many biglaw firms are excellent and completely worth the cost in certain situations. But biglaw partners are not uniformly smarter, better, or more capable than other lawyers. Biglaw partners are figuring it out, just like the rest of us.
This realization—that even the most successful person in your eyes is also just figuring it out—can be freeing. I thought they had some plan that I didn’t, some blueprint that would only be bestowed upon me later, but they didn’t. There’s no secret. There’s just figuring it out, day by day.
But don’t worry, I still came up with a plan! (Have you met me?? Even if there isn’t one blueprint for all, I’m still going to come up with my own plan.) After I met someone I truly wanted to help and then started thinking about how to practice law again, I canvassed the world wide web for tips on how to start your own law firm. I met with former biglaw partners and associates who had started their own practices.
And I started setting up my own law firm. If you’re curious about the logistics of setting up your own legal practice, here you go!
Pick your law firm’s name. Confirm that the name is permitted under your state bar’s rules—New York, for example, only started permitting the use of trade names for law firms in 2020. So if Max and I had started our firm prior to 2020, we would have had to go with something like Xie & Zidel or Zidel & Xie. Which isn’t the worst, but also not really the vibe we want. You’ll also want to confirm with your state’s Department of State and domain registrars that the associated name and URL is available. (We found that there was already a Studio Legal in Australia, but we really liked the name so decided to use it anyway but with a .xyz URL.)
Form your corporate entity. What will you practice as—a sole proprietor? PLLC? PC? LLP (if you have more than one partners)? Reading your state’s rules on these various entities is helpful not just for you but also to help you advise clients in the future. Filing these documents with your state is also usually easier and faster than you would think.
Get an EIN (employment identification number) from the IRS. An EIN is pretty much required by all banks in order to open a business account. The IRS makes it super easy to apply for one online.
Open a business checking account. If you will be holding client funds in escrow, you’ll also need to open up a separate account for that purpose. If you don’t know where to open your business checking account, a good place to start is to call up you personal bank and see what financial products they offer for businesses. Your personal bank will usually be quite eager to help you open up a business account with them, as well.
Grab all of your online URLs and handles. Register your domain (I use Namecheap), host your website (I use Squarespace), design your website (Squarespace, again), register for handles on social media platforms including LinkedIn, etc.
Set up your business email and document management system. If you’re not trying to be fancy, just use Google Workspace.
Buy malpractice insurance. Technically, some states don’t require you to obtain malpractice insurance, but it’s a good idea. (I purchased mine through Embroker.)
Get an accountant and/or bookkeeper. I’ve never filed my own taxes due to financial anxiety, but it’s also prudent to hire an accountant to do your taxes once you have a business or multiple businesses. They can answer questions about what qualifies as a business expense, explain the potential benefits/costs from different taxation elections, and save you many hours come tax season. You can also hire a bookkeeper, who handles the day-to-day of your accounts, but I’ve found that I manage fine doing my own bookkeeping through Wave, which is also free to use for just bookkeeping. (Doing my own bookkeeping was also unintentional exposure therapy for my financial anxiety—by forcing myself to look at money every month, I eventually stopped feeling as anxious whenever I looked at my books.)
Sending invoices and receiving payments. I send out invoices through Wave (for free). Receiving payments through Wave requires paying a fee, so I usually request clients pay via ACH into one of my business checking accounts.
Design the pretty stuff. Logo? Letterhead? Brand colors? If you’re design-inclined, you can just play around on Squarespace and Canva yourself. Even if you’re not (and I count myself as not design-inclined), you can bootstrap the design stuff with Canva and then rebrand later (which I am doing at the moment with a real human designer!!).
Start marketing and drumming up business! This is often much easier said than done. Reach out to your network, post on LinkedIn, make content related to your practice on social media, write articles, say yes to panels and conferences, etc. etc. This is definitely the hardest part imo and what scared me away from the idea of having my own firm—I wanted to stay under the safe umbrella of the INSTITUTION OF BIGLAW forever. (But then I realized that if I ever made it to partner, I would have to develop my own business anyway so I might as well develop those skills earlier.)
It’s a little weird to admit, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to launch my own law firm had I not started creating content. Being a lawyer allowed me to double down on my perfectionist tendencies and rewarded me for freaking out over every errant comma or space. Creating content forced me to fail, flop, and hit Publish on things a little earlier than I would have otherwise liked.
There are pros and cons to both schemas, but the important thing is that doing both helped me balance out the cons of each schema. What we do for work will always impact how we think, even if we aren’t aware of it—so it’s important to be conscientious about countering any negative conditioning from whatever work you engage in.
If you’d like to learn more about Studio Legal, you can visit our website or follow along on our Instagram account. Unlike being an associate, I don’t know where any of this is going—but for the first time in my life, I think I’m okay with that. ◆
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Okay, that’s a bit of a stretch. I could have done my own research, networked, and self-taught myself. I just didn’t have the confidence and/or need to.
Agreed, Ivy and elite jobs don’t teach you how to run a business. Only on how to be an employee. Best of luck with the law firm. Should be a cool adventure.
Hey. Did you have things like labour law, tax law and stuff like different kinds of corporate entities in school?
Where I’m from there’s a subject dedicated to it in the freshman year of high school.