What Is A Solo Practitioner?

When I am asked "what should I call you", my typical response is "call me anything you want as long as you call me for lunch".  I guess the this is pretty much the same answer I would give to Eric Turkewitz over at New York Personal Injury Law Blog concerning his question about who might be and who might not be a solo practitioner. 

(By the way, I had a homemade Philly-style cheesesteak and homemake hot vegetable soup for lunch today, and man was it good, and I ate it while watching Family Fued on TV, which I mention hoping you will be powerfully jealous of me).

Most often I refer to myself as a Third Wave attorney because I think this encompasses much more than just the solo practice of law.  It is meant to describe a different way to practicing law, one that embodies adhocracies, fluid organizations and lifestyles, and rejects the Industrial era standards of standardization, centralization, concentration, synchronization and bureaucracy.  We believe in mass customization, the elimination of costly overhead, time and frustration.

Now, from my standpoint, solo practitioners are more closely associated with this direction.  They are certainly better at adapting to it.  As such, I tend to refer to myself as a solo, but I do not know if I really represent that more cut-and-dried term.

It is simply hard to define these adhocracies, these fluid organizations, these adaptive attorneys, and these loosely affiliated organizations that derive from the need to serve the new prosumer class.  We are essentially freelancers all collaborating on some common goals or cases.

For me, the case is signed up under my name and my firm.  I work from my home.  The settlement comes to me and I place it in my escrow account.  And, then I make distributions to the other attorneys on the case according to our terms.  I then provide a 1099 to those attorneys for the money paid each year.  Are we a law firm in the traditional sense?  We are not.  Am I something more than a solo practitioner?  That point could probably be argued.  However, these attorneys with which I work online are regularly associated, which is the real requirement for sharing fees.  We work together often and on a lot of cases.  Only I do not pay for their staff, I do not pay for their office space (if any), I do not pay for their transportation.  I do not provide them a desk, a computer, a broadband access line.  Each covers their own.  What we share is a commonality of desire to help our shared client by prosecuting their case in a way that is synergetic, coordinated, deliberate and interdependent.  We are, it could be described, as a collaboration of solos.

So the final answer is that for me the term solo is a bit muddled in this day and age.  It means for me in the final analysis a desire to be out on your own, and in control of your own time and work product, with a degree of flexibility as to your work hours and obligations, in which you answer primarily to your family and to yourself.  Call it the Third Wave, hanging a shingle, the home office lawyer, the future lawyer, the connected lawyer, the collaborative lawyer, it really makes no difference.  Whether working at home, working from an office, or from the local Starbucks, it really matters little to me.  You are my compatriot, my ally, my consociate, my pal, my hero.  The point is that when the number one starts with you, then you are a solo in fact or in heart, and that is all that matters.