Raising an Entrepreneur
Speaker Cameron Herold says that schools should teach kids to be entrepreneurs instead of doctors and lawyers. Lawyers who start their own firms have the best of both worlds.
I do agree with Cameron that MBA programs don’t teach entrepreneurship. Being a business person cannot be taught through a Masters degree. It takes something else – the x-factor as Simon Cowell says.
Definition of entrepreneur: ‘a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk for a business venture’
Open Letter to Ed Poll
Dear Mr. Poll,
I subscribe to your blog on my Google reader and I’ve read your works through the ABA and other publications. I even watch your online videos that you’ve recently started doing in your mobile office. Your advice is often on point, intelligent and succinct.
However, in a recent post on your blog, you quoted a statistic by NALP that says that roughly 2% of law graduates from 2008 started their law practice 9-months after graduating law school. You used that statistic to question their competency and I quote: “I wonder what kind of representation their clients are receiving … and how does one interpret or define “competence?” What do you think?”
Being a national leader and speaker on law practice management, I would hope that you realized that all across America, there are law firms big and small and lawyers from all walks of life. There are a myriad of ways to market a law practice and just as many ways to successfully run a law firm. Albeit, there is a general consensus that some things work better than others. However, by your judgment that new attorneys cannot adequately represent clients demeans and belittles the 4 years of college, 3 years of law school and months of studying for the bar exam that all attorneys go through. You imply that they are not fit to practice law despite the fact that they have been certified by their respective jurisdiction. You imply that along the way, they never learned to continue learning; that you assume they will not study extra hard to become experts or associate themselves with colleagues that help each other be better practitioners.
Just like new trends with paperless offices, value and flat-fee billing, legal blogging and twittering, Starting Out Solo is a trend that will continue to rise. And like anything new, it will be rejected at first and I hope that when people see that we are attorneys who are not only competent to represent clients, but in fact, we will go an extra mile for our clients because we need to prove ourselves to those who doubt and to those who dissuade us.
I started out solo two years ago and I now have an associate, run a small law firm, bought another law firm in the process and have not yet committed malpractice.
Sincerely,
Gabriel Cheong, Esq.
owner of Infinity Law Group
Starting Out Solo board member