The Lure of Small Law Firms for Clients and Practitioners
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Second in a series on How Small Law Firms Can Perform Better
Why do clients seek out small firms? For their reasonable prices, of course, and because those small firms are more willing to take on smaller matters, and because small firms may be located nearby and be able to handle the sorts of legal problems facing an individual or small business. Price and convenience are not the only considerations a prospective client shopping for a law firm might make.
Service and skill should also be factors in any choice. A business able to funnel a lot of legal work to a small firm may well get better service than it would at a larger firm, where it would be one small client competing for attention among vastly larger ones.
At the end of the day, every client pretty much just wants the best lawyer his money can buy — and this is where a smaller law firm’s exceptional service can be preferable to that offered by a larger firm. “Where the client will see the difference is that at a small firm like ours, the lawyer they hire will be the lawyer responsible for the matter,” says Wendy Sartory Link, managing partner of Ackerman, Link & Sartory, in West Palm Beach, Fla. “We are very strategic in how we assign cases based on expertise,” she explains.
“At a small firm, each client is a bigger percentage of the firm’s bottom line, and each client is likely known to most if not all of the attorneys in that firm.
At our firm, each staff member is focused on giving each client top service, especially during crunch time,” Sartory Link continues. At a firm like hers, lawyers know their clients and the matters they are working on. “At our firm, the three named partners have been there for almost 20 years. With low associate turnover, there is also more consistency in staffing the matters for each client,” Sartory Link says.
With all of the departures and reorganizations going on in BigLaw today, stability is one salient point that smaller firms might use to win clients over.
For practitioners themselves, there are pros and cons to choosing to work at a firm of any size. At a large firm, a lawyer will be competing with coworkers for clients, will be dealing with partners she didn’t necessarily choose to work with, and will be stuck with technology the law firm picked that might not be the lawyer’s first preference, notes Alon Rotem, general counsel at Rocket Lawyer in San Francisco. Working for a small law firm, a lawyer will not get caught up in a slow-paced, bureaucratic environment where rapid response to a changing market can be challenging to bring about. “Being small means you are nimble, you can customize your practice to fit your needs, and you can change things more quickly,” observes Rotem.
Of course, a small firm won’t offer the array of practice areas that a big firm does or have the support in terms of marketing or scheduling that a big firm offers, says Rotem.
What a small firm can offer a lawyer, though, is greater responsibility earlier in a career. An attorney at a small firm is likely to take on all three roles of finder, minder, and grinder, rather than being limited to one, and more likely the latter, as a newer lawyer at a much larger firm.
Quality of life can be better at a small firm. “At our firm, there has been very little turnover because we have focused on recruiting attorneys who are the right fit for the firm’s environment,” Sartory Link says. “We offer flexible work hours and time off to volunteer in the community or at their children’s school. The average tenure of all employees in our firm is over nine years, which far surpasses the legal industry average of about three years,” she continues.
This post is the second in a series on How Small Law Firms Can Perform Better. The other posts in the series are:
- Mistakes that Small Law Firms Make
- Compensate and Incentivize Lawyers and Staff
- How Small Law Firms Can Cut Costs
- Develop Long-Range Plans that Include Talent
By: Lori Tripoli
