Hanging Your Shingle in a Small Town

April 15, 2013April 15, 2013 / Bruce Cameron

A guest post by Andrew Flusche

Similar to being a rural lawyer, practicing law in a small town has unique challenges and considerations. It’s certainly not the same as the big city! Here are a few things I’ve learned since starting my practice in the booming small-opolis of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Today’s lawyers are tomorrow’s judges

In Virginia, the legislature appoints our judges. Of course those appointments come from the ranks of the active bar. It makes perfect sense, but when I was a baby lawyer I never really thought about it.

Here’s why I mention it: be nice to everyone! If you’re rude to a colleague that doesn’t seem to affect your practice at all today, they very well could be a judge next year.

In the five years since I’ve been practicing, I’ve seen a handful of judicial changes, and I practice in an extremely limited number of courts. Just this simple fact should give you pause before you do anything that might not reflect positively on you.

It’s a small world out there

When practicing in a small town, you run into people from your legal world outside the courtroom. I run into clerks, judges, clients, colleagues, and officers all the time when I’m out and about.

Needless to say, we should always be nice to everyone. But we’re human, so that’s easier said than done.

However, as a small town lawyer, it’s even more important to always be kind. Heck, I run into clients who I can’t even remember, but they recognize me. If I treat someone poorly, they just might be a past client. Or they might have been a client tomorrow.

Be unique to stand out

It’s tempting to model your practice on the other attorneys in town. After all, it’s working for them. Why not follow suit?

Here in Fredericksburg, most folks do family law, criminal defense, and personal injury. Some people just do two of those, but being more of a generalist is standard practice around town.

To give myself a marketing advantage, I came up with a unique angle: traffic and misdemeanor defense. I’m the only attorney in Fredericksburg (and perhaps the state of Virginia) who solely defends traffic tickets and misdemeanor charges. Many colleagues are still surprised that my practice works, but I think the main reason it’s worked out is that I’m different. In a crowded field, the purple cow gets attention.

Andrew Flusche lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia and helps people from all over the country with their reckless driving Virginia tickets. He also wrote the consumer book, Fight Your Virginia Reckless Driving Ticket. Find Andrew on Google+.

Flavor of the Week

April 10, 2013 / Bruce Cameron

flavor of the week It seems that, thanks to HB 1096 South Dakota’s attempt at rural lawyer recruitment is riding high in the press and the blogosphere. Seems that everyone from the New York Times to the ABA Journal are reporting on it. Even Above the Law is throwing their two cents in.

The various responses seem to be a mixed bag, which is to be expected; after all at first glance $12,000 yearly stipend for a 5 year term in a rural county (and in South Dakota, rural is rural) seems like a poor trade. But, this really isn’t designed to recruit just any lawyer, it is designed to encourage South Dakota grown young lawyers to head out to those under-served counties. While $12,000 does not seem like a terribly large incentive, at the end of 5 years, that $60,000 could make a serious dent in one’s student loans.

Nor is does this seem to be an attempt to reformulate legal education along the lines of medical school. It does seem to be taking an idea from a program that works (seems its harder to get doctors to practice in rural communities then it is to get lawyers out there) in order to address at least one concern (how do I pay my loans) new lawyers have about heading out on their own.

The RuralLawyer Book

March 25, 2013March 22, 2013 / Bruce Cameron / 2 Comments

Well, it’s official – Becoming a Rural Lawyer is here. Like RuralLawyer the blog, RuralLawyer the book is designed to help you decide if you’re meant to practice in the 128,000 small towns dotting the US landscape. Becoming a Rural Lawyer looks at the myths of practicing in small towns, discusses emerging areas of rural practice, talks about the rhythms and (unwritten) rules of small town life, and includes advice, tips, and words of wisdom from rural lawyers from across the US.

Becoming a Rural Lawyer is available through Amazon.com (where I welcome your impressions of the book).

End Of An Age?

February 18, 2013March 11, 2013 / Bruce Cameron

If you listen to the tech-savvy pundits, the age of the transactional lawyer will soon be coming to an end as cloud-based artificial intelligence software will soon be producing all the legal forms a person could ever want at prices so low, no lawyer could ever compete. The thing is, this is not what a law practice, especially a rural law practice, is about.

A rural law practice is not about the “product” – those forms, those missives of legalese we lawyers produce on behalf of our clients – if it were, law firm size would be measured in terms of the number of paralegals rather than the number of attorneys. I have no doubt that software can produce a form that is correct in all particulars, that clever engineers can gin-up an interface that will ask all the necessary questions to have the form comply with statutory requirements, and that this cheap, elegant, correct form will be totally unsuited to a client’s specific situation.

Practicing rural law is not about asking the necessary questions, it is about asking the right questions and understanding not only what the client wishes to accomplish, but why as well and only then moving on to the how. The oft-told stories among family law lawyers about spouses asking and getting the family home in the divorce settlement who turn around a sell the property within the year simply because they could not afford the property on a single person’s income are classic examples of understanding the what-a-client-wants part of the equation while ignoring the why; understanding the why allows the lawyer to function as councilor not just as advocate and opens up the possibility of other options that may provide a better outcome and a better service to the client. Technology will always get the “what” part, but it is unlikely to ever get the “why” part and therein lies its weakness.

A rural law practice (or most solo or small firm practices for that matter) is about service – service to clients, service to community. Technology, even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence software, can’t provide service – it simply cannot make that intuitive leap that uses both “what” and “why” to get to “how”. The lawyer who forgets that his true value lies in service not in product will not last long in rural practice. If you provide quality service and market your practice on the value you provide you need not be concerned about being replaced by CheapLegalForms.com any time soon.

Library Science

February 4, 2013 / Bruce Cameron

A tip of the hat to SD Rural Lawyer for pointing out Susan G. Fowler’s study: “Results of Participant Observation in the Fifth Judicial District,”

In this 2007, Ms. Fowler takes a look at the research needs of the average rural Kansas lawyer and finds that because the rural lawyer is a generalist, their research needs tend to be limited to the basics (case-law updates, statutory changes, access to state resources) and they do not spend a great deal of time or money on specialized research materials or access to expert opinions. All well and good if you are planning on how best to restore a rural law library so that it will best serve it’s clientele.

What interested me were Ms. Fowler’s observations on the information processing skill and daily activities of the rural lawyer (not that I participated in the study, seeing one’s day reduced to frequency counts by an outside observer is something of an out-of-body experience – the initial reaction of “it can’t be” is quickly followed by “now that I think about it…”). So, for those of you who have any doubts about the adrenaline-packed, action-filled, exciting life of the rural lawyer, you are absolutely right – the top 5 things rural lawyers do are:

Talk on the phone (communication reduces surprises)
Use a some form of technology to obtain or transfer legal information (the adaptive generalist is always relearning)
Prep for court (there is a marked preference to settle out of court, but you never know…)
work on a case
build relationships (rural lawyers practice in small ponds – adversarial relationships are left at the courthouse door – so building professional/personal ties to the rural bar and to the community brings in business and establishes credibility)

Ms. Fowler also observed that rural lawyers are information power-users (constantly assessing information as they learn and relearn) and hard core multitaskers – though rural lawyers tend to be “time slicers” rather than “parallel processors” when it comes to multitasking; preferring to quickly switch between tasks (spending a few minutes on one before moving to the next) in a round-robin fashion. This form of multi-tasking seems to be facilitated by the rural lawyer’s preference for print rather than digital resources.

So there you have it – a brief look at the life of the rural lawyer through the eyes of the rural law librarian.