Roxana St. Thomas told us yesterday on Above the Law why she wouldn't want to hang out her shingle.  She's obviously put a lot of thought into the issue, and the concerns she raises are the same ones that deter many attorneys from going it alone: it costs money to open and run a law office, you're forced to become a businessperson instead of just a lawyer, and getting off the ground would require handling a wide range of cases perhaps not within your area of expertise.

The challenges she describes are real, and yet-according to the 2004 American Bar Association Report-there are approximately 392,000 U.S. lawyers operating sole practices across the country.  That's about 35% of all licensed attorneys.  Clearly, the option is attractive to many attorneys, and many are making it work for them.  And those numbers may well continue to grow, as law firm layoffs leave more attorneys looking for a new path and technology makes it easier and less expensive for an attorney to fly solo.

Operating your own law practice gives you the freedom to define your focus and your priorities.  Yes, you'll have to be the decision-maker in areas that were previously addressed by someone else...but you'll also get to be the decision-maker in those areas.  That means that you're free to eliminate inefficiencies, to delegate those tasks that don't make the best use of your time (or that you just don't care for), and to define and operate according to your own income goals.  It also means that you're free to make the decision to hand off certain areas of decision-making to experts, if you don't feel qualified or simply don't have the time and inclination to learn a particular aspect of the business.

Technological developments have made it possible to control the costs of doing business, and to keep them proportional to business and revenue.  For instance, Ms. St. Thomas talks about the hourly fees applicable to online research, but those fees come into play only when a paying client presents a legal issue that requires research-a liberating circumstance when you consider that just ten or fifteen years ago, a sole practitioner had to maintain an updated law library on a monthly basis regardless of frequency of use.

The same is true with regard to support staff; gone are the days when the question was "to hire or not to hire".  Today, sole practitioners have a variety of options, including outsourcing and the use of virtual assistants.  These options mean significant savings in overhead, since the attorney won't have to provide office space, equipment and supplies for virtual assistants or outsourcing firms, and won't be providing employee benefits.  Most importantly, it means that the sole practitioner isn't paying for unnecessary support-he or she can contract for exactly the help required for the paying cases in the pipeline.

The flexibility created by technological developments and virtual communications have opened up a world of opportunity for sole practitioners, and that's great news for attorneys considering their options, because solo practice has always held certain appeal for many lawyers:  the freedom to choose your own direction, characterize your practice according to your goals and values, set your own work hours and financial expectations, and a host of other flexibilities were once counter-balanced by the kind of concerns raised in Ms. St. Thomas's post.  Those concerns haven't disappeared, but a new way of doing business has mitigated many of them.

If you're a sole practitioner, tell us what you love about it:  why did you decide to go out on your own and what keeps you operating solo?  And if you're on the fence, what's holding you back?

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