Thirteen Years of Watching Attorneys Start Firms

What is the Independent Practice Initiative?

It’s Chicago-Kent’s incubator for alumni going into solo or small firm practice, formerly called the Solo and Small Practice Incubator. The programme runs twelve to eighteen months, is open to alumni admitted within the past seven years, charges participants nothing, and operates out of the Conviser Law Center.

Participants get training, business development coaching, mentoring, networking, and CLE access. The law school also lines up external resources — which is where we come in.

Amata provides phone and reception services, dedicated offices, and virtual office programmes to participants free of charge for the duration of the programme. We’ve done that since 2013.

Why does an incubator exist at all?

Because law school teaches you to practise law and then hands you a business, and almost nobody prepares you for the second part. An attorney leaving a firm at least has seen how one runs. An attorney going straight out has seen nothing of intake, billing, trust accounting, or where clients come from.

That gap is the whole reason these programmes were created, and Chicago-Kent’s isn’t the only one — the Chicago Bar Foundation runs the Justice Entrepreneurs Project in the West Loop on a similar premise.

What an incubator supplies is the year nobody gets. Structure, people who’ve done it before, and permission to be inexperienced at the business part while you’re competent at the legal part.

What do the attorneys actually get from it?

Time and company, more than training. The coaching matters and the CLE access matters, but what participants actually describe is the effect of being surrounded by other people in exactly the same position, and having somewhere to be each day that isn’t their own kitchen table.

I’ve watched this closely enough to be fairly confident about it.

An attorney alone at home makes decisions alone. An attorney in a building with other attorneys asks a question in the corridor and gets an answer that would have taken three days to work out. Over a year that compounds into something real.

And the clients notice the room. A new attorney meeting a client in a proper conference room is having a different conversation than one meeting at a coffee shop, particularly in practice areas where the client is anxious.

Who stays afterwards?

More of them than I expected, and that’s the part worth noticing. Participants receive everything free while they’re enrolled. The programme ends, the free arrangement ends with it, and each of them decides whether what we provide is worth paying for out of a new practice’s money.

Kendra Spearman came through the 2016–17 cohort. She’s still a client.

Alberto Gonzalez went through the programme and is still with us several years later.

Andrew Willis is a current participant, working out of 33 North Dearborn.

Two people who could have walked away the day the subsidy stopped, and didn’t. I don’t think that’s about the offices, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claimed it was.

I think it’s that by the end of the programme they had colleagues. Leaving meant giving that up, and they’d worked out what it was worth.

What does thirteen years of this teach you?

That the attorneys who struggle are almost never the ones who spent too much on space. They’re the ones who ran out of money before the work arrived, or who spent their first months building a website instead of telling anyone they’d launched.

A few other patterns that have held:

The ones who ask for help early do better than the ones who tough it out. Consistently, and it isn’t close.

Practice area matters less than temperament. I’ve seen good practices in areas I’d have thought were crowded, and failed ones in areas that looked wide open.

Nearly everyone underestimates the gap between doing the work and getting paid for it. They plan for billings and get caught by collections.

And the ones who build a referral network in year one are still practising in year five. The ones who relied on marketing alone mostly aren’t.

Should a new attorney apply?

If you’re a Chicago-Kent alumnus admitted within the last seven years and going out on your own, it’s hard to see the argument against it. It costs nothing, it runs twelve to eighteen months, and the alternative is doing the same thing alone.

If you’re not eligible, the thing worth taking from this is what the programme actually supplies: structure, other people, and somewhere to be. Those are available without an incubator. They just require deciding they matter.

Details are on Chicago-Kent’s website under the Independent Practice Initiative.

Frequently asked questions

Why we kept doing it

People sometimes ask what we get out of thirteen years of giving services away, and they usually expect a marketing answer.

The honest one is that it started as a favour and became the best view in the business.

Fifty-odd attorneys launching practices, in our buildings, where we could see what worked. Not survey data. Not a report. Actual people, over actual years, making the actual decisions — and us close enough to notice which ones mattered.

Nearly everything I believe about how a practice gets off the ground, I learned watching that.

Some of them stayed. Most moved on, which is what’s meant to happen. A few are now sending us clients of their own, which nobody planned.

And every so often someone walks past my office who I last saw with no clients and a laptop, on their way to a hearing, and it’s hard not to think that was worth doing.

Questions about any of this? 312.924.0200 or [email protected].