No clients, and a king-size breakup bill

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By Michael Kemp
Dolan Media Newswires

Every moderately successful solo practitioner has had those weeks.

“Those” weeks can mean a lot of different things; there’s those weeks when there’s a lull at work, the sun is shining, and you can take a few hours off in the middle of the day.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about those weeks: weeks when everything comes due at the same time, clients melt down, and you’re in the office past midnight every night just to keep up. As the Red Queen told Alice, sometimes you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.

This isn’t unique to solos; associates anywhere have the same experience. What is unique to solos, especially ones without any support staff, is how the rest of the practice grinds to a halt during those times. If you’re like me (and I don’t recommend it), during those weeks nonessential correspondence slows to a crawl, papers start to pile up, and the nonlegal part of being a business owner is almost nonexistent. This can cause problems, especially when the services you are using require constant care.

I was having one of those weeks not too long ago; in fact, I had several in a row. At the same time, I had just canceled my partnership with Total Attorneys, and they were calling and emailing every day to discuss some sort of final business. I didn’t have time for it. I ignored it.

For those who don’t know, Total Attorneys is a legal referral partnership like so many that have sprung up in recent years. They’ve gotten a fair amount of press and been recommended by legal journals, so I figured I would try them out.

For the several months I tried it out, I didn’t get anything out of it, but it didn’t cost much either. After a while I just decided enough was enough. People would ask for legal help and then never answer their phone, I would get calls well outside my practice area, I was getting bloated bills (which, in fairness, they would lower if I called and asked). I wrote in and terminated the partnership.

Then the calls and emails started, asking to talk to me about final issues. I ignored them. They tried for about 10 days and stopped, and sent me my final bill.

It was a whopper; way out of proportion for anything that had come before. It was ridiculous. I wrote in and said that it was ridiculous, and got back a rather snippy reply that they had tried to contact me, I hadn’t talked to them, and now I was obligated to pay. So pay up.

I was fuming. This was exactly why I had told them I was terminating the partnership; I was tired of getting bloated bills for no return. I hadn’t gotten a single client — I hadn’t gotten a single client meeting — out of the whole time I was with them, and now they were getting snippy with me? I was angry at them for being unreasonable. I was more angry at them for being right.

As a first point, they were under no obligation to reduce my bill, even if it was unreasonable. More pointedly, they had been willing to reduce unreasonable bills in the past, when I’d asked them to do so. The point here was that they weren’t willing to make allowances for the fact that when you’re a solo, sometimes things have to wait until next week. They didn’t have to, and because I was leaving, chose not to. They weren’t being unreasonable, they were just being inflexible.

This was a problem for me, not because they were doing something wrong, but because as a solo, you need to find companies that can work with you, your needs, and your schedule. Otherwise, what’s the point of having the service at all? I didn’t really have a right to expect it from them. I just needed it.

Let’s say you decide to hire a part-time paralegal. You really need someone to be in the office when you are there, but you know that your hours are usually up in the air. Some weeks you are going to be in court every morning. Other weeks you have to be out of the office some afternoons. You don’t have a set schedule. Is it fair for your paralegal to say that it just isn’t possible for him to work around your schedule, and that he needs to have a set schedule he can count on every week? Absolutely. Is it fair to tell him that you can’t hire him because you need someone who can be more flexible? Absolutely. Just because the positions are contradictory doesn’t mean they’re not both right.

As a second point, it’s fair for a company to expect me to do a fair amount of work to help with my own marketing. It’s also fair for me not to want to. Anyone who has had any experience with Google AdWords knows about this: It’s a great service that also requires a significant amount of work to make it effective. If you have the time to put in that work, great. But if you’re a solo who just doesn’t have the time to spend hours learning the nuances of significant click-through rates, reasonable CPCs, or how to effectively manage keyword spreads to maximize your views, maybe it’s not for you.

Google “Total Attorneys” and you will come up with huge numbers of people who say it is a scam. You will also come up with people who have loved the experience and recommend it. I had known both of these things and chosen to credit the latter and ignore the former. Mostly, this was because the latter tended to be more reputable reviews; partly, it is because you if Google “X is a scam” and find no results, the most likely explanation is that X does not exist. Someone on the Internet thinks everything is a scam.

Is it a scam? I don’t think so. I would recommend against it, though, if you’re a solo who doesn’t always have a lot of flexibility or the desire to spend money on services you’re not using. It’s bad for a company to be unreasonable. It’s not wrong, but it may be just as bad, for a company to be inflexible.

By most accounts, Total Attorneys does work for some people. Will it work for you? You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

Michael Kemp is an attorney at MET Law Group PLLC, St. Paul, Minn. He can be reached at [email protected].