It's hard to believe that an entire month has passed since my last post. However, I've been busy trying to get my new law practice up and running. I was in Toronto last week on a business development junket and had a very good meeting with one of the largest pension funds in Canada.
You're no doubt thinking, "What kind of an idiot starts a business in THIS economic climate?" Well, my business model is to provide pension funds, private equity firms and corporate legal departments with cost-effective, senior level U.S. transactional counsel on an interim or project basis. My hourly billing rate is less than 40% of what it would be if I were still with a major New York firm. That should sell very, very, very well provided that clients are actually DOING transactional work....
To be honest, I'm not sure how this is going to work out. On the one hand, I could end up making a lot more money, working far fewer hour and doing it all on my own terms. In other words, I could rightly cry "FREEEEEE-DOMMMMMM!" like this guy:
On the other hand, maybe the kind of transactional work in which I specialize will be going into a prolonged funk. What if things have changed forever? My big fear is that I've geared up to fight a war that's no longer being waged. Maybe I'm the corporate lawyer version of this guy:
--one of those World War II Japanese soldiers who fought on oblivious to the fact that the war was over (the photo above is of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who continued to fight on until 1974--you can check out the whole story here http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=253).
Wish me luck!
