I have my own practice for past 5 years and have spent a lot of time building up brand and reputation. I'm thinking of bringing on partners but am trying to figure out how to structure compensation, profit sharing and equity while maintaining control. I dont want to do associates bc I need someone with more experience than I can afford. Does anyone have any ideas on how one can up a law firm?
Remember making partners is like getting married. So be careful and know who you make your partner.
Creating the right partnership will be just like dating. You have to start by finding the right person, NOT building the optimal compensation package and hoping the right partner will be attracted to it.
Once I understood the difficulty of finding the right partner and recognized how much work my marriage entailed, I decided to remain a solo practitioner. I did not want a second marriage.
Following...i am in the same boat. I was thinking about providing all overhead (including personalizing a marketing plan for them) for an attorney so they can just be a lawyer without worrying about anything else. In return, i would take 50% of what they bring in each month up to $10k, then 33% up to $30k, and 25% after $30k. Thoughts?
I’m a little old fashioned to me if you want a partner then have a real partnership. Everything is 50/50. Otherwise there will be resentment. The situation you describe is great if you want a top notch attorney to be an employee and keep them without paying out of pocket as much as they are worth.
Find a good associate who has the mental flexibility to learn quickly about the substantive law and the business process.
When you feel like the marriage partnership might work (and assess carefully because I was part of one that didn’t work out even though we both liked each other as friends) then get a succession consultant involved to help you draft the partnership agreement - and follow through to sign it.
Consider giving some form of sweat equity credit for at least a portion of the partnership buy-in so the associate will stay nose to the grindstone for you (this is why this has to be a signed agreement so your associate feels confident this effort will result in long-term gain and won’t turn on you due to worry about whether it is real or not - mine was not in writing and that led to significant head space issues and looking for other options that might have a guarantee).
Make it painful for the associate to venture out after soaking up all of your knowledge by stating in the partnership agreement that equity doesn’t vest until the associate meets whatever standards you both agree to AND the associate has been there for “x” number of years.
But, it really is a marriage. Bringing someone in who you haven’t worked with before and giving a partnership interest right away sounds very scary.
Figuring out who has brought in what client can be really difficult to distinguish. If you want marketing that brings the most profit to the firm, it may make sense to do combined marketing efforts and not fight over who gets marketing resources, credit, who “owns” a referral source, etc.
Competing for credit can create discord and conflict - unless you both practice in completely different focus areas where you can say you get credit for cases in your practice area and he/she gets credit for his/her practice area. When you start getting picky and making the whole process painful, people start to think it would be easier to go it alone.
Besides, one of you may be a rain maker while the other is a work horse. Utilize the best skills of each and send the rainmaker out to market and let the work horse work.
Attorney...if you think about it, that would be $120K per year min that you would be asking from your employee. That is way more than what most small firms/solos spend on marketing and admin, so if I was an attorney looking to venture on my own, it would be a hard sell. However, if you can guarantee me a line of cases and work, then maybe. But at some point, I would want to stop paying the fees and venture on my own because it's more lucrative or I would demand to be a partner and then you'd be back to square one.
Ah, ok, misunderstood your initial email. Still, I guess I would ask what I would be getting overall for overhead (office, malpractice insurance, drafting platforms, etc) and marketing and compare your services to others who are in the business of marketing. There are marketing firms out there who will build a website ($2500) and maintain it ($250 monthly) and marketing companies who you can pay to keep you at the top of google search ($1500 high end). Maybe do a cost comparison of starting/running a firm v. paying for your services and project it out for 5 years to determine whether you would get takers?