Locating Your Law Office

September 25, 2014
Timothy Perrin

When Tony Edwards and Donna Caswell decided to leave their existing firms and start an intellectual property practice, conventional wisdom said they should have hung their shingle in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal or Calgary. After all, a patent lawyer wants to be where people are inventing things, a trademark lawyer wants to be where businesses are active, and a copyright lawyer wants to be in the centre of the creative community.

So when they decided to set up shop in the Kelowna suburb of Westbank, B.C., they were told by everyone from the local law society bencher on down that they’d never make it.

Today, their aptly named Horsepower Intellectual Property Law practice is thriving. While their office doesn't quite look out onto a horse paddock, they do enjoy sweeping vistas of a golf course, Lake Okanagan, and the mountains beyond. And from their "little" operation incity of 110,000, they represent clients from Calgary, Vancouver, Seattle and even far away Houston. “They fired their old lawyers in Arlington [Virginia, site of the U.S. Patent Office] because they can’t get a call back,” Edwards says of the Houston clients. “To [that law firm], they were a small client. To us, they’re big, so we bend over backwards to keep them happy.”

Edwards and Caswell are part of a growing trend among lawyers to ignore the old rules – “location, location, location” – and set up shop by new rules that pay more attention to lifestyle issues and the environment. And some are throwing away the rule book entirely and practising law in a completely “un-lawyerly” fashion.

New and Old Rules

If you were a litigator, the old rules of locating your law office said you should be within 20-30 minutes of the courthouse. Walking distance was better. Documents needed to be filed, and clients don’t like paying for driving time.

But those rules are not holding as they once did. It’s a rare lawyer who uses staff or an agent to file pleadings

anymore. Electronic filing is the norm today. And in most centres, court sits a limited number of days per month, so being walking distance to the courtroom, while nice, is hardly crucial if it puts you in a position where you are competing with dozens of other lawyers while there are untapped markets waiting for you nearby.

For solicitors, the primary imperative used to be: “Go where the clients are.”

Depending on the kind of practice you wanted to build, you picked your location accordingly. If real estate law was your cup of tea, you looked for a growing region where housing starts were through the roof. Wills and estates? Probate? The key was an aging population of retirees.

If you were starting a general practice, you needed exposure to lots of people who probably had never needed a lawyer before, people who would be getting divorced, would need wills, would be in car accidents, buy a house, perhaps forget to call for a designated driver, the usual bread and butter for a solo practice or small partnership.

The “rules” said set yourself up where you can be seen – across the street from a large employer or a transit hub, both if possible – and be sure to put up a large sign reading simply “Law Office.”

But, again, those rules are breaking down. To what extent do you really need to be in the same location as your client to do business? Would it be possible for you to operate a 'satellite' office out of a shared office arrangement, visiting weekly for client meetings but doing most of the legal work back at your main office, whether that be another office proper or a home office.

For many lawyers, however, the “big” geographical question is already answered. For various reasons, they’re not moving. They’ve got lives where they are; spouses have jobs; kids have friends and schools. It’s a question of picking a location from among those available within commuting distance.

And commuting is often a big factor. Michael Fitzgibbon and Stephen Mendelssohn left lucrative partnerships in downtown Toronto firms—and two hours a day spent commuting—to set up a labour law boutique in suburban Oakville, Ont. “[Now] my commute is eight minutes instead of an hour each way, which has given me a lot more flexibility,” says Fitzgibbon.

Moving Outside the Box

Of course, you can always blaze your own trail.

Subject to the client identification and verification rules, cyberspace is an increasingly viable place to base a practice, particularly for extremely tech-savvy lawyers practising in tech-related fields. If your clients are the kind of people who are going to be happier conversing with you on Skype than dropping in to see you, who won’t need any hand-holding when you ask them to scan a document and e-mail it to you, and who sleep with their iPhones on their pillows, then perhaps a virtual practice is a possibility.

Very simply put, the client identification and verification rules require that you have a “guarantor” attest to the identity of a client for whom you do work without meeting them in person. For these purposes, the guarantor list is pretty much the same as for a passport application.

Other lawyers are going to their clients rather than asking the clients to come to them. This would work well for a practice in elder law, personal injury, or any other practice where the clients may have mobility issues. You could also use a mobile office to serve a number of small communities in a region.

The technical issues are far from overwhelming, these days. A cell phone and cellular Internet service would connect you to the world and you could even live in the vehicle as you made your circuit. A paperless practice does away with the need for storage space; just make sure to set up some kind of daily off-site backup in case you lose your travelling filing system.

Recognizing the difference that mobile technology has made, how should you consider the question of where to locate your practice? Here's a list of points to consider..

Practice location: Top questions to ask yourself

You and Your Family

Are you the kind of person who needs the opera, great art museums, a nearby university? Do you thrive on the hum of urban life, love walking everywhere you need to go, and think the “Milky Way” is only a candy bar?
Or are you more like my law-school classmate Tom Humphries, who couldn’t wait to finish his law school education and get out of the “big city” (Victoria) and back to Kaslo, B.C., population 1,029 where, ever since, he has been happily practising law more than two decades?
Or, like me, do you fall in the middle? I ended up in Kelowna which, at 110,000 people, is about the same size as the city in which I grew up. Of course, one of my friends in New York City was aghast when I told her how big my town was and, with genuine concern for my well being, asked, “But what do you do for culture?” I was happy to tell her that I look out at my little lake, listen to the birds, not the cars, and, oh yes, go to the Metropolitan Opera in HD at the local theatre. The big city’s hold on culture clearly isn’t what it used to be.

Your Practice

What kind of practice do you have or want to have? If you are just starting out, this is a crucial question. It is very hard to build a specialized practice in a smaller centre, even with the help of the virtual world. It is, however, possible to move an existing specialized practice from the big city to a smaller centre and use technology to keep it thriving.
Starting a “walk-in” practice at a new location – one to consist primarily of new clients recruited through advertising or promotion – will require work and money. This would be common if you were running a small general, family, personal injury or similar practice. To get this kind of business off the ground, you’ll have to create “brand awareness” in a new market and can expect some initial lean times. As a “retail” law practice, choosing a location wisely can be crucial. Consider an office across the street from a large employer or a major transit hub. (Better yet, both.) Make sure you have a big sign reading simply “Law Office.” Remember that most of your clients will never have used a lawyer before and, to them, we’re pretty fungible.
Moving a referral practice is altogether different. A referral practice is an established practice where most of your work comes from either former clients, those referred by former clients or those referred by other lawyers. A referral practice like Tony Edwards' intellectual property practice in Westbank, B.C., or Michael Fitzgibbon’s labour practice in Oakville, Ont., can survive because both of those lawyers were already well established in the field and had solid referral bases. But both lawyers had spent many years building up those client bases. Edwards tells how he never turns up his nose at a small inventor who comes to him for help patenting his latest idea. Freelance inventors sometimes become heads of research at big corporations which get bought up by bigger corporations. According to Edwards, they always remember who helped them when they were nobodies. Edwards just didn’t plop into Westbank. He spent 20 years building up the kind of practice base that allows him to practise out of a small town and yet practise literally world-wide.
Starting a referral practice is probably best done in a larger centre where you have access to more businesses and potential clients and to more lawyers who might send you work. If you are not working in a firm, consider a shared office arrangement where other lawyers in the office might provide referrals. Get active in the appropriate CBA subsection(s) so that other members of the professions know who you are and that you’re hungry for clients.

The Location