Financially, it has not been a great year for the law firm of LEVENTHAL pllc, notwithstanding significant wins for several clients — an arbitration with a 100% recovery (plus an award and recovery of 100% of the client’s attorneys’ fees), disputes resolved by a single carefully written letter, lawsuits stopped dead in their tracks on a motion to dismiss, a motion to transfer, etc.
Some of the “wins” we are most proud of are the “hard messages” — telling clients that they have no case, telling clients they need to walk away from weak claims or pony up and pay up when facing strong claims. These are not “wins” in the conventional sense, of course, but they are the invisible hallmark of integrity.
This is the irony of good lawyering — your clients (most of them, anyhow) love their relatively quick and decisive resolutions, all the more sweet when they paid so little for the good results.
Presumably, the optimal business model is that good lawyers build on their successes, develop reputations, and increase their hourly rates because they can complete in [insert NUMBER here] hours what other lawyers cannot do in [insert multiple of NUMBER] hour, if at all. (Or they take on more challenging contingent fee cases, shifting the risk of a bad outcome from the client to the lawyer.)
How this single practitioner will manage remains to be seen, but here’s to a higher hourly rate for 2017!
LEVENTHAL pllc. Committed. Ethical. Experienced. Successful. Call for a consultation: 612-234-7349.
[Rule 7.1 of the Minnesota Rules of Professional Conduct requires us to point out that statements of positive results for other clients are not guarantees or representations that the same results would necessarily be obtained for other client matters.]