Become A Consultant Self-Employed Solicitor
*If anyone is interested in joining us as a consultant solicitor please note that you will need at least three years post qualification experience in a particular area of law.
How to become a consultant self-employed solicitor and grow your own practice
Long working days, un-achievable billing targets, office politics, a lack of control, challenging commutes and high levels of stress. This is, of course, a normal day in the life of many solicitors. But things are starting to change and there are alternatives.
Is this really why you chose to become a solicitor?
Back in 2012 LawCare (an organisation that supports and promotes the health and well-being of the legal profession) reported that after an initial survey of UK lawyers, over 66% admitted to suffering from stress in the past, with 32% admitting suffering from clinical depression.
And as recently as this year, according to the Law Society, a survey conducted on behalf of the Junior Lawyers Division (JLD) revealed that over 93% of junior lawyers who responded to the survey had suffered with stress in the month before completing the survey.
Whilst perhaps not surprising, what these surveys reveal is, that despite recent shake ups, for many there’s been no real shift in attitude and approach when it comes to the working practices and habits of the legal profession, whether that’s working for a firm / partnership or in-house.
So, is it possible to build a practice whilst delivering a great service to interesting and diverse clients at the same time as clawing back some quality of life and control? And if so, what are your options?
Locum, sole practitioner, part time or consultant
Going it alone can seem like an attractive and obvious choice and if you’re considering it, you’re faced with four main options:
Locum Solicitor
Becoming a locum is something many enjoy. Of course, you’ll be self-employed and you’ll need an ability to be able to pick up and run with someone else’s work, often with little assistance.
The downsides of being a locum are that contracts can range from as little as a few hours to a few years and you’re always at risk of periods of time without work. What’s more, however long a contract is, you’re always going to be investing all your hard work and effort into someone else’s practice and there is no opportunity to build up your own brand and client base.
Sole practitioner
Again, for some, this represents an ideal solution but it’s not without its difficulties. Professional indemnity insurance, getting accepted on lenders’ panels, finding premises, funding and managing the administration, marketing and business development all fall to you.
If you’re going it alone for the first time, this increased level of responsibility falls at a time when your income, reputation and client base is not yet secure. And there’s also the public perception of being a one-man / woman band to overcome.
Having made the transition myself from self-employed solicitor to operating a regulated firm as a sole practitioner, if you’re starting with no capital my advice would be to wait until you can regularly generate a turnover of over £10,000 a month (maybe more if you’re based in London) as a self-employed consultant solicitor before it makes practical and financial sense to set up and run your own regulated and insured law firm. You’ll also know by then that you can hack it as an entrepreneur, rather than make the costly mistake of spending a lot of money starting a firm, but finding out you are unable to make any money.
Before making the move to operating as a sole practitioner, and in order to grow your turnover as a self-employed solicitor, I recommend first hiring a good virtual assistant, as well as employing a paralegal and also possibly an assistant solicitor – who due to the SRA rules will actually need to be employed by the virtual firm you contract with but whose salary costs you pay to the firm in advance each month.
Part time
If you really want to keep the relative security of working for a firm but you want to reclaim some quality of life, you can always seek to go part time. However, of course this inevitably comes with a pro rata reduction in pay and often comes with a certain stigma attached, especially given the demands of clients.
Self-employed consultancy
An increasingly popular alternative to the options above, freelance self-employed consultancy allows you to provide your services through established law firms either as an individual or using a wholly owned service company to contract with one or more firms at any one time.
It also comes with a lot of advantages:
- You decide when to work and where to work. That means you can work remotely, part time, whatever suits you.
- You decide what type or clients you want to work for and you don’t have to do work offered to you by the firm if you’d rather not. Meaning you can shape your practice into the one you want.
- You set your own targets and fee structure, meaning no more beating yourself up to achieve someone else’s targets. If you want to take the day off, work part time, or set your own flexible hours, that’s also fine.
- But you don’t have the additional worry of professional indemnity insurance, funding and premises (as well as all the other overheads relating to operating a regulated law firm).
- In short you take back control of your practice. You can develop it at a pace and in a way that suits you.
- And you say goodbye to office politics, commuting and late nights in the office.
How it works
The firm you work as a consultant for will take a percentage of your fees. This is normally in the region of 20% to 40% of what you bill on the work you do for your own clients through the firm, but this will vary.
As their consultant, you can continue to work with your own established clients who’ve chosen to come with you. However, if you’ve chosen the right law firm, you’ll also get referrals from them and be able to do some of their client work should you choose to.
Whether you join a small or large virtual firm, it will usually take a bit of time to start getting decent referrals from other consultant solicitors as people will of course first have to get to know, like and trust you before wanting to send their valued clients and contacts your way.
The Jonathan Lea Network currently offers our consultant solicitors a maximum 85% fee share for their own work they do through us, while for work you accept from us you receive a flat 60% of what is billed and paid by the client. Please note that the higher 85% fee share only applies to any billings above £150k in an annual period, while you will receive 70% in respect of the first £100k of annual billings and then 80% for any billings between £100k and £150k in an annual period. For the avoidance of doubt, this 70/80/85% fee share dynamic only applies regarding your own clients.
For any matters you refer to us where other fee earners do the work you will also receive a 15% referral fee. When I was working as a self-employed solicitor my referral fees once amounted to £6,000 over the month I took off to go travelling, which included doing the Rickshaw Run in India. This more than paid for the trip (as well as my nephew who joined me in the Tuk Tuk)!
The Jonathan Lea Network is slightly different from other virtual firms who mostly rely on their consultant solicitors to introduce work and clients to the firm. We on the other hand are more of a hybrid firm who have our own retained fee earners and generate a lot of leads and new clients ourselves through our website and generally more sophisticated and effective marketing activities. For example, within a month of starting our own regulated law firm we won a 90 employee publicly listed company as a client which resulted in supplying one of consultants with 60 hours of well paid commercial contracts work every month, performed remotely and in and around the consultant’s other client commitments.
The other advantages of working this way are significant:
- The firm you work with will be responsible for professional indemnity insurance, although clearly you have to comply with the terms of their cover.
- They’ll also be responsible for compliance and practice management.
- You’ll be able to rely on their marketing and practice development, their administrative support, their legal accounting software and their other resources, including such tools as legal subscription services and sometimes their premises for meetings.
- You’ll also be able to take advantage of their internal library, precedents and in-house knowledge.
In short, the consultancy option offers you all the benefits of going it alone without the same level of risk.
I’ve written more about the benefits of working this way, including examples from my own personal experience, in this article.
How many years’ experience are required to become a self-employed consultant solicitor?
There’s still a lot of misunderstanding about how experienced you have to be to go freelance. Often perceived as the domain of older partners or the very experienced, this is not in fact the case. Lawyers at all levels of PQE can opt to go freelance, although we generally recommend that you have at least three years post qualification experience as a basic minimum.
How do you make the transition to self-employed consultant?
You can choose to either operate as a sole trader or to set up and operate via a limited company. There are clearly pros, cons and tax implications of either approach and you’ll probably need to take professional advice to choose the best option for you.
Whichever approach you decide on, as someone who’s self-employed, you’ll become responsible for keeping your own records and accounts and paying the correct amount of tax to HMRC, as well as making your own pension arrangements.
SRA Authorisation of Individuals Regulations 2019
These new SRA rules due to come into effect towards the end of 2019 allow solicitors, with at least three years of post qualification experience, to provide reserved and non-reserved legal services on a freelance basis without needing to operate under the umbrella of a regulated firm. However, these new regulations include the following restrictions which I believe will still make it more attractive for entrepreneurial solicitors to instead practice on a self-employed basis under the regulatory and insurance umbrella of a regulated ‘virtual’ firm:
1) You have to practice and trade as an individual in your own name and can’t develop your own separate business brand and trade through a service company so as to limit your liability and maximise your income;
2) You can’t employ anyone in connection with the services that you provide, whereas no such restriction exists if you contract through a virtual firm (I employed two paralegals to assist me before we eventually started trading through our own regulated firm);
3) You need to take out and maintain your own indemnity insurance that covers both reserved and unreserved legal services you provide, as opposed to contracting though another firm where you operate under their insurance cover and there is no need or requirement to have your own insurance policy; and
4) You can only hold client money when it relates to payment on account of costs and disbursements, so you are unable to make use of a firm’s client account to hold settlement sums and completion monies which is key to being able to work on higher value matters.
Choosing the right firm
Choosing the right virtual firm is critical to success. You’ll want to be sure that they have sufficient resources to support you and your clients and that includes administrative, IT and marketing support. And do they have a strong client base of their own? One thing to look out for is whether they organise the odd social gathering (like a Christmas party) which I found invaluable in building relationships with other consultants and generating referrals as a result.
The contract you agree with the firm will usually have a fee split basis whereby if the work you do is for your own client you retain around 70% of what is paid to the firm, while it will be around 50% if the work you do has been referred from the firm or another consultant. There will also be a 10-15% referral fee for work you introduce to the firm but don’t carry out yourself. At the start of your self-employment journey it is recommended to work as a consultant for more than one firm (more than three is probably unmanageable) so you can better discover which firm you are more suited to. Like I did, this could include picking a small ‘bricks and mortar’ firm who can’t afford to employ a solicitor covering your niche, but who nevertheless generate work relating to your practice area and would welcome the opportunity to discuss working with a consultant on an ad hoc and flexible basis.
As mentioned, depending on the firm, they will probably refer some work to you although you shouldn’t ever rely on this. You will very much be expected to generate your own work, even though this will usually take a little while to build up. You’ll also normally be asked to sign undertakings not to poach clients which weren’t introduced to the firm by you.
And whilst you vet the firm, they will also want a level of re-assurance. Primarily they’ll want to know that you’re competent and an asset to their firm and its reputation. It’s therefore a good idea to put together a business plan and or strategy and have references from clients and former employers.
Go for it!
If you’re still relatively new to the profession, or, for whatever reason, don’t have a well-established client base, the idea of losing the security of an income and building your own case load and business can be the most daunting aspect of going freelance.
However, a few months after you’ve made the initial jump most solicitors should be able to build up a regular stream of work and won’t want to look back to being employed again. Even in the worst case scenario when after a few months you discover self-employment really isn’t for you (although we recommend you give it a good go for at least a year) then you can always find an employed position again, with employers being comforted by the fact that you have made a qualified decision to stick with employment while having picked up some good experience and developed some valuable skills in making a go of it on your own.
At The Jonathan Lea Network, we are now looking to grow our team of self-employed solicitors who’d like to work with us. As a fast growing firm ourselves we consistently attract many new work opportunities which we regularly refer to other self-employed solicitors. In less then two years, starting from when Jonathan moved into an office and the first employee joined, we have increased our turnover almost six-fold, despite only moderately re-investing our cash-flow so far. We therefore now have a great platform for future growth and see that developing a hybrid ‘bricks and mortar’ and virtual firm whereby employed fee earners and self-employed specialist solicitors can work seamlessly together offers the optimum operational model for both clients and consultant solicitors alike.
So, if you love what you do, but just want to be able to deliver a superior service and enjoy a better quality of life, as well as more effectively build your own law practice, then freelance consultancy is an exciting and realistic option.
If you have at least three years of decent post qualification experience and are interested in working with us as a self-employed consultant we would be very happy to hear from you. In the first instance, please send us an introductory email together with your LinkedIn profile (completed in full) for us to assess, following which someone will contact you to arrange a short introductory call – during which you can learn more about how we operate and whether there would be a good fit.
Also, please also let us know by email to wewillhelp@jonathanlea.net if you’d like to attend one of our forthcoming ‘The Secrets To My Success’ events in London where in an hour’s free to attend evening session Jonathan will give an overview of how lawyers can make a successful transition to working on a self-employed basis and growing their own practice, as well as a detailed account of how, without any capital or existing client base, in his first of year of trading alone Jonathan earned more working as a self-employed solicitor than a comparable employed solicitor with his PQE. Jonathan will also explain how he was then able to start employing people and grow a profitable regulated law firm.
Testimonial
One of our consultant solicitors, Philippa Roles (previously a partner at a large firm in Reading), has kindly supplied the following reference to give more of an idea of what its like working with us:
“I was very apprehensive about taking the step off the cliff edge into becoming self-employed. It’s a very big step, followed by a potentially steep fall, to go from having a secure salary payment to relying on the cashflow ebbs and flows of relying on clients paying invoices. I had only a modest cash reserve to see me through 3 months of no income and was particularly worried that it would take me longer than 3 months to build up a sufficient client base to bring in the level of income I needed to cover my financial commitments and life’s essentials.
However, I was committed to taking back some quality of life. I wanted to be able to maintain the variety and technically challenging nature of the work that I was used to as a partner in a busy regional practice, at the same time as being able to do the work on a timescale that allowed me to spend more quality time with my three rapidly growing children. The sort of work I wanted to do would only normally be done by a partner, but to be a partner you need to be physically present in the office for much of the working day. This did not work well alongside my desire to spend more time with my children. Becoming a self-employed consultant was the only other way to get what I wanted without compromise.
I found Jonathan and his team following a bit of online research and decided to contact them to discuss whether they felt my skills could be added to their service offering in such a way as to give me the flexibility that I needed, but that was still enable me to do high quality, challenging work. It was one of the best approaches I could have made. Right from the outset Jonathan was able to refer small pieces of work to me and support me in producing material that would enable me to promote my new role with his team. It meant that when the time came for me to take the big step, I already had a pipeline of working that would enable me to bring in the level of income I required. Jonathan and his team are very well organised for remote working and their internet marketing knowledge is exceptional. The firm regularly appears in the first page of search results for topics that are important for generating work for me and this ensures that I get a wide variety of working from across the UK and overseas. As clients increasingly move towards internet searches to source their advisers, the fact that Jonathan and his team understand how this works is invaluable for building my practice. I cannot speak highly enough of them. They have really helped make the transition to self-employment as smooth as possible”
Philippa’s own story about how she decided to start working remotely as a self-employed solicitor can be read here.
Other consultant’s testimonials
What support does The Jonathan Lea Network offer to consultant solicitors?
a) Experienced legal secretarial support
If ever needed, we can provide access to a fantastic experienced legal secretary who has worked on a remote and self-employed basis for the last few years. She is always available at short notice to make tight turnaround times at a very cost effective hourly rate.
b) Cloud practice management software
We use a modern, simple and user friendly cloud based software system called Actionstep that all our retained and self-employed fee earners use. All our time recording and billing goes through this platform and we provide as much training and support as you need.
c) Cloud based email
We let consultants decide whether to use Outlook or Google’s G Suite equivalent. In either case consultants can access their emails with us on all devices they use.
d) IT support
We work with a fantastic outsourced IT team who we have known the last ten years and who are able to access your computer remotely and fix any IT issue you may need help with.
e) Facebook group
If you use Facebook we invite all consultants to our invite only Facebook group of 50 self-employed and small firm solicitors where members can share referral opportunities and know how through asking questions and contributing to discussions.
f) App based AML ID checks
We give clients the choice to either scan in their ID and email it to us, or if they find it easier (or don’t have access to a scanner) to instead use a mobile app to provide us with their ID information in a compliant manner.
g) Indemnity insurance cover
We have in place a comprehensive professional indemnity insurance policy that covers our firm for the work our self-employed consultants do as contractors under our insurance and regulatory umbrella.
h) Practical Law access
If needed, we provide access to the Practical Law subscription service.
i) Specialist legal cashiers
We work with specialist legal bookkeepers to ensure we operate our client and office accounts in a compliant manner, all transfers and receipts are carefully recorded and our consultants get paid in a timely manner once client invoices have been settled. Having worked myself as a consultant solicitor for a few years I know how frustrating it is having to wait to be paid once the virtual firm is in receipt of the client invoice monies.
j) Billing and Credit control
We operate an efficient administration team who, with the co-operation of consultants, ensure that client invoices are carefully prepared and without fail sent out at the end of each monthly billing period. We then regularly chase outstanding payments and have an effective process of escalating the pressure on clients to ensure that all agreed and properly invoiced fees are paid.
For all new matters we require clients to pay a fees deposit to our client account. Once a month end invoice has been sent to a client we can then move this money held on account to our office account and from then pay consultants their fee share.
We also operate two payment runs a month to ensure our consultants’ invoices are regularly settled.
k) Virtual office address
Regardless of where you are working from, we will open and scan to email any physical correspondence addressed to you.
l) Search providers
For those involved in property work we are able to order whatever searches you require.
m) Land Registry
We have an account with the Land Registry which we use for the commercial and residential property work we do.
n) Junior fee earner support
As well as providing all the administrative support you will need, so our specialist self-employed solicitors can concentrate on high end value add legal work, manage more matters and take on large cases involving a large number of documents, our consultant solicitors often combine with and delegate to our retained junior fee earners (paralegals, trainee solicitors and junior solicitors) in our central office. If the client is one of the consultant’s own then the consultant solicitor will receive 15% of any time billed by our retained junior fee earners (as well as 70% of the consultant’s own time billed and paid).
o) Publish on our website/blog
Our website generates a lot of traffic (and leads), much more so than a lot of larger established firms. In accordance with our guidelines, we offer consultants the ability to publish on our blog, but still retain ownership of the content you produce (so if you wish at any time in the future you can take the content off our site and publish it elsewhere).
p) Earn passive income
We have an active and growing e-commerce shop on our website where we productise our know how and generate passive income (and more leads) for the business. Consultants are also able to upload their own legal products to our website on the basis that they retain ownership of the content and the revenue produced is shared on a 50/50 basis. The software we use maintains detailed records of all downloads.
q) Letterhead watermark
When joining us, at the Jonathan Lea Network, consultants get full use of our law firm stationary with firm branding watermark.
r) Business cards
We can provide you with professionally produced glossy business cards which include your head shot.
s) Work opportunities
We have created Facebook and Whatsapp groups, in which consultants and retained staff members can post any new work opportunities or enquiries. As a firm, we have established a growing client base. However, each consultant still has the capacity to refer clients from their own proprietary client base, which allows the firm to generate more work. The longer and more established that a consultant becomes within the firm, the more known they will find themselves among the client base, and henceforth more able to establish further connections.
t) Referral fees
As mentioned above, working for the Jonathan Lea Network enables consultants to refer clients, in which case we would provide a 15% referral fee, which is also applicable for retained staff. We work on a basis where there is a fee share for the provision of your own client and a lesser fee share when we refer you a client.
u) Archiving
At the Jonathan Lea Network, we have a reliable archive supplier, to whom we send all our historical documents, including wills. However, it should be noted that we have recently secured larger premises, where will have our own archive storage system.
v) Central London meeting rooms
Our current central office in Hayward Heath is owned by the Regis, and pursuant to the agreement, anyone affiliated with the firm can easily access and use any central London Regis meeting room. This is not exclusively restricted to London, and is accessible in any other city containing a Regis.
Get in touch
We are always looking to recruit solicitors who would like to work on a self-employed basis under our regulatory and insurance umbrella. Please do email us in the first instance with your CV and/or LinkedIn profile and we would be very happy to arrange an introductory call or meeting.
Primarily we are looking for those with specialisms that compliment our own practice, as well as solicitors who have their own client following, or at least a desire and ability to attract work for themselves.
If you would like to apply, as mentioned, please send us a CV and/or LinkedIn profile along with a covering letter to alice.roseman@jonathanlea.net
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