Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Dragoncar said in another thread, "Maus: I think we need a lawyer thread... I've been trying to feel out what kind of part-time law work could fit with ERE, but the only thing I can come up with is something like 3-months of hell contract work followed by 9 months off."
Here you go!
Being a 2L with no plans of working 9-5, I've had some thoughts about this. I've been connecting with part-time, solo practitioners around my area trying to figure out how they do it, turns out there are a lot of ways.
I have a bit of an itch to be a litigator, which I think can be scratched by being a bar advocate in Massachusetts (public defender work contracted out to private attorneys) for a couple of years. The state limits you to 1400 billable hrs/year, though most attorneys only get just under half of that. The average attorney brings in about $30k/year from the part-time work and handles about 50 cases. It's sort of designed to supplement a private practice, but if that's all you did, it wouldn't be bad part-time work.
I also have an extended family full of entrepreneurs who collectively have legal bills exceeding $100k/year, who would be happy to hire me. Most of it is real estate transactions with some contract drafting and employment law. If you could just connect with a few small-business owners who have a few thousand dollars per year in legal bills, it could be a nice option to be their go-to attorney.
Then there's doing wills, trusts and estates for the aging baby boomers who need to plan for the inevitable. The nice thing about that is it throws in a bit of financial planning work, which is inherently interesting to most ERE-ers. I volunteer a lot of my time right now to helping the elderly and so many of them don't even have a will. So long as I am there socializing with them, I may as well help them get their financial house in order and just take whatever they can afford to pay me.
Lots of options, in my situation anyway, to craft out some kind of part-time legal work. I'd like to keep myself to under 15hrs/week for the first 3 to 5 years. Then just stop totally, maybe just doing some civil rights pro-bono work here and there.
I think solo practice gets a bad rap because lawyers go into it wanting to make six figures, so it's work work work, just like a big law firm, plus the administrative headaches, but without the steady money and benefits. But if you approach it with the expectation of only making $15k-$40k/year, working part-time when the work comes to you, things get a LOT easier. Most the advice/books/experience regarding solo practices is with the former mindset, so I find most "conventional wisdom" about it doesn't really resonate with me.

@mikeBOS

Thanks for starting the thread. I've also given some thought to part-time lawyering. I'd agree with Dragoncar that contract document review work would be a hellish gig. My own inclination is to do appointed appellate work for one or two of the districts in California. It pays $30/hour for reviewing the record and $60/hour for briefing and oral argument. As an added bonus, if you do only this type of work, the malpractice insurance is cheap as dirt.
I also read about a gal who parks herself in a local coffee house and does simple stuff like demand letters, marriage settlement agreements, and wills for $1/minute. Now that California permits unbundled representation, that type of practice seems possible.
In the early years of the decade, when housing was on fire, I contemplated doing trust and estate work by marketing living trusts to the many folks in the Bay area whose houses had appreciated by 20-fold and who might wish to avoid probate.
So, your list of possibilities strikes me as spot on. And I agree that the reason most law students avoid solo practice is because the money doesn't justify the steep learning curve. Law school saddles graduates with huge debt and provides little real-world preparation for the business side of solo practice. I was lucky because I managed without loans and took a very intense civil clinic in 3L. I negotiated insurance settlements, drafted wills, even prepared a trademark application for a proprietary beef jerky recipe. It really opened my eyes to the nuts and bolts of a law practice. If you have the opportunity, I'd highly recommend some type of clinic work in your 3L.

Thanks for the great info -- any idea how competitive the public work is? I have no particular skills in criminal or trial work, so I'd be learning as I go. It seems that there are plenty of more qualified lawyers out there looking for any work who would snap that up.

@dragoncar

Both appellate and trial defense work is siloed into lower-level felonies up through capital murders. The more challenging the case, the more trial experience is expected, but the less competative the pool.
If you want to get some immediate trial experience, offer to volunteer to do misdemeanor trials for the district attorney. Some, but not all, will gladly assign some simple DUI or domestic violence trials to ease the caseload on their deputies.

Okay, so, I'm not a lawyer... Gut reaction is that it saddens me that contract review work isn't appealing.
I pay $450/hr to have my contracts reviewed. To be honest, I think it's worth every penny: $900 to review a $1.2mil contract, to reduce the chance that I'm getting screwed?
Almost all doctors come out of training wanting to have their contracts reviewed. I've never seen anyone charge less than $300/hr. It certainly is possible to build a reputation for that through local residency programs. Is it so painful that $300/hr doesn't make it palatable?

@Mo

Sorry for the misdirection. I am not referring to contract reviews, which are fairly staightforward and a wise transaction. I was grumbling about document reviews, where you are looking at tens of thousands of emails for the smoking gun or reviewing hundreds of deposition transcripts in preparation for trial. This is really tedious becuase it requires focused reading of extremely booring material.
As a general rule, lawyers break down into litigators -- those who assist clients with adversarial proceedings either as plaintiffs or defendants -- and transactional practioners -- who draft agreements and assist businesses with mergers, IPOs, patent and intellecual property issues, etc. I'm one of the former; so while I know how to draft a will or review a contract, that work would be better handled by someone who has done it so many times it has become second nature. Having said that, I think I'll explore a marketing pitch for contract reviews at UC Davis...

Mo, also we were talking "contract work" as in a "contracted employee" (i.e. paid by the hour to review documents for a single defined project vs. a salaried associate).
To give you a sense of this, temp lawyers are often expected to review 80 pages of discovery documents an hour for at least 12 hours per day. The pay for this can be one the order of $30/hr (although they are billed out above this).
Granted, that's not a bad chunk of change... it's just grueling, soul crushing work. My thought was that you could do that for a few months and then coast on the cash while your ERE nest egg continues to compound.
I assume having gaps like that will make you less attractive to the placement agencies, though.
Disclaimer: this is all gleaned from temp laywer blogs, not from personal experience.

Sounds just like my buddy who does contract work for temp agencies around Milwaukee. He'll review documents for about $30/hr for 2-3 months, then travel to visit friends/family or do construction work with his dad until another gig comes along. He seems to like it well enough.