Good heavens, it's been two months since my last entry! I really have to do a better job of keeping this blog updated.

I did receive my P-number, so have been a lawyer "for real" for two months. So far I'm afraid that I have to report that I have not made a profit, if I had to pay my 2008 taxes tomorrow instead of income I would have to report a net loss from self-employment.

One of the issues was that it took me longer than I thought it would to get malpractice insurance. As you know, it took me a while to get funding for my law practice, and unfortunately I didn't start looking for legal malpractice insurance until after I had gotten the funding issue under control. The broker then mailed me an application, which I sent back immediately. The broker then sent my application on to a number of insurance companies. And these sat on the application for a while before responding with quotes. The broker and I picked the best option, and I paid the first year's premium, but then it took the insurance company we had chosen (Valiant) a while to actually mail me my policy, which only got here in the mail on Monday.

The reason this was a problem is that lawyer referral services (including the one run by the State Bar of Michigan) require that lawyers who register with them have malpractice insurance, and further require that every lawyer send them a copy of a specific page in the policy called the "declarations page". So without my insurance policy I was unable to register for these referral services, and so unable to get these referrals. If I had to do this all over again, I would make sure that getting malpractice insurance was the first thing I did, instead of waiting to get my funding organized. Legal malpractice insurance is actually quite cheap for a new attorney like me, I have a good policy for a premium of several hundred dollars a year.

Somebody Anonymous asked what kind of law I am practicing. At this point, I am pretty much taking anything that walks in the door, my only two exceptions are criminal law and family law. And if I don't start turning a profit soon, I will start accepting criminal cases, and applying for court-appointed criminal defense work. (But no matter what, I am not going into family law, "messy divorces" and similar problems are not for me, I'm afraid)

Additionally, since I am just starting out, I am not able to take cases on "contingency". This is what we call it when the lawyer takes a case knowing that he or she will not get paid until or unless he wins. At the moment I can't afford to take such cases. Just this week I had to turn down a client who couldn't afford to pay my retainer (I was able to refer her to a public interest agency that should be able to help). Hiring a lawyer is expensive, but I have tried to market myself to be very competitive with other lawyers in the area. Additionally, I am now set up so that I can recieve payments by VISA or MASTERCARD (If you are wondering, I did set that up with Midwest Transaction Group, not with a bank).

Thanks for reading. I'll try not to let so much time pass between updates in the future.