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For as long as I can remember, lawyers were told to specialize in a certain area of law because it was easier to manage and generally more profitable. A solo lawyer having a general practice was perceived to be a newbie or someone who couldn’t get enough clients. Or to put it more charitably, something every new solo lawyer had to do until they found their niche.

Some law firms have general practices, but most of them are just a bunch of specialty lawyers who are splitting the office lease payment.

But there are some people who want to have a general practice. These tend to be people who are fascinated by multiple areas of the law. Or they were exposed to different practice areas while doing internships or externships during college or law school.

So in the age of specialization, is it possible to have a profitable and fulfilling general practice? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons.

Having a broad knowledge of the law has its advantages. The main one being that the lawyer can provide more comprehensive advice. For example, if a senior citizen were to ask me, a tax lawyer, what the consequences of gambling winnings are on her social security payments, I would tell her that some of her winnings might be taxable, and it could make her social security income taxable. Fortunately, her taxes can be minimized or eliminated by keeping a record of her gambling losses to offset the winnings.

On the other hand, a general practice lawyer would also advise that her reported gambling winnings will increase her Medicare premiums regardless of whether she had losses to offset the winnings. Very few people do not learn this until the damage has already been done. After all, who consults a lawyer before they go to a casino?

Most people hire lawyers only a few times in their lives (mostly when they are in trouble) and then hope to never see one again. Thus, another advantage of having a general practice is that it allows lawyers to maintain a long-term relationship with their clients. This can work well for all parties. The lawyer has a steady source of income, although not a lot, which will be explained later. The client will not need to search for and vet multiple lawyers.

There are some problems with having a general law practice. The biggest problem is dealing with conflicts of interest. In short, if you try to help everyone with every legal issue, eventually you will be faced with a conflict. This is particularly the case in small communities with few people and fewer lawyers.

The classic example is where you help two (or more) people start a business by setting up a corporation or a limited liability company. You might likely be the general counsel to the business, providing advice on an as-needed basis. But some time later, the partners may have a falling out. You might be able to help by interpreting the by-laws or operating agreement to settle a dispute. Or you can act as a mediator. But if the parties won’t budge and a court has to get involved, you likely won’t be able to represent any of them.

The second problem is keeping up with all of the latest legal developments. Even specialist lawyers must spend considerable time reading new laws, administrative regulations and court decisions. Also, they must anticipate how those new items will affect their current and future clients. Imagine having to do this many times over as a generalist. For people who must know everything about everything, this can be a major time suck. However, this problem might be somewhat overblown. Many lawyers participating in specialty groups will announce and even analyze new developments, especially if they are important. Also, I’ve been told that if you know the basics of a certain field of law, then it will be easier to understand new developments and changes.

Lastly, you may need to apply a number of alternative fee structures. In most cases, generalists serve the middle class and the indigent. And unfortunately, most Americans live paycheck to paycheck so they may not have the budget to hire an attorney unless it’s a very serious situation. What this means is that you may not get many clients who can pay a large amount up front. So you will have to take cases on contingency, payment plans, or flat-fee consults. If you are just starting out, you may get burned by a client a few times. But eventually you will be able to turn away potentially problematic clients or structure a fee arrangement that is fair to everyone.

So based on the above, a general practice is not a default practice area for new or failing lawyers. It can be profitable but it depends on many factors, many of which the lawyer cannot control. Lawyers will have to spend more time keeping up with the law, and likely serve clients who cannot afford to pay lawyer fees up front. But being able to provide multidisciplinary legal advice is a skill that few lawyers today have.

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Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at sachimalbe@excite.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

David Reidy, formerly the Chief Legal & Compliance Officer at fintech startup Payactiv and before that a partner at McGuireWoods leading the national fintech practice, has joined Scale LLP as its new managing partner.

“The chance to lead Scale LLP is a once-in-a-career opportunity,” said Reidy. “We are living through a generational change in workplace culture,” said Reidy, “and the time has come for a top-tier virtual firm.”

Reidy takes the reins of a rapidly growing law firm with around 50 lawyers across 10 states that doubled its partnership over the last year. Founding partner Adam Forest describes the firm as heavily influenced by its Silicon Valley roots. “Innovation is in our DNA,” he said.

Part of innovation is adapting to the changing legal landscape by bringing in leadership with experience running a national Biglaw practice group and an in-house department. Reidy is quick to note that his legal department experience Scale’s complement of former in-house lawyers — including six former GCs — are critical to the firm’s business. When it comes to building relationships with new clients, it helps to have “worn the business hat” in the past he said.

While Scale LLP endeavors to continuing growing as “a top-tier virtual firm,” it’s an open question how long the word “virtual” is really going to matter.

Traditional, brick-and-mortar — or more accurately “steel-and-glass” — law firms are tentatively adopting three- and four-day office weeks. Some are embracing remote working arrangements to lure and retain top-notch talent outside of the law’s customary power centers. Meanwhile, a virtual law firm cracked the Am Law 100 this year earning one of the most recognizable chits of an establishment law firm. So what does it even mean to be a “virtual” firm at this point?

Oh, right, the way lawyers can keep 80 percent of their fees.

But putting that admittedly important detail aside, how are virtual law firms really all that different, in terms of work product, from the way traditional firms have operated for years.

As Forest explains, the bulk of a traditional Biglaw lawyer’s work day is spent working with attorneys on different floors, in different cities, and at different firms. The law firm was already moving toward what we call “virtual” already… only with higher commercial lease outlays. We only needed a little bit of a push to get to a model where technology replaced even that small portion of daily face-to-face communication. As Reidy put it, “The pandemic proved the model can work but the need for it has been there.”

“I wouldn’t trade my experience at an Am Law 50 firm, but there are room for different approaches,” Reidy said. “50 percent of service professionals considering a change,” he said citing a recent survey, “not because they don’t want to work it’s that they want to explore alternatives.” Of all the reasons to develop alternative paths to practice, Reidy makes a point of flagging is the impact that the old face time model has had on representation and diversity in the workplace.

But the pandemic also proved that most people do crave the sort of community that virtual working doesn’t necessarily encourage. While loneliness is bad enough as a mental health factor, the strength of the law firm model is collaboration and cross-promotion, and virtual work can easily slip into siloed work. Of all of Scale LLP’s efforts to evolve the virtual law firm, its approach to maintaining community might be the most consequential for the long-term success of the model.

“We’re built with attorneys in mind,” Forest explains. “We put a heavy emphasis on community and getting to know and trust one another.” To make that happen, the firm employs full-time staff focused on building the community. Virtual meetings, celebrations, events, smaller “elevator meets” are run to get the attorneys to feel connected and build real relationships. It seems to be working. “Last year, half of all work was on someone else’s client.” That’s exactly the kind of collaboration and cross-promotion that virtual firms aren’t expected to have.

So maybe, by next year, Scale LLP will have shown us that there’s no need to tag firms with the “virtual” label any more and we can just call them all “law firms.”

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

One by one, Biglaw firms have been adopting the new Davis Polk salary scale. There may not be a formal memo announcing the latest lockstep salary match, but we’ve heard that associates at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan will soon be raking in the money.

Sources from Stroock tell us that the firm officially announced its DPW match earlier this week. As of July 1, salaries at the firm will look something like this:

• 2021: $202,500
• 2020: $205,000
• 2019: $215,000
• 2018: $240,000
• 2017: $275,000
• 2016: $305,000
• 2015: $330,000
• 2014: $350,000
• 2013: $365,000

Congratulations to everyone at Stroock!

We depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we’ll also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Duke Law School Faculty have incited a turf war with the student staff at Law and Contemporary Problems, the school’s oldest law journal. At the heart of the dispute is the Faculty Board’s insistence that an upcoming “Sex in the Law” issue include an article by UK philosophy professor Kathleen Stock. As Stock has spent the last few years aggressively promoting herself as the professor willing to rubberstamp whatever anti-trans sentiment will get her a media interview, it’s not exactly a mystery how she intends to use the student journal as a vehicle.

Making this, I guess, more of a TERF war.

Because “trans exclusive radical feminist” is one name for Stock’s recent work. Another is “gender critical feminism.” But whatever it’s called, it’s a brand of warmed over marginalization packaged as “philosophy.” It’s mostly a quirk of the branch characterized as analytic philosophy, a strain of the discipline that spent the last 75 years or so building a “value neutral” framework that can justify the status quo as objective truth. Not every adherent to this brand of philosophy breaks bad, but a discipline capable of offering a crutch to someone interested in saying “things are as they are because they’re meant to be that way” probably needs a good dose of self-reflection.

A 2020 profile in the Times Higher Education offered exactly the sort of low key snark that we rely on the UK to provide:

While unpopular closer to home, Professor Stock’s views are seemingly striking a chord with a larger audience outside academia – with 24,000 accounts following her on Twitter. Last month her blog on the employment tribunal ruling against Maya Forstater, the tax expert who lost her job after claiming that transgender women could not change their biological sex, was liked by more than 3,300 people.

In other words, “while actual academics think she’s become next to useless, right-wing trolls seeking to piggyback off the credibility of an academic institution confirming their biases are quick to hype her work.” When a news outlet focusing on higher education describes your work as a blog post with 3300 upvotes that’s a roasting.

Bringing us back to the question of how any of this is happening at a student-run Duke Law School journal. Apparently the student editorial board voted overwhelmingly not to include this article but the Faculty Board is refusing to let the article move forward without it. We’ve been told 5 student editors have already resigned and at least 14 more are considering following.

Law journals get a lot of flack for low readership, but is the Faculty Board really that excited to score some of that sweet, sweet 3000-hit Substack audience?

This all got me thinking about the NCAA’s recent smackdown from the Supreme Court. Unlike other fields, legal scholarship prides itself on almost exclusively employing student-edited publications. An army of law students are entrusted with the publishing arm of legal academia in exchange for a résumé chit and a pat on the back. All this tireless work for no pay is justified with somewhat romantic rhetoric about putting the best students in a position to put their purposes into print.

But, it seems at Duke this trust in student leadership only goes so far.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

My father grew up working in the Wolf family meat market. That business is long gone, but some of the institutional knowledge was passed down through the generations, and I even spent time in the meatpacking industry myself. Sure, doctors know something about the fragility of the human body, but so do butchers: once you get the skin off, animals don’t look so different from you and me. It takes a lot less force than you might think to break down the basic biological materials all vertebrates are composed of. Which is why you need to protect the three-pound blob of fats and proteins inside your melon that contains everything that makes you you.

For the first time in a decade of riding motorcycles, I had a close call the other night. I was on my way to a children’s soccer match — one still set to commence at that point, which I imprudently took as a proxy for relatively calm weather — when I encountered an unexpected downpour. The road slipped out from under me on a soft left curve a few blocks from home. My bike gained traction again pretty quickly. Unfortunately, when it did, it was sideways and still moving forward. Six hundred pounds of Honda Shadow and another 180 pounds of lawyer smacked the pavement pretty hard.

Obviously, I am more or less OK. The doctor gave me a couple hydrocodone tablets to ease my recovery. But there is only one reason I’m not unconscious in a hospital bed somewhere (or dead), with my ATL editors wondering why my column was (even more) late: I was wearing a helmet.

My head actually BOUNCED off the pavement. It is weird to be conscious for that, because it didn’t even really hurt. The helmet did what it was supposed to do. It absorbed the shock. I saw the whole world from the level of the asphalt before my head was catapulted back up like it was spring-loaded. My bell felt a little rung afterward, but instead of lying there bleeding like I surely would have been had I been helmetless, I dusted myself off, picked up the bike, and pushed it over to the side of the road to collect my thoughts.

I live in a state that does not have a universal helmet law. In fact, only 18 states have universal helmet laws, and the trend, sadly, over the past 20 years is to repeal helmet laws rather than strengthen them. It is an inexcusably bad decision not to wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle, but it shouldn’t be a personal decision at all. Helmetless riders cost all the rest of us billions every year.

There are lots of statistics about the economic impacts of motorcycle safety. The U.S. department of transportation periodically reports on the economic costs saved each year by the use of motorcycle helmets — these costs are for things like medical expenses, lost productivity, legal and court costs, insurance administration costs, congestion costs, and property damage. For 2017, use of motorcycle helmets saved $3.7 billion in economic costs — and that’s exclusive of comprehensive costs, which assign an additional value for lost quality of life. One recent study found that national mandatory motorcycle helmet laws could save an additional $2.2 billion annually.

The argument from nonhelmeted riders goes something like, “My body, my choice, if I assume the risk, I will bear the cost.” Which is not true. All kinds of costs of a motorcycle crash are not borne by the rider. You sure don’t bear the costs of the traffic jam you caused while they hose your remains off the sidewalk. A meta-analysis of 12 scientific papers also found that nonhelmeted patients are more likely to use publicly funded medical insurance.

And then there’s the perennial pastime of motorcycle enthusiasts: pointing out mistakes made by other riders that they, of course, would never be foolish enough to make. You are human. Your decisions are made in a fragile three-pound blob of fat and protein. Do anything long enough, and you will make a mistake.

I’ve made many mistakes. But wearing a helmet the other night was certainly not one of them. Helmets are inexpensive. Helmets are effective. Protect your dome out there.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

Kinney is working with a market leading Labor & Employment firm on its search for a junior to mid-level employment associate in Chicago. This firm is consistently ranked as one of the best places to work in Chicago and offers outstanding compensation and benefits as well.

Associates with 1-4 years of Occupational Safety and Health Administration experience, Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), Environmental, and Whistleblower experience are encouraged to apply.

Apply at jobs@kinneyrecruiting.com.

The new $205,000 salary scale is now all the rage across Biglaw firms, but for successful litigation boutiques like Susman Godfrey, that starting number was merely a suggestion. Just yesterday, the Houston-based firm announced a salary scale that comes over the top of the Davis Polk scale at every level.

The firm was already paying associates salaries that were higher than the market scale, and has now beaten the market again by $5,000 at each class year. Check out the new Susman salary scale, effective July 1:

Don’t forget, Susman is also a firm that regularly beats the market on year-end bonuses — and wildly so, in most cases. This past December, the most junior associates at the firm received median bonuses ($80,000) that were nearly as high as what the most senior associates received on the Cravath scale ($100,000). If you want to work hard and be justly rewarded for doing so, this is the firm for you.

Congratulations to everyone at Susman Godfrey!

We depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we’ll also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The Biden administration is proposing some major changes to Affordable Care Act marketplaces, including expanding the enrollment period by 30 days in 2022 and beyond.

The extension would allow consumers more time to review plan choices, seek in-person assistance and enroll in a plan that best meets their needs, stated the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in a fact sheet released on Monday that described the proposed provisions.

If finalized, the new annual open enrollment period for all individual market exchanges and off-exchange individual market plans would change to Nov. 1-Jan. 15.

Another provision included in the proposed rule would allow exchanges to create a monthly special enrollment period for consumers with a household income of less than 150% of the federal poverty level.

In one of his first acts as president, Joe Biden signed an executive order that established a special enrollment period from Feb. 15 to May 15. In that time, 1.2 million Americans signed up for insurance through HealthCare.gov.

“The success of the special enrollment period opportunity clearly shows the demand for quality, affordable coverage,” said CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure in a news release. “These latest steps aim to better fund outreach efforts and eliminate barriers to coverage. We’re making high-quality, low-cost coverage more accessible than ever.”

Biden’s CMS also proposes expanding the duties of exchange navigators who work with vulnerable and underserved populations to help them find affordable coverage.

The Trump administration struck a huge blow to the navigator program, slashing funding from $63 million in 2016 to $10 million in 2018. But, in April, CMS announced that they will give $80 million in funding to ACA navigators for the 2022 plan year.

Now, CMS wants to reinstate previous requirements that navigators provide consumers with information and assistance on post-enrollment topics, such as the eligibility appeals process and the exchange-related components of the premium tax credit reconciliation process.

But to account for this increase in navigator funding and to support further consumer outreach, user fees for the federally facilitated exchanges will go up to 2.75% of premiums from 2.25%. For state-based exchanges on the federal platform, user fees will jump to 2.25% of premiums from 1.75%.

Photo: zimmytws, Getty Images

* Donald Trump is suing the State of New York over a golf course. Bet he hopes the litigation doesn’t end up in the rough… [Washington Post]

* A grand jury may soon be investigating the recent building collapse in Surfside, Florida. [Insider]

* The Second Circuit has ordered an alleged “copyright troll” to file a sanctions opinion against him in all cases in which he is involved and to mail the decision to clients. Almost seems like a scarlet letter… [ABA Journal]

* Apparently, Attorney General Garland will personally scoop ice cream at a Department of Justice event this week. Wonder who got the “scoop” on that story. [Fox News]

* A former top lawyer at the Air Force and Space Force is now working as the general counsel of Voyager Space Holdings. Starfleet may be next… [Corporate Counsel]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

The Justice Known For Keeping Quiet Is Silent No More: Not when it comes to marijuana, at least.

Milbank Re-Raises: The firm that started it all.

Boutiques And Biglaw: Both are getting in on the new scale.

Left In Donald Trump’s Wake? A trade war. Great, just great.