Most guides to starting a law firm are written by people who want to sell you something at the end — practice-management software, a website package, a lead-generation contract. This one isn't. The goal here is simpler: to lay out, in the order that actually matters, the decisions and steps involved in opening your own practice, so that the part that feels overwhelming becomes a list you can work through.
Because that's the real obstacle. Starting a firm isn't hard the way passing the bar was hard. It's hard the way any large undertaking is hard when nobody has shown you the sequence — when every decision feels like it depends on five others and you don't know which to make first. Attorneys are trained to manage exactly this kind of complexity for clients. The trick is to manage it for yourself.
This is the hub for everything we've written about going solo. Each section gives you the essentials and the decision, then links to the full guide for that step. Read it top to bottom for the whole path, or jump to the decision you're stuck on.
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Start With the Question Under the Question
Before any of the mechanics — entity, name, office, clients — there's a prior question most attorneys skip past because it's uncomfortable: should you start your own firm at all? Not "can you" — most barred attorneys can. The honest question is whether solo practice fits the way you want to work, the income you need, and your tolerance for being responsible for everything that used to be someone else's job.
Going solo means you are now also the marketer, the bookkeeper, the IT department, the receptionist, and the person who follows up on unpaid invoices. The law is maybe half of it. For some attorneys that's liberation — they'd rather own all of it than answer to a partner. For others it's a poor trade, and they'd be happier and better paid at a firm. Neither answer is wrong, but guessing is expensive.
We've written a full, honest breakdown of how to make this call — the financial runway question, the temperament question, the practice-area question, and the difference between wanting out of your current job and wanting in to ownership. Work through whether you should start your own law firm before you spend money on anything below — and for a clear-eyed picture of what that money actually goes to, see how much it costs to start a law firm. If the answer is yes, the rest of this guide is your map.
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The Sequence That Actually Matters
Here's the order we'd run it, and the reasoning behind the order. Most of the anxiety around starting a firm comes from trying to do everything at once. You don't have to. Each step makes the next one possible.
- Decide it's the right move — covered above.
- Choose your business structure and form the entity — because your name, your bank account, and your malpractice coverage all depend on it.
- Name the firm — because everything client-facing flows from it, and there are ethics rules you can't ignore.
- Make the office decision — home, leased, or virtual — because it shapes your costs and your client experience.
- Set up the money plumbing — operating account, trust account, bookkeeping — because the day your first client pays you, this has to already exist.
- Decide how you'll get clients — because revenue is the thing that makes all of the above sustainable, and it takes the longest to build.
- Set your fees — because underpricing in year one is one of the hardest mistakes to recover from.
You can move quickly through 2–5 (they're mostly administrative and can be done in a few weeks). Steps 1, 6, and 7 are the ones that deserve real thought. Notice that "build a website" and "buy software" aren't on the critical path — they matter, but they're downstream of these decisions, not prerequisites for them.
Step 2 — Choose Your Business Structure
Your firm needs a legal form: sole proprietorship, or a professional entity such as a PLLC, professional corporation (PC), or an LLC where your state permits law firms to use one. This is the decision that everything administrative hangs off — it determines how you're taxed, what liability protection you have (and don't, since a professional entity never shields you from your own malpractice), and what you can legally call your firm.
The right structure depends on your state's rules for law practices, your expected income, and whether you'll ever bring in partners or staff. Some states restrict which entity types attorneys may use; most require professional-entity variants rather than a plain LLC. Because this is genuinely jurisdiction-specific, the one universal rule is: confirm what your state bar and your state's business-filing authority actually allow before you file — and consider a short consult with an accountant on the tax treatment, since that's where the real money difference lives.
The full breakdown of the options, what each protects, the tax trade-offs, and the questions to bring to an accountant is in our law firm business structure guide. Don't over-engineer this step — many solos start as a single-member PLLC or the equivalent and revisit it only when income or headcount changes.
Step 3 — Name the Firm
Naming feels like a branding exercise, and it partly is — but for attorneys it's also a regulated one. Most jurisdictions have rules about what a law firm can call itself: prohibitions on misleading names, on implying a partnership that doesn't exist, on trade names that suggest something you can't substantiate, and requirements around using attorney names. A name that would be fine for a bakery can draw a bar inquiry for a firm.
Beyond compliance, the name carries practical weight. It goes on your trust account, your malpractice application, your bar registration, your domain, your signage, and every client agreement. Changing it later is a genuine hassle. So it's worth getting right once: a name that's compliant, available as a domain, not confusingly close to an existing firm, and that you won't wince at in five years.
Our guide to naming your law firm covers the ethics rules to check, the practical tests (domain, search, conflicts), and the trade-offs between your-own-name versus a trade name. Check name availability and the domain before you fall in love with one.
Step 4 — Make the Office Decision
Where your practice physically lives drives your costs, your professional image, and how clients experience you. There are three legitimate answers, and the right one depends on your practice area and how often clients actually need to sit across from you — not on what a firm "should" have.
- Home office — the lean default for many new solos, legitimate and increasingly normal, if you handle a professional video presence and a plan for occasional in-person meetings.
- Leased office — right when clients regularly come to you or your practice area carries weight; the cost is real and recurring, so favor short terms early.
- Virtual office — a professional address plus on-demand meeting rooms without a full lease; the underused middle path, with some ethics fine print on address and mail handling.
We've written the launch-stage version of this decision in the first law office guide — how to choose for a brand-new practice without overcommitting. For the deep dives on actually setting each one up well, the complete law office setup guide and its room-by-room companions cover the physical side in detail. The short version: start at the lightest setup your clients genuinely allow, and move up when in-person volume — not ego — tells you to.
Step 5 — Set Up the Money Plumbing
This is the step that's purely administrative but absolutely cannot be skipped or improvised, because the day a client first pays you, the accounts have to already exist and be correct. Three pieces:
A business operating account. Separate from your personal money, full stop. Commingling firm and personal funds is both an accounting nightmare and, in some framings, an ethics problem. Open it as soon as the entity is formed. The full setup — choosing a bank, opening the trust account at an approved institution, and accepting card payments without dipping into trust — is covered in business banking for your law firm.
A client trust account (IOLTA). This is the one attorneys get wrong, and getting it wrong is one of the fastest routes to a bar discipline problem. Client funds you haven't yet earned — retainers, settlement proceeds, advance fees in many arrangements — do not belong to you and must sit in a separate trust account, never touched for operating expenses. Every U.S. jurisdiction has trust-accounting rules, most run an IOLTA program, and the requirements are strict and unforgiving. Set this up correctly from day one and learn the rules cold — this is not a place to wing it.
Bookkeeping from day one. Even a simple system, started immediately, beats a shoebox you'll reconcile in a panic next April. You need to track income, expenses, and — separately and carefully — trust-account activity. Many solos use small-business accounting software plus a discipline of recording everything; some use law-specific tools. The tool matters less than starting on day one and never letting the trust ledger drift.
Alongside the accounts, two protections belong here: malpractice insurance (not legally required in most states, but going bare is a risk most new solos shouldn't take — see what to buy and why and get a quote before you decide), and confirming your bar registration and professional-responsibility setup are current for operating your own shop. These aren't glamorous, but they're the floor you build everything else on.
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Step 6 — Decide How You'll Get Clients
Everything above can be done in a few weeks. This step is the one that takes months and never really stops — and it's the one that actually determines whether your firm survives. Revenue is the oxygen, and the supply takes time to build, which is exactly why you start thinking about it early rather than after the office is furnished.
The good news for new solos: your first clients almost never come from advertising. They come from your existing network, from referrals, from other attorneys who don't handle your practice area, and from being genuinely findable when someone searches for what you do. The attorney who tells everyone they know that they've opened a practice — former colleagues, law school classmates, the lawyer down the hall who does a different kind of work — generates more early business than the one who quietly launches a website and waits.
This is a deep topic and it's where new firms most often stall, so we've given it its own full treatment: how to get your first clients as a solo attorney walks through the network activation, the referral relationships worth building, and the realistic timeline for organic discovery. Start this before you launch, not after — the pipeline you want in month three is built in month zero.
Step 7 — Set Your Fees
Pricing is the decision new solos most reliably get wrong, and they get it wrong in one direction: too low. The instinct — "I'm new, so I should charge less" — feels humble and is genuinely costly. Underpricing doesn't just reduce this year's income; it sets an anchor that's painful to move, attracts the most difficult and least loyal clients, and quietly signals lower competence to the exact clients you want.
Your fees need to cover not just your time but the overhead clients never see: the trust accounting, the malpractice premium, the non-billable hours you spend running the business, the gaps between matters. A rate that looks generous next to your old salary divided by 2,000 hours is often, in reality, below water once you account for everything a firm has to carry.
There's real craft to setting fees as a new attorney — what to benchmark against, when hourly versus flat fees make sense, how to talk about money with clients without flinching, and how to raise rates later. The full method is in how to set your fees as a new solo attorney. The headline: price for the firm you're building, not for the impostor syndrome you're feeling.
Leaving Your Current Job Without Burning It Down
Most new solos are leaving an existing job, and how you leave matters more than people expect — both ethically and practically. Two things deserve care.
The clients. If you have a book of business or clients who'd want to follow you, there are real ethics rules around soliciting them while still employed, and your employment agreement may add contractual limits on top. The clients ultimately choose their own counsel — they're not property — but how and when you communicate with them is governed, and getting it wrong can turn a clean exit into a dispute or a bar complaint. Know your jurisdiction's rules on departing-lawyer notice and solicitation before you say a word, and tread especially carefully while you're still on the old firm's payroll.
The bridge. The profession is smaller than it feels. The colleagues and even the boss you're leaving are future referral sources — other attorneys are among the best sources of work for a new solo, precisely because they refer the matters they don't handle. An exit that's professional, well-timed, and not a surprise leaves those relationships intact. An exit that feels like a betrayal closes doors you'll wish were open in month six. Give honest notice, don't take what isn't yours, and leave the way you'd want a departing associate to leave you.
Non-compete and non-solicitation clauses vary widely in enforceability against attorneys — many jurisdictions limit restrictions on the practice of law specifically — but "probably unenforceable" is not the same as "worth a fight in your first month of practice." Read what you signed, and get advice if it's restrictive.
A Realistic First-90-Days Order of Operations
If you've decided to go (Step 1), here's how the rest tends to sequence in practice:
Weeks 1–3 — the administrative foundation. Form the entity, settle the name, open the operating and trust accounts, get a malpractice quote and bind coverage, confirm your bar registration is in order for solo practice. This is checklist work — satisfying precisely because it's finite.
Weeks 2–6 — the practical setup, in parallel. Make the office decision and set up wherever you'll work. Get a basic professional presence: a real email at your domain, a simple but credible website, a way for clients to reach you and to pay you. None of this needs to be elaborate to be enough.
Week 1 onward, and never stopping — clients. Tell your network you've opened. Reconnect with referral sources. Make yourself findable. This starts on day one and runs in the background through everything else, because it has the longest lead time.
Ongoing — the discipline. Record every transaction, reconcile the trust account, and keep the books from day one. The firm that does this from the start never has the painful reckoning that the firm that "gets to it later" always does.
Notice what's not an emergency: the perfect website, the practice-management software, the office buildout, the logo. Those are real, and worth doing well, but they're improvements to a working firm — not preconditions for opening one. Attorneys delay launching for months over decisions that don't actually gate anything.
Once the doors are open, the job changes from setting up to getting traction. What to focus on in those first three months — the clients, the cash, the rhythm, and the ways solos quietly stall — is covered in your first 90 days as a solo attorney.
What to Skip (For Now)
New solos burn time and money on the wrong things. A short list of what to deprioritize while you're getting open:
- An expensive office buildout — start lean, upgrade when client volume justifies it.
- Premium software stacks — a simple, correct system beats an elaborate one you haven't learned. You can adopt practice-management tools once you understand your own workflow.
- A large marketing spend — your early clients come from relationships and referrals, not ad budgets. Paid acquisition rarely pays off for a brand-new solo.
- The perfect brand — a clean, professional, compliant name and identity is enough. Don't let logo perfectionism delay opening by a quarter.
- Practice-area sprawl — taking everything that walks in feels safe but makes you forgettable. A clear focus is easier to refer to and to be found for.
Spend the saved time and money on the things that compound: the client pipeline, getting the trust accounting genuinely right, and being excellent at the work itself.
The Firm You Open Is Not the Firm You'll Have
The last thing worth saying: the version of your firm that exists on opening day is a starting point, not a verdict. The office will change. The fees will rise. The practice area may narrow. The website will get rebuilt. What matters at the start is that the foundation is sound — the entity is right, the trust account is clean, the name is compliant, and you've started telling people you're open. Everything else is iteration.
If you're at the very beginning, start with the honest go/no-go in should you start your own law firm. If you've already decided and you're working the checklist, the linked guides above are your deep dives for each step. When you're ready to set up the physical space, the complete law office setup guide takes it from there. And once the firm is open and the matters start stacking up, how to run a solo practice without drowning is the operations playbook for keeping it sustainable past year one.
Starting a firm is a large thing made of small, finite steps. You already know how to work through complexity — that's the job. This is just the job, pointed at your own practice.