Primary care law is the new general practice.
The American Bar Association magazine Law Practice Today just published an article on Primary Care Law becoming a valid specialty. It’s nice they’ve “newly discovered” the way I’ve been practicing law since 1993. Let me tell you how I became a LifeCycle Lawyer.
I met my wife while she was in medical school and promptly followed her along the path and four years later got into medical school myself. Half-way through med school, as she was finishing her family medicine residency, we decided two doctors do not usually make a good marriage, so I went into law instead.
Six years after I started practicing law in a big firm doing general civil law, we moved to Columbus, Ohio and opened solo family medical and legal practices in the same office. It was a match made in heaven. I administrated both our practices, only marketed the healthcare one, and met two-thousand new law client prospects each year, many of whom agreed to pay me “Less Than $1 A Day” ($30 a month) to be their attorney-on-call.
Nine years later, we closed those practices and moved to Israel for two years and then back to the states. Susan went back to a “big-med” practice (Kaiser) and I went into someone else’s established medical malpractice plaintiffs practice for several years until I tired of suing our friends and went back into what I call LifeCycle Law.
Practicing LifeCycle Law and Counseling means attracting and accepting clients and agreeing to do unlimited free consultations for any legal issue that may arise in their personal lives for a very reasonable fee. If additional legal services are needed beyond answering basic legal questions, then it’s usually done on a flat-fee basis unless it is a larger, open-ended issue.
If a client owns a small business, then we provide LifeCycle Business Consulting and General Counsel services for a little bit more per month. Okay, ten times more ($300 per month), to be truthful. But I’ve yet to have a small business owner balk at the price.
I try to keep the number of my personal clients under 200 and my business clients under 100 so I have plenty of time to handle all the little issues that pop up in their respective personal and business lifecycles.
It’s been a great way to practice personal and small business counseling and law and I, while I have developed some deep knowledge and experience in a variety of areas, I do not think I will every stop being a LifeCycle Lawyer.
So, if you ever have a need just to ask a lawyer a question about almost any topic, feel free to call me at 410-525-3476 (410-LCL-FIRM).