The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/11430
of his practice in Silicon Valley. He goes skiing for an hour or two before work, and he’s online with his clients by 9:00 a.m. PT. My office is at home. I’m able to take my kids to school or home from school a few days a week and spend quality time with them. Show me big-firm lawyers who can ski before work or carpool their kids! What do you miss about your former life in a large firm? Not a whole lot, frankly. My lifestyle was very different back then, and I could tolerate working very long hours. Now that I’m a family man, I just can’t do that, nor would I want to. I’m a great fit for this kind of practice. I do sometimes miss the big social events and big budget things large law firms normally do, but all of us at VLP have chosen to exchange most of that stuff for a better quality of life day to day. Has the economic downturn affected your business? As I mentioned earlier, we’ve continued to add attorneys and their clients. What I’m seeing is that it isn’t that clients want cheaper lawyers — everyone wants the best lawyer available, just like the best doctor or any type of professional — but rather, they’re focused more and more on value, that is, the best bang for their buck. That’s what our model is all about, and clearly, our clients are attached to that model. Looking 10 years down the road, what changes do you see in the practice of the law? I certainly agree that law firms will have to adapt to survive and thrive, but I don’t think that means every law firm will become virtual. I’m sure more firms like ours will spring up because the technology allows it, but I think firms will have to embrace cutting-edge technology to better service their clients, like document management systems that clients can access, for example. We’re already ahead of the game on that score because all of our documents are already stored online — it’s just a matter of how and when we’ll enable clients to access that. Those kinds of advances will be critical for law firms in the future. One aspect of delivering better value to clients is providing alternative billing methods from the standard hourly fee. Do you have a unique type of billing practice that you can share? Sure. We leave billing mostly to the individual partner, because our business model aligns the incentive of the partner and the firm. The partner is incented to pick the right number because the money doesn’t go into one big pool as in a traditional firm. But the one thing that’s unique to our practice is that we have several partners — I’m one of them — who have a sort of hourly virtual general counsel relationship with some of our clients. If a client needs more than five or 10 hours a week of services, we can provide a fixed number of services for a discount to our normal rate provided the client guarantees those hours on a month-to-month basis. Several partners even spend “office hours” with their clients who aren’t big enough to have their own full-time general counsel, but still have more 70 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer needs than that of a start-up. It’s a great way for the client to help manage their legal costs on a fixed budget and for the attorney to have guaranteed income and a good, evolving understanding of the client’s legal needs. Let’s hop into a time machine. Your three-year old is now graduating from college and wants to pursue the noble profession of law. What’s the best advice you can give? The same advice I would give today — make sure it’s something you really want to do, something you’ll truly love. What’s that great quote . . . “The law is a jealous mistress”? It’s a long haul to become a lawyer, and the work is hard. There’s a lot of burnout and heartache with trying to balance your life and manage a practice. I don’t think in 10 years or even 50 that’s going to be much different. David, as we wind up what’s been a most enlightening conversation, let me just ask if there’s anything we haven’t touched on that you’d like to talk about? I just want to go back to your question about will I see a change in law firms. What I think is that there will be a greater diversity in the type of firms out there. For instance, when VLP started, we didn’t try to change big law firms, and we’re not saying that big firms should be like us. What we are is a group of people who want to practice in a different way and are figuring out how to do that. Our value is provided by our platform, so we don’t need to struggle with how to offshore our work to India or some of the things that bigger firms need to think about in order to maintain per-partner profit. We built our firm on a different model precisely so we wouldn’t have to think about a lot of those issues. Big firms will still be around in the future, but we might have 50 other virtual firms competing with us. But who knows, 20 years from now we could be a 500-attorney firm. We’d still be virtual, but I think we could stand up against even the biggest firms. Thank you, David, for giving us a really good look into your virtual world. Let’s catch up in 2020. ILTA David Goldenberg is a Founding Partner of Virtual Law Partners. Prior to VLP, David was a co- founder and partner of Lion Tech Law, a boutique law firm based in San Francisco. David has also served as general counsel for Mediabolic, Inc., the leading embedded entertainment software company in Silicon Valley, for nearly three years. David graduated from Stanford Law School in 1996, where he was Chair (Managing Editor) of the Stanford Journal of Law, Business & Finance. He received his bachelor’s degree with honors from Stanford University. A member of the State Bar of California, David can be reached at dgoldenberg@virtuallawpartners.com.