On December 19, 1995 a 25 year-old kid from Brooklyn stepped out of the shade of a well-established law firm to be a solo attorney. And today, that kid celebrates 13 years in private practice.
It’s been a wild ride, folks.
When I hung out my shingle there were no such things are blogs. Heck, only a few companies had email addresses and websites (my email address, jfleisch@ix.netcom.com, had been my home since shortly before my graduation from law school in 1994 – and my first website was not built until 1996).
If you did have an email address it was from AOL or Compuserve.
Lawyers advertised on the television, radio, and in the Yellow Pages.
Business cards were heavy vellum stock with black lettering. No logos, no fancy stock.
When you wanted to get stuff printed, you called the local printer – not some outfit thousands of miles away.
Employees lived within 50-100 miles of your office, and they were expected to be at their desks – working, darn it! – at 9:00am every work day.
Lawyers used WordPerfect 5.1 with the blue screen. Bankruptcy petitions were done either using a typewriter or Chapter 7..13 from Specialty Software.
Legal forms came from Blumberg – at least, in New York they did.
Having a computer on you desk was forward-thinking. Having a laptop was radical.
Your computer had floppy disks. Really floppy ones – the 5.25″ kind.
You accessed Lexis and Westlaw for legal research or went to the library and slogged through books.
Solo practitioners in big cities were thought of as the folks who couldn’t get a real job.
Most solo attorneys handled a bunch of different kinds of law.
What else do you remember from 1995? How has your life and practice changed since then?
