How It Works
Think of it this way; if you are an attorney, looking for a way to wind down your practice, wouldn’t it make sense to find a younger lawyer who could come in and buy your practice, allowing for you to have retirement income, and making sure that the clients you have spent a legal career serving are taken care of after you are retired?
Selling a law practice is extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible. That is where Lawyers Incorporated comes into play. We have a team who will evaluate your practice and help determine its value. Once a value is ascertained, Lawyers Incorporated will then meet with you to give you options as to how to get the most value for the practice that you have spent years building, and how to find the best fit for your practice.
Lawyers Incorporated has discovered that the quickest way to devalue a law practice is to put a For Sale sign in the yard, or to list it for sale with a real estate company. All you would be doing is selling the value of the building, or lease-hold interest, and whatever equipment that you have. The real value in your practice is your name, and in the reputation that you have built up over a carrier. That cannot be determined by a real estate broker.
The professionals at Lawyers Incorporated know that as soon as you list your practice for sale, your client base will dry up, which will destroy the most important value that your practice has; its client base and goodwill.
Once you make a decision to retire and sell your practice, that’s when Lawyers Incorporated goes to work. There is no public listing, and no one will ever know that your practice is being sold. Everything is kept confidential.
When the team of professionals at Lawyers Incorporated goes to work and brings a buyer for your practice, any prospective purchaser must first sign a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement whereby they cannot even divulge that you were considering a sale. The prospective buyers will come from a list of established attorneys, and graduating law students, who have contacted Lawyers Incorporated and hired them to facilitate the purchase of an established law practice.
Even these prospective buyers are kept confidential. Many of these attorneys are currently working for large law firms, and looking to enter into private practice. These attorneys do not want their employers to know that there are looking for a job elsewhere, and their privacy is just as important as your privacy.
Once a prospective purchaser has been identified, and the appropriate confidentiality agreements have been signed, the team at Lawyers Incorporated will introduce you to each other. Sound easy? It is, but that’s just the first step.
Prior to forming Lawyers Incorporated in 2013, the owners spent years trying to come up with a program that protected the confidentiality of the buyer and seller that actually worked. Rarely, if ever, will you find someone who wants to buy your law practice, and who has the ability to pay the fair market value of your law practice and allow you to simply walk away.
Take just a moment and pause to think about how many lawyers you personally know, during the past ten (10) years, who passed away or retired, and walked away from a viable law practice and received nothing in return for decades of hard work? The reason is that being a lawyer is hard. It is next to impossible for a graduating law student to be able to step into an existing law practice. That is why the team at Lawyers Incorporated developed the mentoring method as a viable secession planning mechanism.
The time to think about selling your practice and preparing for retirement is a minimum of five (5) to ten (10) years before that date actually occurs. The earlier you contact Lawyers Incorporated, the better. The reason is that the longer you can give our team of professionals to match you with a prospective buyer, the greater value your practice has. Let’s look at an example:
Lawyer Jones has practiced in a small town for over thirty (30) years. He would like to practice another five (5) to ten (10) years and then retire, and receive residual income from his practice. Lawyer Jones contacts Lawyers Incorporated who puts him in contact with Lawyer Smith and Lawyer Johnson. Lawyer Smith has worked with a large law firm for ten (10) years, but would like to raise his family in the town where Lawyer Jones’ law practice is located. Lawyer Johnson is a third year law student, and is from the same small town where Lawyer Jones maintains his practice. Both Lawyer Smith and Lawyer Johnson are viable prospective purchasers, and both bring a different skill set to the table. Lawyers Incorporated will arrange a meeting with Lawyer Jones and Lawyer Smith, and a second meeting with Lawyer Jones and Lawyer Johnson, to give the seller multiple options.
One option would be for the law student to go to work for Lawyer Jones, at a below-market salary, for three (3) to five (5) years while Lawyer Jones mentors this young law student into becoming someone capable of taking over his practice. At the point when Lawyer Jones decides to retire, the name of the practice becomes Jones & Johnson, and Lawyers Incorporated negotiates a retirement income for Lawyer Jones as Lawyer Johnson continues to manage and grow the practice.
Option No. 2, with Lawyer Smith, who needs no mentoring, but who has no ties to the community, would be for the team at Lawyers Incorporated to bring Lawyer Jones and Lawyer Smith together for the formation of a partnership, and Lawyer Jones spends one (1) to three (3) years still in active practice, introducing his existing client base to Lawyer Smith. Lawyers Incorporated then negotiates a buyout structure to be paid as retirement income.
This is just one of an endless number of solutions. The team at Lawyers, Incorporated realizes that no two law practices are exactly the same, and everybody has different goals. Lawyers Incorporated works with multiple lending institutions to arrange financing for those attorneys who simply want to walk away. We will find the option that best fits you.