Selling Your Law Practice:
The Profitable Exit Strategy
By Edward Poll
LawBiz Management Company
(A division of Edward Poll & Associates, Inc.)
$489.00; soft cover; 412; pages; ISBN 0-9652019-4-5 (2005).
A law firm management consultant and coach to lawyers, Edward Poll has written several informative books that help lawyers manage their practices. His self-published new book, Selling Your Law Practice, continues along the same lines.
There are many reasons why you might want to sell a law practice: you’re simply unhappy in the practice of law; you want to retire or relocate; you just want to know the value of your practice; or you die suddenly and heirs wonder if there is value in your firm’s goodwill. Whatever the reason, this essential guide will guide you in every aspect of selling your practice for top dollar.
The first question Poll answers is whether the ethical rules of your jurisdiction allow you to sell your practice. Over half the book is a review of the various State Bar rules regarding the sale of a law practice. This is a useful reference tool.
As explained by Poll, large firms have long had the ability to transfer ownership interests in a practice “through mergers, retirements, partnership breakups” and other means. But the outright sale of a law practice from one attorney to another was prohibited by most states until just recently. I was surprised to learn that even today the disciplinary rules in some states, like Alabama, Connecticut, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Texas apparently don’t permit the sale of any lawyer’s practice.
The book includes a helpful CD that contains sample agreements, forms, and financial worksheets from the book in both Word and Excel.
Though filled with many practical, step-by-step methods to properly value and close your law practice, I was a bit taken aback by the $489.00 price of this soft cover book. Caveat Emptor: check your jurisdiction’s rules to determine if they allow the sale of a law practice before buying this book.
People buying law practices who are in need of capital should consider ALL of their alternatives. My firm, Stillwater Capital in New York, is one of the leading lenders to the legal industry. We have a fund that lends money to small and medium sized law firms and the loans are collateralized by a secured interest in the firms fee income. The fund underwrites the loans by carefully analyzing many of the borrower’s major cases and lends only a portion of the prospective income. The program has been highly successful.
Posted by: Richard Rudy, Stillwater Capital | July 30, 2020 at 03:40 PM