How Much Money Should You Save Before Starting a Law Practice?

The answer, as you probably expected, is that it depends. It depends on your personal obligations and how much overhead you expect your law firm to carry each month. Ideally, you should have enough money set aside to pay for personal and business expenses for at least one year. While all firms are different, if you are starting a law firm right out of law school you will need time to grow a professional network and a portfolio of clients. Experienced lawyers who have a portfolio of clients that they will be taking with them from another firm may not need to create this large of a safety net for themselves.

When we started our firm it was done out of necessity. We could have spent our days rotting away at our doc review jobs but we decided to just take the leap with enough saved for about four months of total expenses, which,  for our situation was about $12,000- our combined personal expenses are about $2,500 and our business expenses are roughly $500 a month. We have been supplementing that amount with freelance work that we are able to complete at home.  Obviously if your personal obligations are greater, you will need to bring in more income. The point is that starting a firm is possible, even on a very limited budget.