Setting Up Shop

The great thing about starting a law practice is that you need very little start-up capital. All told, we spent about $5,300 on start-up costs. We decided to operate with extremely low overhead which meant not renting or buying a "traditional" office. We opted for a virtual office for client meetings and a home office space for doing actual work. Our virtual office came with receptionist services, but we opted to get our own business line at our home office. We only bought equipment that was absolutely necessary to keep our costs as low as possible. Here's a list of the items that we did purchase:

•  Virtual Office setup-$1000
• Malpractice Insurance-$1000/yr
• Form Books & Practice Guides-$2000
• Business Phone Line- $100 set-up
• All-in-one printer, scanner, fax, copier-$399 on sale for $199
• 2 land line phones-$60
•  Dymo Label & Postage Writer- $70
•  Business Cards- $60
• Paper Shreader- $50 
• Misc. Office Supplies- $150
• Print Advertising-$500

You'll notice that we did not buy new office furniture- we used what we had. Clients will never see the inside of my actual "law office" so who cares if I'm using the desk that I bought at a garage sale before I went away to law school.

We also didn't spend on high end letter head- at about $100 per box, we just could justify it at this time so we created our own logo and printed our own. We had a close personal friend set up our website. And that was it. We were able to get our law firm up and running in about a week.