r/LawFirm

The company that owns Bottomline / Legal X / BillReviewIQ published their 2025 state of the industry report for the insurance industry based on all of their clients rate information.

If you want to know if your rates are competitive leave a comment with the state and most relevant line of business and I’ll do my best to reply. (I’m at work and have a life but I will try and get to each one - if I don’t answer yours look to see if I answered it anywhere else).

It’s broken down by State and Lines of Business as follows (I’m doing this from my phone so apologies if the formatting is off a bit):

• Commercial Auto

• Construction Defect

• Environmental

• General Liability

• Homeowners

• Management Liability

• Personal Auto

• Professional Liability

• Property

• Workers Compensation

I’m a managing partner at a mid-sized litigation firm, and for years, my partner and I have built our reputation the traditional way by doing good work, earning trust, and growing through referrals.

Recently, during an intake, a client mentioned she had searched for attorneys in our practice area on ChatGPT before ultimately coming to us through a colleague’s recommendation. She told us we didn’t appear in her results and she was right I checked myself across a few different queries. What surprised me was not just our absence, but who did show up. Several newer firms (some are only three or four years into practice) were consistently mentioned ahead of us. These are firms I’m familiar with, and while capable, they don’t have the same depth of track record.

Historically, business development in legal practice has been grounded in relationships, credibility, and word-of-mouth. That model has served us well. As of late I have noticed that part of the client discovery process is now mediated by AI, which raises a different set of questions, ones I don’t think the profession has fully grappled with yet.

To California PI firm owners - what is your plan if the uber proposition passes? I have had my solo PI firm for 6 years and doing pretty well but haven’t thought through what I’d do next….would love to hear from anyone in the same boat. Would you close up shop? Add/shift to a different practice area?

Was on Upw͏ork looking for a translator for a client matter. Got curious about the legal category. There's actual work there.

Contract disputes, fiduciary breach, N-400 applications, corporate stuff. Some of the postings pay $75 to $250 an hour. Clients have verified payment and real spend history on the platform.

Marketing has been a money pit since day one. Lead gen platforms eat your budget and send you people who can't pay. Google Ads CAC never made sense for the volume I was getting. SEO takes 18 months before anything meaningful happens.

So now I'm looking at this Upwork thing wondering if I missed something obvious or if it's a trap.

Anyone here actually closed a client off Upwork? Or is the legal category full of people who want you to incorporate an LLC for $50 and stiff you on payment?

Not asking about the ethics angle, I'll handle my bar rules myself. Just want real numbers from anyone who tried.

Anyone have advice on finding an associate job that doesn’t totally burn you out? I’m a first year at a biglaw firm doing litigation and I’m leaving for a clerkship soon (hoping to give myself a gap before the start day to figure out my life).

I’m pretty miserable, and really want to work towards some sort of life balance where I can get a dog, enjoy my hobbies etc. I have no debt and enjoy a pretty simple life, but I’m not sure that government work is the right move this early in my career. Would love to hear advice from anyone willing to give it

I am a Sophomore student who is majoring in history, concentrating in Legal History. I am the president of a charitable club, a member of a law club, working on a genealogy AI startup, and have worked in a customer service role in a restaurant for 3 years. I completely redid my resume to make it suitable for legal assistant and legal receptionist roles, despite applying to over 50 firms and going to 10 firms to drop my resume, following up by email, I have yet to get a single interview. I am trying to work full-time over the summer and get experience in a law office. One of my family connections is allowing me to do 10 hours of legal assistant virtual work with Medical documents over the summer, but I like working long hours and need an environment with a rigid and office-like schedule. I saw some Redditors recommend a paralegal certificate, and that it can be as quick as 2 weeks, but a 68$ a month fee for several months is a bit steep for a college student when there is no certainty I get a job even with that, but I am extremely dedicated to getting a job and will do anything it takes to get one for the summer. If you have any reccomendations I would greatly appreciate it.

I am a first year associate and took the oath in December but I began working at the firm as a law clerk in around August. I would like to get a new job but I would want to stay for at least a year. When does the clock for a first year associate begin ticking? Is it when they first begin working, when they are sworn in as attorneys or a third date that I do not know about?

Hello everyone,

Let’s be real for a second. Most of us went to law school to argue cases, solve complex puzzles, and—let’s face it—actually practice law.

Instead, a huge chunk of the "billable day" feels like being a glorified file clerk.

I’m doing some research into legal workflows, and I want to know the specific task that makes you stare at your monitor in total silence for a minute before you can start it. Not the "big picture" stuff, but the granular, repetitive friction that kills your momentum.

Is it one of these "usual suspects"?

The PDF Shuffle: Renaming, OCRing, and organizing 50+ discovery documents just so they’re "ready" for the system.

The Intake Loop: Asking a client for the same missing info for the third time because it didn't sync with your CRM.

The Formatting Nightmare: Spending 45 minutes fixing a Table of Authorities or indented numbering that decided to break itself at 6 PM.

The Conflict Check Crawl: Manually cross-referencing names across three different spreadsheets or legacy databases.

If you could press a "Delete" button on one repetitive admin task—the one that keeps you in the office an hour longer than you need to be—what would it be?

I’m not trying to sell a "revolutionary AI platform." I’m just trying to understand the gap between how law firms actually work and how tech companies think they work.

Drop your most hated task below. I’ll go first: Copy-pasting data from an email into three different filing forms.

Hi! I’m a third year law student and I need to teach one of my clinic classes. My topic is about what the first year of being an attorney is like.

I wanted to ask members of this subreddit what their first year as an attorney was like and maybe what advice they would give their 3L self or 3Ls in general?

If you’re so kind to answer, please include what sector of law you practice in (private/gov./nonprofit). I hope to get a wide range of perspectives.

Nice to meet you! We're small lawyer company from Toronto, CA (specializing in real estate and property transactions), and I’m wondering if hiring an SEO or digital marketing agency is actually worth it for us. My own marketing efforts haven’t led to much (as I'm definitely not marketing specialist huh), and offline advertising has been disappointing too (huge budgets = few leads).

Not looking for sales pitches or smthng, want to hear actual feedback from people who’ve worked with attorney marketing experts who do promotion & SEO for lawyers and actually understand legal field. How to find good match and how to avoid red flags?

Not looking for DMs, just genuine experiences.

Fellow attorneys, I’ve had my law license for two years now. For those two years, I’ve worked at a small firm in IL. For a few months now, the work environment at my firm has became a lot worse and I’m processing that I have to find a new firm. I’ve started working closer in proximity lately with the managing partner and he has been verbally abusive on more than one occasion. I think he made some bad investments at the beginning of the year and he’s been taking it out of his staff. It really feels like he uses us as a punching bag.

I can’t continue to work here, but I’m worried about applying to new firms and not being able to use him as a reference. We’re just not on good terms. Does anyone have any guidance on how to navigate this? Or even just some words of encouragement? Realizing I have to leave has been difficult. I love the work but it’s becoming really unhealthy to continue to work for this person.

Hi! I've never owned a suit but I do own a white button-up, a silver tie, and some black dress pants along with some nice shoes. I've seen that coming to a law office interview in a suit is the best and sometimes only option but my interview is tomorrow! If it helps, I think this law office is small since Statefarm only employs 2,000 people across all it's legal offices nationwide and if memory serves me correctly there are only 7 or 17 other assitants working in this office under two or three attorneys, so I'm thinking my outfit could pass since I've read that for smaller offices business casual can work. I'm really stressing out about this so please tell me my outfit will work!!!

Also I of course plan to buy suits if I get selected for the job (depending on what I see the general office attire style looks like).

Hey all,

I have the opportunity to found an AI native law firm from scratch and would love to hear your feedback on it. It’s also a cooperation and research project so all involved partners only have the goal to prove this is possible and make the law firm as efficient and profitable as they can to provide a precedent for future development.

Cooperating with big insurers I could get as many cases as I want (and also pick only those, that go well with automation, first). So volume won’t be a problem.

I have also the chance to cooperate with a legal tech startup and use their development team and resources to build workflows and agents from scratch. The law film will be build from the ground with AI automation in mind, so every workflow will be as automated as possible from the beginning without the need to change existing and established but outdated workflows.

Resources like phone support, taxes and admin will also be covered by cooperating partners. All of those services are part of a development deal without destroying the economics, 100% of each case will be revenue and development team and case forwarding will imply no charge but rather benefit from the insights to develop their own tailor cut solutions.

Regarding the team size I’m thinking me and two paralegals supervising the AI for evident mistakes, escalating difficult decisions or unclear cases to me. I’m currently unsure but also consider a second lawyer as a backup in case of sickness and vacation.

The idea is to first define the most relevant flows and make them as AI assisted as possible to accelerate throughput: Client contact and regular updates, evidence gathering, first draft, summarizing and clustering arguments, proposed contra arguments backed by AI research and feedback loops.

The human in the loop would only need to review and fine tune the result and confirm the AI proposals regarding deadlines, next steps, arguments and drafts, so there are no hallucinations or bad outputs. In general the goal is to archive the same or even better quality and client satisfaction than the typical small general law firm with 5 or 7 lawyers (maybe more in the short future) but only with one or two lawyers and two paralegals and AI.

I think AI hallucinations and wrong proposals are not as bad as they used to be and will disappear in the short future. Anyhow this may still prove to be a bottleneck: If controlling the AI takes as long as it would to draft in the first place, there is no efficiency gain.

The major risk I see are time consuming tasks like court dates or cases that escalate in volume and time and cannot be automated.

The goal is to close 80% of cases out of court by settlements (also draft templates filled by AI) and to really cut on the time consuming tasks.

Do you have any experience? What would your gut feeling be about this? Is it possible or too early? Does the risk still outweigh the gains in your opinion?

I’m really curious about your insights!

Hi all,

I’m a recruiter at an agency that recently shifted focus into legal hiring over the past few months, and I’ve been running into a consistent issue I didn’t expect at this level.

Even when:

• The job posts clearly include salary ranges
• The roles are with reputable firms
• I’m reaching out directly to candidates (headhunting with tailored messages)

…I’m still getting very low response rates from attorneys and paralegals as well.

I understand lawyers are extremely busy and likely get a high volume of outreach, but I was expecting at least moderate engagement given the transparency and relevance of the roles.

For those of you in the legal field (or other recruiters in this space):

• What actually makes you respond to a recruiter message?
• Are there specific red flags that cause you to ignore outreach immediately?
• Is it more about firm prestige, type of work, comp structure, or something else entirely?
• Any tips on how to stand out or improve response rates?

Appreciate any insight — trying to adapt quickly as we grow in this space.

Thanks in advance.

I recently started transitioning my practice from a big city to the town I live in a little out of the city. I’ve done almost exclusively criminal defense, with some civil cases here and there (wrongful conviction, prison brutality, etc.). I’m going to be doing criminal defense and estate planning in my town.

My landlord is a big developer in my town. He’s mentioned before that he knows a lot of financial planners (hopeful estate planning referrals). He’s now getting sued and his attorney doesn’t do litigation so he asked me to represent him.

My lease just started April 1 so I don’t have a longstanding relationship with my landlord, but he seems to know a lot of people in town. Do I cut him a good break on the fee for goodwill? Or charge him what I’d charge any other client?

First year lawyer no clue I might need guidance. Should I ask the lawyers around my area for help like hey I can work at your firm or how exactly I word it or ask? Some of them are local candidates for the county judge position

Rounded out year one and I realized…I need a North Star. Anyone in the IP/Entertainment space? I’m a true solo looking for others on the same path.

We need to fire our marketing service. They are charging us monthly, but haven’t done anything in 5 months. I do estate planning in nor cal.

I’ve gotten a few local pitches, but haven’t found something I like. Most seem to want 5-15k to update the law firm branding before diving into advertisements. They all seem to also do different things. The social media lady didn’t do SEO or PPC. The SEO guy did PPC, but didn’t do social media. Neither would draft a blog posts, send mailers, or were experienced in getting AI to recommend the firm. One lady said all she’d does is get lawyers on podcasts. That’s great and all, but I don’t think most of my old clients listen to podcasts.

Do you have a marketing agency you could recommend that increased business significantly for you?

and when did you find time, if ever, for hobbies/fun? just curious, and thanks!