Costs

So I am going to list my start up costs. I could have limited alot of these but I hoping spending a little extra helps my progress a little.

Website design: $500.00 and alot of my wife's time. It was expensive but this is somewheres I saved alot of money for what I have being developed. It seems most attorneys use FIndlaw.com or a similar service. My wife Rachel is pretty handy with computers so she volunteered to read up and design a website for me. It costs us $400 for dreamweaver and $100.00 for a HTML book, Dreamweaver book and search engine optimization. This costs will likely go up once I start making sure the website shows up on the search engines well.

Office Rental: $900 a month. With NNN and everything else I ended up with a 700 square foot office. I could have gotten a smaller office cheaper but this one seemed to work perfect for me. I plan on offering mediation so I needed a conference table and my wife and kiddo will be in the office so a bigger-private office worked out well.

Furniture: $2000.00. This is somewheres I splurged a little. I could have saved some money buying used furniture or less expensive furniture, but I figure these are long term investments. A conference table, chairs, desks, carpets, bookshelves and a few end tables all added up cost wise but really made my office look very professional.

Business Cards: $50 to start off. My wife created great custom cards for me with Adobe Illustrator. I was really happy with this, and I will see how long it takes me to give out the 500 I bought.

Malpractice Insurance $500 first year. I used a deal set up by the California BAR association for first year attorneys.

Advertising and Marketing: undetermined at this point. I have spent a few dollars here signing up for the local Chamber of Commerce and other things. I have lookedat the cost of yellowpages and other ads but I have not signed up for any of them yet. I am sure this is something that I will spend more time and money figuring out the next few months.

Book and Research: $600. OK so this is something else I splurged on a little. I am a family law attorney so I bought the Rutgers Group family law books and a book on forms. As far as legal research I used OnLAW. The California BAR Association had an offer that gave away OnLAW for free for one year to new attorneys so I took advantage of this. I will see in a year if I want to change to Westlaw or Lexis but I will take advantage of a free year of online research.

Utilities: $200 a month. This covers phone, gas, electric and internet in my office.

Computers and programs: $300. I already had a computer so that was one cost I avoided. I started pretty minimal for programs and only bought Quickbooks and a tax program. A law school firnd of mine was an accountant before law schhol so I relied on him a bit getting everything set up. I looked at Abacus and other billing and fileing programs but decided to skip the costs.

Business Books: $150.00. I will mention this because I bought so many. I really wanted to know what I was getting into so I bought alot of business and marketing books. I will post an article someday listing all the books I bought, but using Amazon and buying most of them used I saved alot of money.

Office Supplies: I spent $200.00 to srat up and have not come up with a monthly dollar amount for this yet. As the next few months go on I am sure I will get a more consistant number but I used alot of stuff I had laying around the house to start up. It could have gotten more expensive if I bought everything from scratch.

Alot of costs I did not mention because they were just life expenses for me. My cel phone I had already. I bought a few new suits but those were not really necessary costs. I also signed up for $1200 mediation training course. It seems the amount you spend could be unlimited.

I choose to splurge getting my office set up and conserve on advertising and other things I would get a better feel for as my practice has been up an running for a few months. I talked to a few friends who run their own practices and constantly ran into the idea of image. I really wanted to feel liek a real business and attorney from the start so I spent alot more than I needed to. I am hoping the extra costs
pay off. IF you have a tighter budget you could start much cheaper than I did.