BigLaw Refugees Confess to Money, Branding Worries at Newly Formed Firms
Several big firm lawyers have made the leap to form their own law firms, where they have new freedoms—and fears.
Among them are two lawyers who were classmates at American University, Richard Rochlin and Scott Sigman, the Connecticut Law Tribune reports. The two friends had previously discussed striking out on their own, but they didn’t make the move until February. Their new firm is Sigman & Rochlin.
Rochlin had been a corporate partner at Shipman & Goodwin in Hartford, Conn., and Sigman was a former assistant district attorney in Philadelphia. “It’s incredibly exciting to be a small business owner,” Rochlin told the Connecticut Law Tribune. “You’re always worried about your next dollar, and you have to be. But I don’t worry like I used to worry” about job security.
Another group of lawyers from a large law firm–Mark Seiger, Charles Gfeller and Robert Laurie—took a detour before forming their own firm. The group left the Hartford office of Edwards, Angell, Palmer & Dodge to form an outpost for 100-lawyer Goldberg Segalla, but they wanted more autonomy and opened their own firm, according to the article.
Seiger told the Connecticut Law Tribune that the decision to start a firm wasn’t an easy one. “I’ve always been tethered to a large law firm,” he said. “My biggest fear was once you cut ties, can you build your brand?”
The firm hired a marketing consultant to help with the branding and kept costs low by adopting a paperless office, the story says. Seiger says his firm pays about $6,000 a year for technology that used to cost in the low six-figures at their old firm.
“We realized that if we could shed the overhead, we could market a more agile firm with more reasonable costs,” Seiger said.
