I practiced at two AmLaw 100 firms. For years I put a question to other lawyers that I could not settle for myself: are you better off as a generalist or a specialist? The answers came back almost evenly split.
I was the generalist. Banking, then debt finance, then equity finance, then M&A. Curious, certainly. Focused, I was not. The received wisdom ran against the specialists back then, whose exits looked narrower than an M&A attorney's, right up until the specialist became the most sought-after lawyer in the market.
I admire the lawyer who can sit with a thorny regulation until it gives way. That was never going to be me, and the firm was never going to be the place where I found out what was.
The question was never really about practice areas. It is about who decides the shape of your practice. Inside a large firm, that answer is mostly made for you. Owning the firm is how you take it back, and the reason more lawyers do not is that the business of running one swallows the practice of law.
That is what Termstack is for.
Lawyers who want to decide the shape of their own practice, and who would rather spend the next decade building something than waiting to be told what they are.
If you are thinking about leaving to build your own practice, the hardest part is not the legal work. It is everything around it. We build that part so it is there on day one.
If you already have a firm and the operations are the thing holding it back, we take them off you and build them to scale.
Reach out if you are building your own practice, or growing the one you have.