I’ve always been my own guinea pig. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. I would tell my parents I want to experience it myself, make my own decisions. I didn’t want their experiences. I wanted the excitement of experiencing for myself what would happen, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I didn’t want others to tell me what the outcome would be. (As a parent myself now, I have to bite my tongue and look the other way if I want a child who is going to not be afraid to take risks). I also don’t wait for the rest of the world to tell me something is alright to do. I decide for myself and generally others who trust my instincts follow suit, usually after I come out of the experiment alive and breathing and not any worse for wear!

Being a solo requires you to be your own guinea pig if you want to break free from some of the restrictions, professional prejudices and often jaded experiences of other lawyers. (That’s not to say we don’t need guidance. Of course, we all need guidance at times.) And by restrictions I’m not talking about ethical rules. I’m talking about those conventions which the majority use as an excuse to not try anything new . Or they use the conventions to deliberately avoid being different from their fellow class mates or the lawyer down the street for fear others will look to criticize them, most often without any real knowledge about the person they are critiquing or just a cursory understanding about what they are doing. It’s simply about their fear of trying something different which makes them question why you are doing something different. But never forget, you will also intrigue these same critics.

By way of example, I’ll share one of my more memorable experiences as a solo. I had taken on a very compelling case involving child kidnapping, transporting a child across state lines, the UCCJA and all laws surrounding prior reprehensible acts. I did it as a favor (and fairly new lawyer) because the person had little to no money and my professor asked me to do it. The client was a very young mother not married to the father. They eventually stopped living together. The father then basically took their child at two years of age and disappeared. After five years the mother was able to track him down in Florida. The little girl was now seven. The woman went to Florida herself and simply took the child out of school and brought her back to Connecticut. Wow. I was only told about the case a week after the client arrived home from Florida with her daughter. No one else would take her case feeling it was a loser because of the then four-pronged test of the UCCJA, the strongest historically being the child had her home in Florida for an extended period of time regardless of how she got there and this would prevail. Given she had no money and the case was a guaranteed loser I was told my reputation would suffer. Well, I wasn’t worried about any of that. Was that ignorance? False bravado? I don’t know. But there were compelling arguments to be made and clearly I wasn’t in it for the money!

Everytime I came up with a unique argument and told more experienced lawyers about it, they told me I’d lose. Everytime I asked those I considered mentors whether they could see the argument I was fashioning, could see the tapestry I was weaving, they’d tell me yes, but it wasn’t going to work. Why? Because this is how it’s done and that’s the way it is. Regardless of the fact there were four prongs to the UCCJA only one carried any weight and I should just stop now instead of setting myself up to surely lose, and in front of the family bar, my future adversaries. My reputation was conceivably at stake. Well, my client’s relationship with her daughter was at stake and my reputation was secondary.

My opponent was a 20 year veteran, his client could pay his fees, and even he pulled me aside and said, ‘you know you’ll lose which is why I’m not interested in negotiating an agreement before trial.’ (I also never even suggested one because my client was dead set against anything which involved the father in the daughter’s life.)

Well, I realized if everyone said it was a loser I had to pull out all the stops to make sure the judge (who I was inclined to believe wanted to find a way to give this woman her daughter back) was given a smorgasbord of options in the brief as well as at trial so she could decide ultimately if she wanted to break new ground. Ok, clearly I’m writing this story because I gave the judge what she needed and she took what she needed to make the ruling she wanted and gave my client her daughter back. (As an aside, the client never even thanked me and disappeared!). The opposing counsel was clearly surprised he lost. But I followed my gut. My client wanted to me to go for it and my instincts said to go for it and it all worked out in the end even though I took some hits from fellow attorneys. Fellow attorneys were not my clients. The truth is, had my client gone to one of these lawyers she would have surely lost because these lawyers bought into their own limiting thinking based upon their experiences and giving full measure to everyone elses’s experiences because it supported their own.

There is a moral here for solos. You have to trust your instincts, your morality, and your integrity in all areas of your solo practice. Unless there is a clear, bright line that says ‘do not cross or you risk losing your license or harming your client’, you have to be willing to step away from the pack, venture forth, maybe take some professional hits. But the further you move away from the pack the more room you have to move freely and be seen as the talented advocate that you are or have the potential to become.

Be your own guinea pig. You may not enjoy it all the time especially when you are going through some of the negatives, but I promise you you’ll be happy you ventured forth the majority of the time bringing with it the benefits only those who takes chances can enjoy.