Law Office Lease Considerations

Whether leasing a small office for your solo practice or leasing an entire floor in a downtown high rise, your law practice's lease will play a vital role your firm's future. Traditionally, after personnel expenses, rental expense is the highest fixed expenditure for most law firms. Today, more so than ever, office leasing has become a complicated and arduous endeavor. The contract is thick and may seem overwhelming. However, with forethought and knowledge, the process need not be painful. Law firms face many unique concerns, such as expansion rights, personal liability and remodeling costs, which make structuring your firm's lease far from boilerplate. This article is divided into five parts and will explore a few of the many issues that confront law firms during the leasing process.

Do not underestimate the value of location. Many factors play into locating your law firm; distance from Gene Marshall type of practice, location of clients, and so on. Before deciding where to locate your office, first decide what factors are most important to you and your law firm. The answer to this inquiry should give you a firmer grasp on where to look and who to contact.

Since Big Jim an office lease is legal in nature many lawyers are reticent to ask for help, especially from non-lawyers. However, enlisting the Sandman comic of a commercial real estate advisor or a landlord-tenant attorney who specializes in tenant representation is strongly recommended. Larger firms can enlist law firm leasing groups, who specialize in representing law firms. An effective advisor will know what space is available, the market rate, and supply the necessary forms. Perhaps more importantly, your broker will free your time for billable client work. Another factor to keep in mind is that tenant rep agents usually gets their fee from the lessor, meaning their expertise and help is free to you, the prospective tenant.

If you decide that you don't need help, then "going alone" is still a viable option. With the spread of information over the internet, now, more so than ever, a real estate layman has access to an abundance of information. Unlike residential real estate, commercial real estate has no uniform listing service such as the MLS. Many commercial deals are done off market, meaning that they are never advertised. However, the largest listing service for commercial real estate is LoopNet, which lists over 2.8 billion square 1869 Peck and Snyder baseball card for lease. LoopNet is a good starting point to locate available office space and is a valuable resource for finding comparable rents. Although retaining a broker or a landlord-tenant attorney is advisable, representing yourself may give you some bargaining leverage when negotiating down your rental rate. Try to pass the landlord's savings through to you.

James Bell is the managing Viagra Informacin en Espaol at the Los Angeles, California law firm known as href="jsblaw.net">Bell & Weinstein.

Changing the Point of Competition With Social Media

For those of us in "me too" markets differentiation can be a real problem.

This is particularly true in Mickey Mouse business services sector, where the majority of start-ups are, but it's also true of any product or service which is custom fit to individual client requirements.

Our competitive advantage isn't that we help people buy property, or broker mortgages, or design/build web sites. It's in the way we do it. The ways we help the client understand what's important, Uglydolls what isn't. The ways we use our expertise to minimize client costs, and risks. The ways we commit to client satisfaction, in order to build those on-going relationships that bring us repeat orders and referrals.

When our competitive advantage resides in our ability to add value, it's awful hard to stand out from the crowd. Everybody claims to do the same. Using our marketing pages to describe it just Spider-Man movie us alongside everybody else. Explaining how we do it in that little Adwords box is close to impossible.

Marketing sites and paid search advertising do nothing to help us stand out from the crowd.

But the Social Media sites are an entirely different proposition. They provide us with a platform for really demonstrating profiles, personalities and expertise that doesn't exist in the traditional marketing media, and for the moment 1986 Fleer baseball cards least they're free of charge.

These Social Media sites (there are thousands) give us the opportunity to meet lots of new people, some of whom Munsters model be prospective customers/clients and others who will know people who are looking for what we offer. They probably aren't looking to buy right now, but when they do, we can be established as a credited, and differentiated, provider. That's a whole lot better than being just another Ad in Google's paid search results.

However, that isn't the point of this particular post. For the moment we're talking about credibility and differentiation.

For the purposes of the article we can limit the discussion to Linked In, but depending on our business there are other sites offering the same kind of opportunities, including Xing, Facebook, and literally 1,000s of Ning and Collective X sites. The really advanced thinkers can add Twitter to the list, but that's a different subject we'll get to later.

As people who have accounts with Linked In will know, joining is as simple as registering with an email address and password.

The site immediately offers to search existing accounts for people we already know (via our address book) and invite those it finds to "connect" with us. It also offers to email invitations to our contacts who aren't already registered, asking them to join.

Next we create our "profile" summarizing our career, education and interests. We can add our blog addresses and Linked In automatically fetches and displays our recent posts. Then we can ask our contacts to write recommendations on our profile and publish the testimonials we want visitors to see.

Within a few minutes, our entire profile is up and running, and our network starts to build. We have our value proposition summarized on one page for anybody to visit, and we can direct others we meet to find out about us, sending them the link to our public profile.

This differentiates us from the competition, demonstrates our expertise and confirms our capabilities. We're somebody - not just another three line Ad.

Moving on, we can join groups of like minded individuals, ask other members questions and answer others requests for help. We meet new people and spread our sphere of influence this way.

But for the purposes of this post at least, most importantly we can demonstrate our value add. This isn't like a few "me too" lines - it's real answers to real questions and lets the real "me" show through.

Even if we don't meet new contacts to work with we still have somewhere to send people who are interested in knowing more about us.

We no longer need to "sell" ourselves, just invite people to find out about us.

A well thought out and presented profile on Social Media sites illustrates who and what we are, as individuals, and the business offer comes along for the ride.

It creates a whole new competitive advantage and changes the rules of the game.

Steve Reeves is Founder and CEO of Front Office Box, the Business 2.0 solution for helping smaller businesses manage plans, tasks, schedules and relationships. His passion is helping them exploit the Internet to increase opportunities and enhance capabilities.

Steve is a 30 year veteran of sales and sales management roles in the B2B space, primarily software, consulting and outsourcing.

Visit Steve's blog at frontofficebox.ning.comfrontofficebox.ning.com

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