Fifty years ago as the United States celebrated its bicentennial, lawyers experienced their own Declaration of Independents: the publication of Jay Foonberg’s classic How to Start and Build a Law Firm. A half-century later, Helen Fan released the first primer on building a two-agent, AI-native law firm, based on her 100-day experiment.
Together, Foonberg and Fan stand as diametrically opposing ends of the law firm launch continuum. But Foonberg’s and Fan’s background and philosophy of starting a firm couldn’t be more different.
Born in 1935, Foonberg was 41 years old (though his curmudgeonly advice made him seem much older) and mid-career when his 700-page tome hit the market, swiftly setting the record for the most frequently stolen book from law school libraries. Foonberg’s book adopts a personal, conversational tone because he assumed his readers would do it all themselves — answering the phone, writing letters, counseling clients face to face and hustling for business. What’s more Foonberg’s early, unflinching advice read like gospel etched in stone: Rent an office. Never let the sun set on an unreturned phone call. Do the work and don’t get paid or don’t do the work and don’t get paid. Reputation precedes you. As a topic, technology was an after thought, best summarized in a throwaway line that it always changes.
In contrast to Foonberg, Fan is a young woman at the inception of her legal career, just two years post LLM. Whereas Foonberg’s conception of a firm places lawyers at the center like the sun, Fan designed a firm that could run autonomously without lawyers at all. As Fan shared, she used Open Claw to architect a firm around two specialized AI agents — a senior “Morgan” and junior “Cleo” connected to a workspace where they could accept client-style prompts, break them into subtasks, debate strategy, draft work product, and hand back recommendations. Fan set rules to ensure some human oversight – such as a mandatory requirement to elevate disagreements between Morgan and Cleo for live attorney review.
Despite their different approaches, Foonberg and Fan have more in common than you’d expect. For starters, as first movers in the start-a-law-firm /AI native law firm space, they’ve each amassed cult-like followings eager for every scrap of wisdom they share. For decades, Foonberg crisscrossed the country, as a keynote speaker who dominated the solo/small firm circuit. Meanwhile, Fan recently celebrated 10,000 new followers on LinkedIn and has spoken about agents at law schools, legal tech events and even biglaw.
What’s more, both Foonberg and Fan are united in their commitment to the future of lawyers. Foonberg constantly reminded solos that we run businesses, not charities and that if we aren’t vigilant about collecting fees, we won’t be in business long. Meanwhile, Fan’s vision behind the Legal AI Value Stack is that legal AI’s highest and best use (Fan initially says for legal tech but the point applies with equal force to law firms) is building AI-native firms that compete with pure automation, using AI to handle everything that scales while reserving human lawyers for the trust and accountability that software alone can never provide. In short, the Fan model maintains a permanent seat at the table for lawyers.
Of course, while Foonberg and Fan may be the bookends, they’re far from the only game in town on how to start. My friend Ryan McKeen of BestEra who’s both biz and tech savvy and kinda old timey sits somewhere in the middle. Next month, he’s hosting Revolutionary Era, a day long modern seminar on starting a firm that covers the six pillars (vision, operations, finance, marketing, technology, culture) that separate firms that survive from firms that scale. And of course, there’s me, the accidental entrepreneur who started a law firm because I had no other choices and made law firm ownership my life’s work through MyShingle.com.
Throughout history, lawyers have always faced challenges, whether it’s the inability to find a job, the drudgery and disappointment of biglaw, the competition with DIY forms, disasters like Katrina and 9/11 and COVID. Today, the spectre of obsolescence by AI looms and while it’s scarier, it’s just another obstacle on the continuum.
What’s constant is how we lawyers respond. What’s constant is that our profession will always have a Foonberg, a Fan and the thousands of lawyers in-between who stared down the nose of impossible circumstances and decided to step up and build something anyway. Innovators. Creators. The Crazy Ones. The People who not only figure it out, but lead movements.
As it always has, the future of legal belongs to the owners.