If you want a 'Home, Sweet . . . Office,' then you need to do it right

By Correy Stephenson The Daily Record Newswire If you, like more and more lawyers these days, want to call your home your office, what do you need to know to do it right? The Daily Record Newswire turned to two practitioners with home offices for advice: Lee Rosen, a partner at the Rosen Law Firm in Raleigh, N.C., and David E. Mills, a sole practitioner in Cleveland. All members of Rosen's firm work from home, although the firm maintains offices in three different cities for client visits, with a lobby and some conference rooms. Mills works exclusively from his home office, which takes up one of the two bedrooms in his apartment. --Dedicate a space. Both Rosen and Miller emphasized the need for dedicated home office space. "If the physical space blends in with the living room or wherever else, you are more at risk of feeling like you are always at work," Mills said. Having a true office space with a desk "puts me in the mindset of doing work." And in a house with a spouse and children, a room with a door you can close also helps you adhere to the rules of professional conduct regarding client confidentiality, Rosen noted. "In my area of the law, family law, I make a lot of phone calls and I need privacy," Rosen said, so that family members don't overhear details of private client communications. -- Technology must-haves. "A phone or a cell phone, and a computer of some sort," are the essential technologies for a home office, Rosen said. "Beyond that, everything else is optional." He said he uses a 27-inch cinema display Apple monitor with his laptop and has a desk phone and a cell phone, as well as a scanner. "I have a keyboard and an external track pad to make it feel more like a desktop." Mills uses dual computer monitors and maintains a separate work phone line. He relies on an all-in-one scanner and printer, with an inkjet printer as a back-up. --Have a plan for client meetings. "There is still a need to maintain a facade for some clients of having a physical office," Rosen said. "Some clients don't feel secure with a lawyer who only exists in the ether." Because his firm has office space, Rosen said he doesn't meet clients at his home. Mills occasionally meets with clients face-to-face in his dedicated home office space. Because his practice is focused on federal appeals, clients stop by only rarely. His space looks like a typical law office, and clients who walk into his apartment may not even realize that a few more steps would put them in his living room. "I really wanted to replicate what ... my office [would be like] in a large law firm," he said. --Expect to make mistakes. Mills said the two-and-a-half years since he opened his home office has included a lot of trial and error. For example, he realized early on that he needed to upgrade his e-mail service to have unlimited storage capacity. "It seems almost laughable now that I would have placed restrictions on myself like that," Mills said. "Once I started doing this, I kept everything in folders and it became this great database." Published: Thu, Jun 9, 2011

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