This week we have Ron Casper from Casper-Roimi, an Israeli firm focused on real-estate transactions and investments domestically and internationally.
What is your primary area of practice? Do you handle a variety of types of matters?
Our firm’s primary area of practice are real-estate projects and transactions. We also represents clients in day to day purchasing and selling of private properties. Internationally, our firm represents Investment funds and private investors in the U.S. mainly in real estate, including building new single family houses, multi family, commercial real estate, care Homes etc.
What do you think is the toughest challenge for a solo practitioner or a small law firm?
I think the toughest challenge for a small firm are:
1. Constantly and methodically bring in new clients and going forward, deciding which clients you want so you could focus your energy on those.
2. Making sure you’re not working too hard day to day. It’s important to leave time to learn new areas of expertise and keep to date with the areas you already practice.
3. Growing your firm and hire additional staff, lease a larger office and purchase tools and software while maintain enough cashflow and income to run a profitable firm.
How do you adapt to new legal technology?
I am very technologically orientated and open to try new tools and capabilities. I make sure to go to legal innovation lectures and legal-tech conferences to learn about new technology in the industry. When something feels right for us to use, we’ll give it a try and will examine implementation in our firm.
How do you deal with changes in client volume?
It goes without saying that we try to stay organized and work very efficiently (which is easy to say). At the same time, foresee new deals and clients and create a strategic plan with set goals we want to reach to be able to keep providing quality legal services.
Since this is not easy to do, we make sure to allocate at least an hour per day for business development, planning and strategy. If something is not working for us, what can we change; If we’re not reaching our goals, why? I believe these days you have to find the time to take care of business work along side with the legal work.
How do you know it’s time to expand?
When it comes to expanding the practice, we try to use our strategic planning meetings to forecast future needs. If we feel we’re swamped, we might bring in a temp to support our team in specific areas. It is our mission to provide the highest quality of work to our clients and we will make sure we do everything in our powers to keep our promise.
How do you collaborate with other lawyers? Is there a process for that?
It depends on the type of collaboration we are looking for. I’m constantly looking for networking events to expand my legal network. I believe that with a strong network one can help bring more leads and potentially help clients.
With more legal professionals in my network, I have more options to collaborate on cases in terms of help when needed and/or referrals.
Would you or your firm look to hire new associates, or bring on contract attorneys if you could more flexibly manage their workloads?
Absolutely. It’s tough to work with attorney from overseas remotely, not to mention find them. Full transparency: we used Legably in the past and it was easier to connect and work with attorneys than what we’ve done in the past.
In addition, it makes it simple for us to grow as case volume of our international and US deals grows.
Ron Casper is a partner at Casper-Roimi, a a boutique law firm focused on real estate transactions in Israel and Trust’s, Corporate, Commercial and offshore investment’s in the United states and United Kingdom.
blog.legably.com 