This bit of the story is not exciting, it's not filled with wonder and escape and joy. It's filled with hard slog and a fair bit of stones along the path. I said we did research, and we did. We spent hours looking into all the bits of paperwork you need to work as a lawyer from home; the certification, the insurance, the setting up a company, the fact that I couldn't be a shareholder in said company because I wasn't employed in the legal professions, the phonelines, broadband, photocopying, printing, paperwork, the endless bureaucracy that makes setting up a Law firm less an act of entrepreneurial spirit and more like the biggest, hardest Sudoku you have ever had to do.
We had to satisfy Law Society demands, we couldn't start until certification had been proven, until the business plan was set down in triplicate in stone, delivered to the chief Druid's own stone circle, danced around three times and then sung to. It felt like anything we wanted to do was too hard to do, every single step of the way.
And we had a deadline to work to; within the next 6 months Mr Mr would be work free and any income coming in regularly would be mostly from my dwindling supply work. School budgets were getting tighter and the supply had been slowing down for the past year. We were looking at a few months of no income until the business took off.
Added to that was the working out of the physical demands of an office; a room with a door that closes, a desk, a chair, space to spread out files when necessary. We set aside the small front office, no more than 6 foot by 8 foot, and set it up with the basics. We had the desk, the chair from the dining room went in, a new computer was purchased and a case management system invested in. I spent 3 days of October half term in Bradford getting to grips with legal software, and loving the feeling of being a grown up in a grown up world. I was playing, of course. Much of my time was still spent working in school. I was applying for full time teaching jobs and being rejected, eventually I fell lucky with a Learning Mentor's role at a school in Prescot (coincidentally the same school where I did the first day's supply I ever did for my favourite agency). It paid, not a lot, but it paid, and it meant I had security for a year at least.
I started that on the 7th October 2013. Mr Mr walked out of his full time, salaried firm on the 11th. Little issues of perfect timing like that were to happen all the way along setting up the firm.
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