SRA, Something Really Awful

Thank God Mr Mr is a smooth mannered and civil guy. He brought work with him from the old law firm, who were sad to see him go and wanted to help him on his way. It was a good job, too.
The SRA said that for him to have an independent licence that let him trade as a Law Firm himself would take 3 months. Yes, that's right. 3 months. Our hopes of starting up in October were dashed and a new date.... January 1st 2014.... seemed the most likely.

My work in school was mornings only, so I returned home at 2pm to start a second job, sorting out websites and Facebook. Actually, setting up domains and building a website seemed easy compared to the paperwork Mr Mr was still filling in and sending off.

Every solicitor has to be approved by the Solicitors' Regulations Authority. Basically, you can't just set up on your own; they check everything about you, your finances, your qualifications, whether you've been in trouble, everything.  I think the only question they didn't ask is what size shoe Mr Mr wore. And if they're not happy then they ring or email or contact you and make you fit in to their guidelines. I'm not criticising them. Being a lawyer is a very responsible job, and running a law firm even more so. They want to know that firm isn't going to just vanish leaving its clients in a fix, or that the owners aren't running it just for the profits. We were set on our path and just took the regulations as something that had to be done.

This picture, borrowed from the Telegraph site, pretty much sums up how red tape makes me feel; trapped, held down, suffocated.

The first couple of months of Mr Mr working at home were harder for me than I thought. I was finding my way in a job I'd never done before, and I felt like an idiot. Every day I had a silly question to ask, from "How do I work this phone?" to "Where do we keep the envelopes?" I hadn't had a job in an office before, and the last teaching position I had had been in a small school where money was always tight and there was no such thing as stock unless you provided it yourself. Getting used to having colleagues again was a surprise. All of a sudden I had people to talk to and get to know. I had a purpose and a challenge, to improve attendance at the school which was around 92%. I had ideas and aspirations.... but I had a house and children who were suffering from neglect, a meal to prepare every night and a house that I collapsed into at 2pm instead of bounding in with my Next Big Idea. It was stressful. I found myself sitting next to Mr Mr asking him to check on the website late at night because I would come home, have lunch with him, sit for an hour until a child to tutor came in, get dinner ready, spend time chilling with the offspring and only when they had finally settled happily to work or bed did I get the computer out and begin what we had ascribed as 'my job', the website and social media.

And weirdly I missed being alone in the house. With supply, I'd managed a day or two a week when there was only me and nobody in control of my destiny. I could go out, clean up, visit friends or relations, spend all my time on the computer or none. Now I had a small window free to do something, usually not enough time to go anywhere and often not enough energy to be bothered. Daily lunch with a husband sounds lovely in theory but in actuality I missed being able to drop everything and just go for a coffee. Now I felt obliged to ask Mr Mr to come as well.... and sometimes you just want that breathing space. I began to worry about whether I'd be any use working full time in his office, or would the lack of freedom be an issue?

Online solutions in a Modern Legal World

Oh Lord, that has to be a vote winning headline, doesn't it? It has the works; legal, online, solutions, Modern. It would probably sweep the boards at the "Most Boring Blog Post Title Ever" award ceremony.

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.

Tom, Dick or Harry; flying high, tunnelling free

After Christmas, we were still talking to each other and sizing up possibilities. We knew what we wanted to do (start a solicitor's firm), what resources we had (a solicitor helped, an IT amateur, and a lot of determination) and what we wanted to achieve (we needed a firm that would pay the bills, serve the community and give us satisfaction. Probably in that order as well.) but planning steps and getting the system sorted can take some time.

And then there's always the dreaded decision to be made; when to jump??

You see, we stood in the kitchen (all our best discussions happened in the kitchen back then; it was the only place where we didn't have little ears listening in, and I was usually cooking or cleaning in it when Mr Mr returned from work) on very many days going "Yeah! We have the idea! We want to set up on our own......." and then taking the step back from the edge.

I've never done a bungee jump (too scared of heights) but I have been daft enough to climb to the top of high buildings and then look down. I think what we felt was a little like that, a sort of precognitive vertigo, where we would look into the future and, as long as we looked far ahead enough we could see the golden dawn on the horizon and feel secure in what we wanted but looking straight down to the days ahead gave us an uncomfortable feeling of dizziness, gut-twisting nausea and a wish to move back, to move away and hide.

That first step is a hard one.

I don't think we would have taken that first step if it hadn't been for fate giving us a hefty push and saying... screaming.... JUMP NOW!!!

One May night, Mr Mr came home and said that there was news from the office. About the firm. The last time he'd said that, the law firm he worked for had gone bust overnight (night before our first anniversary, thank you very much) and we'd been devastated, unable to do anything but get drunk. I was reaching for the Aldi red wine when he smiled and said,

"They're introducing a  new contract. It would mean a cut in pay. I've got til September to sign it. And if I don't sign, they'll lay me off."

We had a date.

I seem to remember that night all the paperwork we'd done so far came out; the lists, the calculations, the plans and goals. We talked and planned and began to set in place a plan and a date for starting the plans and ... most excitingly... a date for completing the plans. October 2013 would be the month when Mr Mr would cease to be a salaried member of the legal profession and become a solo practitioner.
October would be the day we broke through the surface from paid employment to the freedom of self-employed.

And so we did our research...

Every sensible move starts with research, right? You find the sites online, you read the books, you seek out now worlds and new civilisations, basically you look for somebody who knows what you need to know; is it do-able? Will we go under? Can we survive on a drop in wages before the cash comes in?

For Mr Mr, he went looking at the Law Society, picking up the books on how to run a law firm and how to run a small law firm in particular. He wanted to know that the mechanics of it would be easy enough, that the red tape (love that legal red tape that's really pink!) wouldn't be a killer.

Me, I looked at whether I could have a role. Everything about the firm needed to be done on a budget... that's a budget of pennies, not pounds as well, so for me looking at securing the best deals on everything was crucial. There were a lot of lists going around, a lot of  brainstorming and word clouds and 'missioning' (if you know what I mean; who are we serving? How can we be accessible? Do we do an office or a home office? How do we see clients? Where is our client base coming from??? The list went on and on and on.....)

And all the time I was covering supply in a few schools, no more than 2 or 3 days a week and some weeks completely empty and Mr Mr was working in the firm and coming home less angry than he used to because he had begun to dig a hole. Only a small hole, but a hole and he could see how escape was just about possible.

I Blame John Grisham...

Life is never quite straight forward. When I was a little girl I made my life plan; be a teacher, marry a nice man, have three children (two boys, one girl) and be a writer. I never had a plan to teach for all of my life, but I figured I'd teach for a good 30 years and then stop to be a semi-retired lady who lunches.
How wrong could my life plan be.
As it was, I taught full time for less than 7 years before I had children and stopped to be CEO of my domestic empire. By the time my youngest was nursery age, I had been out for 8 years and found supply work to be the best choice for me. Fast forward another 7 years and I was looking to return full time. Almost 15 years after my last full time post, I applied for every job going and got nowhere. I lost out to newly qualified teachers, or to those fresh from their NQT year. I kept on supply, and kept hoping that someone, somewhere would employ me.
By the time I accepted my job as a Learning Mentor and now TA I was desperate just to have a continuity of employment, a daily grind that would pay a little and often. It wasn't the hardest of jobs, but it wasn't the best use of my skills. I'm doing it, but I don't find the pleasure and enjoyment in a modern school that I used to have. Targets, curriculum changes and tests (always the tests!) have changed teaching from an enjoyable and creative career to a treadmill with eyes firmly fixed on the level prize of SATs results. It's not the job I loved as a little girl, and it's not the job I want to be doing until I retire at (as it now seems) 65.

And something similar was happening with the Husband as well. He'd been working as a solicitor since the age of 22, in Liverpool and Manchester. He'd worked for firms, been a salaried partner, been involved (as an innocent participant) in a firm going bankrupt, worked for the Manchester office of a London firm and for another Liverpool firm. And he was getting tired. He didn't like working for the Man. Working for another Man. He was tired of working and watching someone else gather the profits. He was tired of office politics and meetings that lasted long but achieved little.

It came to a head one October holiday. In London, of all places, where we sat reading a book, The Litigators by John Grisham. It's about a man who has had enough of the Big Corporate World and sets off to be a small hustling lawyer with a 'boutique' firm (meaning small, rather than classy).  We both read the book over the week and something in the story set us off thinking. What if we could make a bid for freedom? What if we could set up and be a small firm? What if we could work for ourselves.........