No savings, no plan B: Why this lawyer built a firm in just 6 weeks

After years in a stable government role, Redman shared how she decided to step away from that security, opting instead for a commission-based arrangement with a firm where she brought in her own clients and forwent the certainty of a salary.

“It was an amazing step to take to be thrown from this very stable government career back into the world of not just private practice, but unsalaried private practice,” she said.

However, within just four months of building a strong pipeline of self-generated work, Redman explained how a blunt question from her accountant ultimately became the catalyst that forced her to reconsider her path – and realise she was already in a position to launch her own firm and take the leap.

“But then I found that in the first four months, I had billed quite well. So my accountant said to me, ‘Kate, you’re getting all your own work in. You’re getting all your own clients, all your own referrers. You’re not being referred to any work by the firm that you’re at’,” she said.

“So my accountant was like, ‘What are you doing? Would you have preferred to have kept all of that?’ Because I was just getting a percentage of everything I built, and it was like, you need to start your own firm, if the numbers make sense, then that sounds great.”

While taking the bold step into firm ownership, she reflected that it was never a long-held ambition, but rather a recalibration of what she wanted her professional life to look like, particularly as a parent seeking greater flexibility.

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“I didn’t have long dreams of ever opening my own law firm, but I was starting to think about it because when I was thinking about going back to private practice, I was like, well, I don’t want to be working until midnight every night,” she said.

“I don’t want to have silly billable-hour targets when most of my work is done on a fixed-fee basis. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I still have two little boys. I still want to be able to see them grow up and know what’s going on in their lives.”

However, as Redman explained, deciding to become a firm owner was just the starting point. She shared that what followed was a relentless six-week sprint, balancing a full client workload to keep cash flowing while simultaneously building every element needed to launch a law firm from scratch.

“But then, in the six weeks I had to do the practice management course, I hadn’t done it. So the six weeks were continuing to do the work so that we had money coming in, doing the practice management course, designing the website, doing all of that,” she said.

“It was a lot. But it’s also, if you are someone who is close to me, [you know] that this is also quite in line with my personality. I’m a very all-or-nothing kind of person.”

While many might understandably question whether it was possible to pull everything together in such a short time frame, Redman said the possibility of failure never truly registered – explaining that with no savings or financial safety net, not succeeding simply wasn’t something she allowed herself to consider.

“It didn’t even occur to me because it couldn’t [fail]. Because it’s so funny, people have asked me, like, how much did you have in savings before you started my firm, and I was like zero,” she said.

“We didn’t have a huge amount of savings. We didn’t. So it didn’t even cross my mind that it wouldn’t work because it couldn’t cross my mind that it wouldn’t work. It was like, this is happening, and I will do everything in my power to make this happen.”