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Selling a Law Practice: Prospects and Pitfalls

By Edward Poll
November 01, 2003

[Ed. Note: The author is now putting finishing touches on a timely new book-with-CD publication, tentatively titled How to Buy, Sell, Merge or Close a Law Practice. In this forthcoming guide, Poll has updated his 1996 "toolkit" for buying and selling a law firm (see www.lawbiz.com) while also adding how-to chapters on firm mergers and closings. Although the related article below focuses on the sale of small practices, readers from large firms may take more than passing interest in Poll's observation that buyers of small firms are often attorneys who are leaving large firms.]

Large firms have long had well-defined methods for transferring ownership interests in a practice via “mergers,” “retirements,” “breakups,” etc. Attorneys in larger firms have also always had mechanisms in place that provided them and their heirs with funding for the value of their individual interests in the firm.

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