Four years ago, Laura Black and Mark Neumann were miserable: They had promising careers and salaries of more than $50,000 a year as beginning attorneys at prestigious Baltimore law firms.
But they were fed up with 60-hour weeks of reviewing boring legal documents. So they ignored their friends' advice, quit and started a business that has created a stir in the tradition-bound industry.
Today, Baltimore-based Attorneys Per Diem, a legal temporary services agency, places about 100 lawyers, paralegals and legal secretaries around Maryland each day. And the partners say they will open their first branch office, in Washington, D.C., by the end of the year.
By next year, they plan to expand their service, which provides legal professionals only to law firms and companies with in-house lawyers, to New York.
Delighted with their rapid success, the partners predict that there will be Attorneys Per Diem offices in every major city in the United States by the end of the decade.
A pipe dream? Perhaps. But customers and attorneys say the two have already defied the legal industry's skepticism.
And all indications are that they are well-poised to take advantage of a boom in the demand for low-cost lawyers who don't expect partnerships and can be laid off as soon as a big case is over. Their temporary attorneys, who don't get benefits, cost as little as $15 an hour. Experienced lawyers cost $25 an hour and up.
"I wasn't sure it would work," said Ward B. Coe, managing partner of Whiteford Taylor & Preston.
When Ms. Black told him she was quitting her job at Whiteford to start a legal temp agency, he was doubtful firms like Whiteford would trust their business to outside lawyers.
But after Ms. Black persuaded him that her temporary attorneys were well-qualified, Mr. Whiteford started using her staff to help prepare for big cases. "We've concluded it is a very good idea," he said.
Such endorsements seemed unlikely in late 1990, when Ms. Black and Mr. Neumann were unknowingly leading parallel and unhappy work lives.
Both had ended up as lawyers after having watched small family-run stores fall to competition from larger stores.
Mr. Neumann didn't like having to review long and boring legal documents. Ms. Black, who had her third child shortly before joining Whiteford, felt torn between the demands of her job and family.
"I felt guilty working because I was not at home. And I felt guilty at home because I was not working."
She lay awake at night, wondering how she could do legal work yet set her own hours: "I wanted to arrange the soccer schedule first," she said.
Finally, in late 1990, she thought: Why not just contract herself out as a temporary attorney? And why stop with herself?
"I knew so many people who were unhappy" with traditional law firm work, she said.
In December 1990, as she was getting ready to leave Whiteford, she got a call from Mr. Neumann, whom she knew slightly from their time together at the University of Maryland School of Law.
"I really was wracking my brain. Anything and everything sounded better than practicing law," he said.
They agreed to meet over lunch in a few days to discuss the idea.
Then, a few minutes later, Ms. Black's phone rang again. Mr. Neumann didn't want to wait. He wanted to talk then.
"And I thought, 'That's who I want to have as a partner,' " she said.
The next day, he quit his job at Frank, Bernstein Conaway and Goldman.
And the two set out, violating nearly every piece of conventional business wisdom imaginable.
They never wrote up a business plan. They rented a downtown office before they had enough clients to pay the rent. They ignored the advice of colleagues.
"Everybody said we were nuts," Ms. Black said. "We probably did everything wrong."
But they did a few things right.
Their hurried matchmaking, for example, seems to have worked out.
Mr. Neumann, 31, handles the administration of the firm. Ms. Black, 42, is the marketer.
They say they have become good friends. Mr. Neumann's sister introduced Ms. Black to the man who became her second husband.
And their timing was perfect.
As law firms faced unprecedented cost pressures, they laid off lawyers, thus creating a well-qualified pool of attorneys available for temp work. Ms. Black and Mr. Neumann say the glut of lawyers is so large that they reject as many as 80 percent of the resumes they receive, and currently have about 500 legal professionals in their stable.
Meanwhile, demand for legal work continued to boom.
Warren B. Daly Jr., a partner at Ober Kaler Grimes & Shriver, started to use legal temps because lawsuits were getting more complicated and firms were increasingly loathe to hire permanent attorneys.
"Fifteen years ago, no one would look at 300,000 pages of documents" for a case, but now lawyers are expected to do so, he said.
So now he brings in low-priced temporary attorneys to read through mind-numbing stacks of pages.
Best of all, when the case is over, and there isn't any work for them the temporaries are sent home at no cost to the law firm, he said.
That's a mixed blessing for attorneys looking for temporary work.
Nancy Hopkins, 30, was laid off by Semmes Bowen & Semmes in 1992, and turned to temp work because the job market was glutted.
She knows why so many law firms like hiring temporary attorneys: "They don't have to pay any benefits."