Administrative Law Work - Part I: Building Your Law Practice

by Carmen Mosley-Sims, Esquire

It is the best-kept secret of a successful legal practice. Do you know what it is? Litigators may tell you it’s a solid foundation in civil procedure and evidence. High-volume practitioners will tell you it’s a well-developed library of forms and templates. Judges will assure you strong writing skills will take you far, long after your legal knowledge has been exhausted. These “secrets,” however, while important to success as a lawyer, are not very secret. Anyone reasonably familiar with the practice of law could figure them out—or pay someone to tell him.

The secret I’m going to tell you really is secret. So secret, almost no one knows what it is until they have been in practice for ten years or more, and most people never know. It will not appear in any of the “build your own practice” books, and it probably does not occur to even the most well-rounded and street smart law student as she cultivates dreams of her own firm. Bowen Law School offers a course on the subject, but you have probably seen it listed on the course schedule and thought, as I did, “What a weird specialty area. That certainly won’t be any use to me.” I am, of course, talking about administrative law.

Administrative law? That subject for dyed-in-the-wool government bureaucrats? Surely I’m joking. But no, I’m not. Administrative law is the law of the executive branch. It is where the government steps down from its ivory tower on Capitol Hill and gets down to the business of governing. It is where literally every single mandatory course in law school gets applied, simultaneously, in the most convoluted and unlikely scenarios the government and the public can dream up....