How to establish a successful legal practice?

How to build up a successful law practice?  This article answers the question.

Building A Successful Solo Law Practice
By Joseph R. Jacques, CMC

Before commencing a solo law practice, one must ask the question: Why! Your answer may fall into one of two categories: (1) you have to, or (2) you want to. Those falling into the first category may simply be unable to obtain employment as lawyers, or the options available may not allow them to utilize their legal training and skills. Faced with this situation, they must either start their own practice or obtain employment outside of the field of law.
The main advantages of solo practice are freedom and independence, limited only by economic needs and responsibilities assumed to clients and the courts. Lawyers who choose to go into solo practice should be prepared for a few years of lean earnings, non-billable time, and perhaps more than a few frustrations. If you who can manage to get through the first two or three years, have utilized good public and client relations techniques, and provide the highest level of client service and work product, you should be on your way to a fulfilling practice. Lawyers contemplating such a practice also need to be aware that only a very few sole practitioners ever become wealthy from the practice of law. Most will survive economically, but, on the average, sole practitioners are at the bottom of the earnings ladder. Surveys of law practice economics almost universally report that the larger the organization, the more individual lawyers in those firms earn. Any lawyer contemplating solo practice would be well advised to be alert for prospective affiliations, either another lawyer joining you, or your joining another group of your fellow practitioners.

The State cannot be unjustly enriched

A general equitable principle that a person should not profit at another's expense and therefore should make restitution for the reasonable value of any property, services, or other benefits that have been unfairly received and retained

Fibrosa v. Fairbairn (All ER p.135 H) “[A]ny civilised system of law is bound to provide remedies for cases of what has been called unjust enrichment or unjust benefit, that is, to prevent a man from retaining the money of, or some benefit derived from, another which it is against conscience that he should keep. Such remedies in English law are generically different from remedies in contract or in tort, and are now recognised to fall within a third category of the common law which has been called quasicontract or restitution.”