by Cynthia Price
Legal News
This is part of an ongoing series about solo/small firm attorneys and how they make their practices work.
As with most successful careers, Dee Dee Fuller’s has been a combination of natural ability, learned business skills and fortunate circumstances.
Take, for example, the way she obtained the job at Miller Johnson that preceded her current solo practice.
“When I was finishing up law school I didn’t really understand how it worked. I thought I?was way ahead when I sent my resume out in January based on graduating in July or August. I had decided that my first choice law firm was Miller Johnson, but to my astonishment they’d already filled all their slots at the end of the summer,” she explained. “I found out that when the summer interns are done, they ask them back.
“I was told going in, you can’t just be in the top 20%, you have to be in the top ten students. I worked hard in order to do that, and applied for the job I wanted, but then they were already full.
“So I was sort of going through this depression,” she says with a brief laugh. “Then someone at Miller Johnson called me and said that they had just done a strategic plan and discovered that at the time there were no female business lawyers in Grand Rapids. There were boutique lawyers and women whose specialties overlapped with business, but — this was 1996 — no women doing it full time.
Fuller says, “When I was interviewing, I remember I said “There are a lot of things I’m pretty sure I can do, but I can be a female lawyer, that I know I can do.’”
But that is not to downplay the role of Fuller’s previous experience and training. Fuller says she has always had an interest in numbers, accounting, and tax issues. After receiving her Bachelor’s in Business Administration from Aquinas College, she had a career in risk management, working for Wolverine Worldwide and Meijer.
She rose to Risk and Insurance Manager at Meijer. “I oversaw the claims staff, worked with benefits and liability claims, and then the financing and funding of benefits claims. I really had a great job. Part of what I did was hiring and firing lawyers. After a while, I felt there was a real need for good lawyers,” Fuller says.
She returned to WMU-Cooley Law School (then Thomas M. Cooley Law School), and received her J.D. cum laude despite by then having four children. “My husband was wonderful,” she adds.
Despite loving her work at Miller Johnson, she struck out on her own in 2004. “Miller Johnson is a great firm but it’s still a big firm. I figured if I ever was going to do it on my own, that was the time. And I’ve been glad I did; really it’s been great,” she says.
Fuller Law and Counseling represents businesses with whatever they need from entity creation forward. Unlike many other solo practices such as family law or bankruptcy, “It’s not just a ‘one and done.’ You stay involved with your business clients for decades. I might have been the one who helped them organize their company, and then years later they’re going to buy another company and they call on me to work through that with them.
“It’s really all about relationships,” she says. “Long-term relationships.”
In fact, expertise at building relationships may be why Fuller never really had much trouble meeting one of the biggest challenges for solo law firms: marketing. She says she thinks every single client she had on her own at Miller Johnson, though not all of the firm clients she worked with, followed her when she left.
“I?haven’t done much marketing,” Fuller says, but adds, “A couple of my children are in marketing, and my son has his own marketing business. And as I was telling him about what I do, he said he thought I really do a lot of it but just don’t call it that.
“It’s just the things you get into the habit of doing. The more you get in front of clients — a birthday card, even a Thanksgiving card — the more they’ll remember you when they need a lawyer.”
Based on her business instincts, Fuller says that when she started out, she wanted to be sure she was always in the black, or as she puts it, “I was concerned not to ever bite off too much.” So she started out working from home.
Very quickly, she realized that she needed administrative help in order to free up her time to concentrate on legal work.
Again, fortune smiled on her. Fuller knew someone whose niece had worked at Varnum but left to have a baby. She was able to hire the young woman part-time.
“It’s the only way that I can build the business effectively and efficiently; that’s kind of the story for me. Since I brought in administrative help, I’ve remained busy continuously.”
She has nothing but praise for her first employee, Melissa, and her current administrative assistant, Amanda Durham. They have handled her bookkeeping and accounting for Fuller, though she says, “I review and process everything.”
The firm eventually hired two additional attorneys, but with the economic downturn in the late 2000s, was not able to keep them busy.
Though she also does estate planning, Fuller has found that business contracts and agreements suits her well. “When?I went into law school I thought I was going to be a litigator, but that’s not my thing. I’m like a mother cat with her kittens, I get too upset by things, and there’s so much negativity and fighting. I don’t mind writing the nasty letters, but I really don’t like to fight.”
Fuller also was fortunate in getting her IT needs met. She hired a Cooley Law School intern for legal work, and he also was “a natural” at working with computers.
The lovely office Fuller Law and Counseling occupies at 300 Ottawa Avenue followed having an office in Coopersville, where Fuller got involved with the Rotary and a number of its special projects. “I’m on the Del Shannon Car Show committee, and I work on that religiously. We give away the money that show earns at the Farm Museum.”
She is also involved with Rotary in Grand Rapids, but says she doesn’t have the time to use it as networking. “But I love Rotary — what they’ve done with polio and potable water throughout the world — they’ve made changes as an organization that I?couldn’t make all by myself.,” she says.
Fuller is also a past chair of the State Bar Business Law Section as well as of the Grand Rapids Bar Business and Taxation Section. She stays involved with professional associations, speaks frequently on business topics, and has served as an adjunct professor at WMU-Cooley’s Grand Rapids campus.
As far as the “coverage” problems other solo attorneys may face, she feels that not being a litigator really reduces the need for that, but at the same time she is personally available pretty much all the time for her clients. “I don’t really take vacations, maybe a long weekend at times, and I haven’t had a sick day in about 30 years,” she says.
“I’m very fortunate because I love what I?do and I look forward to coming in to work every day.”
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