About a hundred Canadian lawyers are in the community I run, and a good chunk of them went out on their own in the last few years. I've also heard the pre-launch version of the story on dozens of screening calls. This is what the decision turns on and what the first year looks like.
The four questions that decide it
Forget passion. Four practical questions do most of the work.
Where will the files come from? Plenty of successful launches started without a book. What they had was a theory of where work comes from that doesn't depend on hope: referral relationships you've tested, a former employer who'll send conflicts work, a community that knows your name. All-referral revenue is rickety, and the members who built on it and made it work are the ones who knew it was rickety and planned around the wobble. The launches that struggle are the ones where the marketing plan is "I'm good at the work."
Can you carry the gap? Revenue lags work, and work lags opening. In litigation the lag can run a year. The comfortable launches had six to twelve months of personal burn covered through a line of credit, a spouse's income, or savings. The stressful ones had three. Do the math before, not after. (The startup numbers are broken out separately: what it costs to start a law firm in Canada.)
Is your practice portable? Some practices walk out the door with you: immigration, family, employment, wills. Some are institutional. If your work depends on a bank's panel spot or a national client's relationship with your firm's brand, ask whether the work follows you or stays with the letterhead. Be cold about this one.
What does your life absorb right now? A launch eats eighteen months. Members who did it with a new baby at home will tell you it's possible, and will not tell you it was fun. There's no wrong answer here, just an inventory of what else the same eighteen months has to hold.
Years of call isn't on the list. Members have launched at year three and year twenty. Year three came with energy and no bad habits. Year twenty came with a book and a reputation. Both worked.
What the first year looks like
The work is the easy part. Nobody in our community says the legal work was what almost sank them. It's everything around it: intake, billing, collections, bookkeeping, choosing software, trust accounting compliance. You were trained for one job and you bought yourself five. (The mechanics have their own post: starting a law firm in Ontario, step by step.)
Pricing starts too low. Nearly every owner in our community says the same thing about their launch year: the calendar had holes, a discounted file beat an empty week, and the discounts stuck. The second-year version of you ends up busy at rates the launch-year version set. The members who escaped fastest picked a number, said it out loud to other lawyers, and let themselves be talked upward. Put a rate review in the calendar for every January — raising rates on new files is a five-minute decision when it's scheduled and an agonizing one when it's not.
If you launch general, expect to narrow. This one is for lawyers opening the doors without a defined specialty (if you're taking an established practice solo, you already know what you're for). The plan says "general corporate-commercial." A year in, four of your best files look the same and you finally have data. Most members who launched general narrowed after launch, not before, and the clarity came from the files.
The quiet is real. Members who went solo describe the same thing in almost the same words: a low-key loneliness that comes with working on client files with nobody down the hall. It shows up even in practices that are doing fine. And the fix they describe is the same too: people they can ask for advice without being judged.
What's recoverable and what isn't
Most first-year mistakes are recoverable. Undercharging corrects. The niche clarifies. The software can be switched (painfully, so pick carefully the first time). Slow months happen and pass.
Two things are dangerous. No pipeline plan. Lawyers who are excellent at the work and have no theory of where it comes from run out of runway with their reputation intact. And trust accounting sloppiness. Every law society's trust rules read the same way on this: there is no grace period for being new, and "I was busy" is not a defence. If you take retainers, the bookkeeping is sacred from day one, or you shouldn't take retainers yet.
How to tell if you're ready
You're probably ready if you can name where the first ten files come from, the gap is funded, the practice walks with you, and the people in your life are signed on. You're probably not ready if the plan's strongest line is "I hate my firm." You need something you want to build.
Whichever side you land on, run the decision past people who've made it. Members who went solo consistently describe the final push the same way: they watched peers a step ahead do it, read what those people were building, and realized they could do it too.
Inn Laws is full of lawyers a few steps ahead of where you're standing — people who opened their own shops last quarter or last decade, working through the same decisions in peer groups and on the member platform. If you're circling this decision, apply below. The screening conversation is a fit test in both directions, and you'll come out of it with a clearer read on your own plan either way.