The sales part of legal services

For the past two days, three colleagues and I have been in Portland at a dental conference. My firm represents hundreds of dentists and doctors, who may be among the most demanding of clients, but who also are the epitome of small business owners.

Our role here is as business consultants with legal training. We can help a young dentist buy a practice, set up a professional corporation, create an estate plan, implement tax-favored cafeteria and a retirement plans, comply with voluminous health-care regulations prescribed by state and local governments, and, eventually, sell the practice.

In short, we help people keep their money, and dentists have a prime opportunity to make plenty in the first place. If a dentist does it right, the dentist works four days a week for 20-ish years, and then embarks on a lengthy and comfortable retirement replete with mint juleps, fishing, or whatever else he or she enjoys.

At the convention, we often are overlooked among the hundreds of other vendors. We have worked on non-silly ways to promote awareness of the services we provide. It is a challenge in the couple of seconds that a dentist may be looking at our booth. If you have quality ideas, please float them my direction.

In the meantime, with the convention ending Saturday afternoon, it's back to real legal work Monday. Have a good weekend.