How my firm starts_1

(This was how I start my business of owning a legal firm based on true events)

You may have heard about it from me in fragments or you may have heard of it through the grapevines or even if you really read my story, how my firm came to be. I fictionalised parts of my real life and use it as the premise of Sold Soul, my first novel.



It started with an invitation by someone who would have lost everything if she didn't make it in business. I was already in a comfort zone then in which I was a partner with an ex-Deputy Public Prosecutor who opened his firm a year before, alone. I was living in Seremban sheltered by my parent's house and given a car and an allowance to boot to help me survive the real world even when I was already a partner in a small legal firm in Seremban. The youngest of three boys, my parents were then left with nobody to support and just this final one who seems to have a future but still need a bit of a push. Like a penguin starting to hunt for fish or a tweety bird starting to learn to fly...



So, I was hanging around one of my junior's legal firm which opened in June 2000. There was this restaurant there, just within the Kuala Lumpur Satellite Centre, which was quite empty then, unlike now. My junior, M & S opened their business without any business plan and they were using a quarter of an office rented by S's cousin. The office was big and no one was at the office as S's cousin need it as a base which he use as a business address. They were doing cleaning services for LRT lines and others and they don't need a real office. So, M & S got the office to themselves.



I was always hanging around at their office as I was servicing this client in Shah Alam, SS2 and Sunway as I was still commuting from Seremban. I didn't have an office yet in the Klang Valley and I didn't think that I need one. I loved the fact I could drive at anytime of the day to do work in those places and called up people later whether I could sleep over at their places. As most of the girls I was dating either lived with their parents or with housemates, and I was such a good boy (yeah, right!), I bunked a lot in my university's friends house. As they were also living with their parents, it was not a problem. It got so routine that I once came back from a trip with one of the girl I was dating at 8am to my friend's house and his father helped opened the front door of the house as my friend was a heavy sleeeper!!



Back to the story, I was having lunch when my would be partner asked me whether I consider opening up a firm in the Klang Valley. I told her that was an interesting idea but where? I did talked with my client whom I was servicing to sponsor me an office as I was nearly everyday at his house (he was also office-less) but he asked me to wait for his office to be ready and I could use a part of it. He was going to opened an office in Sunway.



That was our first meeting and from there we talked and talked until I had the confidence to approach my then partner and proposed to him to open a branch in KL. He rejected it outright as he don't want to have to pay fees to the Bar Committee of another state (you have to pay at all states that you have a branch).



In the end I change tactics and that was how on 20.9.00, a new legal firm was born...



(to be continued...)