I got into insurance because I was fresh out of school, had no real idea what I wanted to do, and figured I would try sales. I worked one industry job. Then in 2020 I opened Walker & Company with a laptop, a website, and exactly one person in the business willing to tell a carrier I was probably fine. I did not have a book of business. I did not have a track record. I had read more policy forms than was probably healthy for someone my age, and I had a theory that if I picked one narrow thing and did it every day, the rest would show up eventually.
Six years later, around four hundred law firms in twenty or so states trust us with their professional liability coverage. I want to be careful about how I say that, because it can sound like a bigger operation than it is. We are still a small shop. We are still figuring plenty of things out. There are firms on our own client list whose revenue passed ours within a year or two of opening, which is a humbling thing to know about your customers. But four hundred firms said yes to a business that started with nothing, and I have not really gotten over that, and some part of me is still waiting for someone to check my credentials at the door.
I bring all this up because of a conversation I keep having, and because it is one of my favorite parts of the job.
The attorneys about to jump
Every so often I end up on the phone with an attorney who is thinking about starting their own firm. Sometimes they are leaving a big shop, sometimes a mid size one, sometimes they are a few years out of law school and tired of building someone else's book. I genuinely look forward to these calls, and I am always a little in awe of the confidence it takes to make that jump, especially since I know what the jump feels like from the inside. Mine was not a law firm, but the cliff was the same shape.
The worries are the same too. They are worried the clients will not follow. They are worried about looking small. They are worried that the established firms in their market know something they do not, some body of knowledge that takes twenty years to accumulate and cannot be gotten any other way.
I had every one of those worries, and I can report from a few years further along that the last one in particular is mostly wrong. Some of the established players really do know things you do not. What I underestimated, and what I think most people about to start something underestimate, is how far you can get on the willingness to just begin, and on the confidence that whatever you have not figured out yet is figure-outable. Most of what I know now I learned on accounts where I had no business sounding as calm as I did. The moment I kept bracing for, where someone serious finally steps in and asks what exactly I think I am doing here, never came. I suspect it is not coming for you either.
The people who let me in
I do want to be clear that figuring it out was never a solo act, and this might be the part most worth hearing if you are about to start something. Whatever ground we have covered, we covered because people in this industry were patient with a nobody. Underwriters took my calls when my questions probably did not deserve their time, and then answered the follow up questions too. Carriers appointed an agency with no track record because one person vouched for me, and then gave me room to prove it out. I am still working off those debts, and I am nowhere near done learning from the people who extended them.
I mention this because the industry you are trying to break into works the same way. From the outside it looks like a wall of established names. Up close it is full of people who remember starting out, and who will take a chance on someone new who does the work and asks honest questions. You will find your version of the underwriters who taught me.
What this has to do with insurance
Here is the part where I am supposed to pivot to selling you something, and I will, but the pitch is smaller than you might expect.
New firms tend to assume insurance will be one of the painful parts of starting out, another place where their lack of history counts against them. It is usually the opposite. Your first professional liability policy prices off the work your new firm has actually performed, which at inception is not much, so the first year costs less than most attorneys expect, and the premium grows with your book rather than arriving all at once. Carriers, especially in a market as competitive as this one, want new firms. You are the growth they are all chasing. There are real questions to get right, like what follows you from your old firm and what does not, but none of it is a reason to wait, and most of it takes one conversation to sort out.
So the honest version of the pitch is this. Walker & Company is a small business that was knocking on an established industry's door six years ago, and in a lot of ways still is. We have not forgotten what it felt like when someone treated us like a real business before the numbers said we were one, and we try to be that for the firms we work with. A two attorney startup is not small to us. It looks like us. You will get the same work on your first placement that a firm many times your size would get, partly because that is the job, and partly because we have an obvious soft spot for people willing to step out on the ledge.
If you are getting ready to start your firm, we would be glad to be one of your first calls. And if you are still in the hedging stage, deciding whether you are qualified to do this at all, I am not going to pretend an insurance broker's opinion should settle it. I will just say that I asked myself the same question in 2020, went ahead without a good answer, and it has worked out better than anyone involved had a right to expect.