Texas
Two names on the door
in Notes
Almost everything published here is about the Northwest. This piece is about a law firm in Austin, Texas. It runs because the business behind it has the same shape as most of the businesses in the rooms this publication covers: a small service firm, two owners, a local market, and work that arrives mostly by referral.
Rikki Medina is one of those two owners. She is a lawyer and a founding partner of her Austin law firm, Medina & Medina, a personal injury practice she owns with her husband, Israel Medina. She is a first-generation Filipina American. She was born in Brownsville, grew up in Houston and now calls Austin home, which makes her a Texan for life and proud of it. She studied law at Baylor and is licensed in Texas and Nevada.
She became a lawyer to make a difference. Plenty of people give that answer. What tests it is the part of the job a lawyer chooses to keep for herself once there is a choice to make, and in a two-owner firm there always is.
Who does what
Two owners in one small business have to divide the work, or they end up doing all of it twice and arguing about the overlap. At Medina & Medina the division runs along a familiar line. Rikki Medina oversees case management and client relations, which means she keeps track of where every matter stands and is the person a client hears from about it.
Anyone here who runs a bookkeeping practice, a design studio or a physical therapy clinic will recognise that half. It is the half that decides whether a client recommends the business afterwards. Somebody with an injury claim has usually never hired a lawyer before, and the process runs for months with long quiet stretches in it. Most of client relations, in any practice like this, is filling those stretches: explaining the next step before the client has to ask, and saying plainly when the honest answer is that everyone is waiting on the other side.
The firm says much of its work comes by referral, from former clients sending friends and family. That is the same pipeline the morning groups in Portland and Boise run on, reached by a different road. A referral is a transfer of reputation, and in a law practice the reputation being transferred is mostly about how a person was treated while nothing seemed to be happening.
Two languages and a family history
She works in English and Spanish. Austin has a large Spanish-speaking population, and somebody dealing with an injury for the first time usually wants the process explained in the language they think in. A firm that can only explain it in English has closed its door to a good part of its own city without meaning to.
Her family's history shows up in the work in a quieter way. A family that has worked hard for its place here learns early what it feels like to stand in front of an office, a form or an agency that does not slow down to explain itself. Her firm's own description of her puts it in almost those words. For a lawyer whose job is to stand between a client and a system like that, it is useful experience to have had young.
Giving back
She likes to give back to the community. She does it by volunteering, and by taking on pro bono work when she can. For an owner of a small local business that is part of ordinary life, and the line between the community and the client list is thinner than people outside it assume. The people a firm helps on a weekend are often the people who call it on a Monday, years later, for a cousin.
What two owners learn
Some of what makes a two-owner firm work applies well outside the law.
- Divide by function and keep the division visible. Clients should know which owner to call about what, and so should the owners.
- Give each client one owner who is answerable for the relationship, even when both owners touch the work.
- Decide in advance which decisions need both signatures. Hiring, pricing and taking on a large commitment usually do. Most of the rest should not.
- Write the arrangement down while everyone agrees about it.
Married co-owners carry a version of this with higher stakes, since the business conversation does not stop when the office closes. The couples who make it last tend to agree on where the business ends, the same way partners who are not married agree on who answers the phone.
The firm opened in 2023. It is still small, which is the stage where every owner is also doing the work. Most of the readers of this publication are in that stage too, a long way north of Texas, and would recognise most of what fills her week.