> You might even lose if the other lawyer's able to find any loopholes in your contract. Your experience seems very grim. I've been in freelancing for decades

> You might even lose if the other lawyer's able to find any loopholes in your contract. Your experience seems very grim. I've been in freelancing for decades and never had such a situation. Even non-paying customers were rare to me, and I only once had to actually sue. You will still loose some money sometimes, mostly due to your own bad estimates and client's bad inputs, but that's a fact one needs to plan ahead when running their own business. Sometimes you'll screw over the client as well - a well paid gig will come over that you don't want to miss and client's project will be put on the back burner. Not nice, but hat's also the part of running a business, knowing your priorities and cutting where needed. But all in all, I don't think freelancing is in any way significantly different, nor harder than running an agency (or any business) - only that you have to accept that you need to play more than one roles until you can afford to hire people for that. Having 5 to 9 job is easier, but also has its many downsides, so I wouldn't dismiss freelancing without even trying it for a while. If nothing else it's a great way to learn both about technical and financial stuff, because it constantly forces you to figure out how to do and solve new problems, no 2 projects are exactly the same, unlike working in a companies where people spend entire careers maintaining the same piece of in-house code.