From solo attorney to the nation’s largest female-founded law firm: Building a business that lasts
Starting a business is one challenge. Building one that continues to grow for decades is another.
For women entrepreneurs, that path can involve additional hurdles, especially in industries where leadership has historically been dominated by men. Law is one of them. While women now make up a significant share of practicing attorneys, building and scaling a firm from the ground up still requires more than professional expertise. It takes a clear purpose, smart business decisions, strong systems, and the ability to build a team that can carry the mission forward.
Jan Dils’ story offers a useful example. What began in West Virginia with one attorney and one employee, herself, grew into a firm with more than 150 team members and a national reach. The lessons behind that growth apply far beyond the legal industry.
Starting With a Reason Bigger Than Growth
Jan Dils opened her practice in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 1994. The motivation behind it had taken shape years earlier.
As a child, she watched her aunt battle cancer while struggling to obtain Social Security disability benefits. Seeing someone who needed help get denied by the system left a lasting impression. That experience eventually influenced Dils’ decision to build a legal career around advocating for people facing disability and injury claims.
That foundation matters when examining the growth of Jan Dils, Attorneys at Law. The firm is the largest female founded law firm in the United States, growing from a solo practice into a team of more than 150 people serving clients in disability, veterans’ benefits, and personal injury matters.
The scale is impressive, but the more useful lesson for other founders is what existed before the scale: a specific problem worth solving.
Businesses built only around growth targets can lose direction when markets change. A clear reason for existing gives leaders something more durable to build around. It can guide hiring, services, customer experience, and decisions about where the company should expand next.
Build Depth Before Chasing Width
Entrepreneurs are constantly presented with opportunities to add another service, enter another market, or pursue another audience. Growth can quickly become synonymous with doing more.
But sustainable expansion works better when a business first becomes good at something specific.
Dils initially established her practice around Social Security disability cases. The firm later expanded into veterans’ disability benefits and personal injury law.
That progression reflects a useful business principle: expansion should make sense in relation to what the company already does well.
For founders considering a new service or market, a few questions can help:
- Does this solve another problem for the people we already understand?
- Do we have the expertise and systems to deliver it well?
- Does the new service strengthen our positioning or make it less clear?
- Can the existing team support the expansion without weakening the core business?
- Is demand driving the decision, or are we expanding simply because we can?
Growth creates value when it builds on a strong foundation. Adding revenue streams without that foundation can create complexity faster than it creates profit.
Culture Has to Become More Intentional as the Team Grows
A three-person company can build culture informally. Everyone works closely together, communication happens naturally, and the founder’s personality influences almost every interaction.
At 30, 50, or 150 employees, that stops being enough.
Culture has to become something the organization deliberately reinforces.
Jan Dils’ firm identifies values around teamwork, community involvement, continuous improvement, caring, and dedication. Its recruiting materials connect those principles with specific qualities such as service, adaptability, listening, education, and client loyalty.
For business owners, defining values is only the beginning. Employees pay attention to what leaders actually reward, tolerate, and prioritize.
If a business says customer service matters but rewards employees only for speed, speed becomes the real value. If leadership says teamwork matters but consistently celebrates individual performance at the expense of collaboration, employees notice the contradiction.
Strong cultures turn values into operating behaviors.
Community Can Be Part of the Business, Not Separate From It
Another lesson from long-lasting businesses is that their relationships extend beyond transactions.
Dils built her firm in her hometown of Parkersburg, and community involvement has remained part of its identity as the organization expanded. The firm and its foundation have supported initiatives involving veterans and local organizations, including an annual veterans appreciation dinner and a 5K benefiting veterans.
Community involvement should not be treated as a marketing tactic disguised as generosity. Customers and employees can tell the difference.
For founders who genuinely want community involvement to become part of their companies, consistency matters more than spectacle. That can mean supporting one cause for years, giving employees opportunities to volunteer, sponsoring initiatives directly connected to the company’s purpose, or using business resources to solve a local problem.
A company becomes part of its community through repeated participation, not a single donation accompanied by a press release.
Women Founders Should Not Underestimate the Value of Visibility
There is also significance in seeing a woman build a major organization in an industry where leadership has traditionally skewed male.
Dils has spoken about finding herself as the only woman in the room during parts of her career. Rather than allowing that position to change her goals, she remained focused on the clients she wanted to serve and the organization she was building.
Visibility matters because successful women-led businesses expand the picture of what leadership can look like.
That does not mean every female founder needs to turn her gender into the central part of her brand. It means there is value in women being visible as business owners, executives, employers, and decision-makers.
A woman running a company today can make entrepreneurship feel more achievable to someone entering the workforce tomorrow.
A Business That Lasts Is Built in Stages
Looking at a company after decades of growth can make its success appear inevitable. It rarely is.
A business reaching 100 employees once had 10. Before 10, it had two. Before multiple locations, it had one. Before established processes, someone had to figure out the process for the first time.
That is why founders should be careful about comparing the beginning of their business with another company’s mature stage.
Instead, focus on what the current stage requires.
For a solo founder, that could mean documenting processes before making a first hire. For a growing team, it might mean developing managers instead of routing every decision through the owner. For an established company, the challenge could be preserving culture while expanding into new markets.
The skills that help someone start a company are not identical to the skills required to lead it 10 or 20 years later. Founders who build lasting businesses learn to change their role along with the company.
Longevity Comes From Building Beyond Yourself
More than 30 years after opening her practice as its only attorney and employee, Jan Dils leads an organization that operates at a scale the original solo practice could not have supported.
That transformation offers a broader lesson for women building companies in any industry.
Start with a problem you genuinely care about solving. Become excellent at the core business before expanding. Create systems that allow other people to succeed. Build a culture employees can understand without having the founder explain it every morning. Stay connected to the customers and communities that made growth possible.
The goal is not simply to create a bigger business.
It is to create one capable of lasting long after it stops depending on one person to hold everything together.
