The Lawyer Who Started as the Client

When Sara Shikhman arrived with her family from Ukraine in 1992, they had two suitcases and almost nothing else. They even found their couch on the side of the road. But from what her family lacked, Sara learned to be resourceful.

A serial entrepreneur, she started a writing business in college and then a furniture company after law school. Eventually she started a med spa with her husband. They started with just one room and grew to 12 locations. She lost the business when they divorced, but she gained hard-won expertise in a niche industry and discovered the regulations that founders in the field struggle with. It was an area that most lawyers struggle with as well.

“When I owned the med spa,” Sara says, “I could not find a lawyer to help us that knew the answers I needed.”

The idea to start her own law firm came to her while sitting at her kitchen table. She had no savings and no idea how she was going to pay her bills. But the first woman who called with questions about opening a med spa hired Sara right away. That was her first client, and Lengea Law has not stopped growing since.

The vision from the start

Most of Sara’s clients are first-time business owners. Many are women, and a lot have never started a company before. Sara describes them coming to her almost in a whisper, and they remind her of how her own parents spoke when they didn’t have the words to navigate a new country. The firm’s job is to translate on their behalf and break down those barriers. To be there when someone wants to hear that what they envision is actually possible.

There are over 25,000 med spas in the United States. Big firms had traditionally written the industry off as a nail salon with a wellness label and work that didn’t merit a legal specialization. Sara, who had spent years running her own med spa, knew they were wrong. The industry was full of nurses, physician assistants, estheticians, and entrepreneurs who needed legal support and could not find it.

Lengea Law needed to grow to meet the moment

Sara knew she wanted to build nationally: a distributed team, thousands of clients, and a practice that could serve every corner of the country. Sara also knew that she needed a better system to help her scale her practice.

She remembers the early days, before the business really took off, when everything lived in spreadsheets. Even with meticulous attention, she couldn’t ignore the gaps. Time entries went missing. Invoices didn’t go out. The money she had earned kept slipping through the cracks. Across the firm, billing and admin work was eating 15 to 20 hours a week per attorney, all of it unbilled. “I was losing thousands of dollars of money I didn’t even have,” she says.

When Sara started with Clio to manage her business, the payoff was immediate. Billable hours per attorney went up more than 50%. Billing cycles that used to take several days now take a couple of hours. The firm’s collection rate climbed from under 75% to nearly 98%. Annual revenue grew tenfold, from $500,000 to over $5 million.

With everything organized in Clio, Sara’s firm could take on bigger clients, bigger projects, and the kind of work she had pictured from day one. Lengea Law now serves more than 1,700 clients with a 20-person distributed team across New York, California, Texas, the Philippines, and India.

Sara and her team have also seen how AI is already changing expectations across that four-digit client base. They want instant answers and they expect answers to be spot-on. “I think AI is scary,” Sara admits, “but AI is also the future. And in the future, all of our work will be enhanced by AI. Why not start now and work with AI to deliver superior work faster and better for our clients?”

What no one else saw

Lengea Law has helped those clients go from 200 square feet to 10 locations. She’s helped solo nurse practitioners become founders who exit to private equity for millions of dollars. The firm grew because it helps clients like no other can.

“We’ve grown so fast because when clients hire us, they realize that we’ve been in their shoes before and we can help them faster, better, and more accurately than our competitors,” she says.
After just six years, Sara wants to be bigger. She wants to grow to 5,000 clients, then 10,000, then 50,000, without compromising the service that got her here.

“I’m most proud of the fact that I get to help my clients build and live their American dream,” Sara says.

It’s the same dream her parents had when they bought a one-way ticket in 1992. It’s the dream Sara saw at her kitchen table. Now, she helps her clients build their own reality of it.