On prospective clients who don't hire me

There are two ways to deal with a prospective client who doesn't hire you, and actually they aren't mutually exclusive ways.

One is to say to yourself, Well, that's too bad. I wonder what I could have done differently to get that party to hire me. I think I did an honest evaluation of the hours it would take me to do the work, leaving off the self-education hour to make sure I do it right (because we live in the future now, where new lawyers aren't hired by firms and don't get the early-career mentorship that lawyers of past generations used to get). Then I gave a competitive rate for those hours and explained to the party why they should hire a lawyer rather than use forms they download from the Internet. They didn't hire me, and that's their loss. Let's take a lesson and see what I should say to the next prospective client that will make them more likely than this party to hire me.

The other way is to say to yourself, Well, we'll see how it goes when one person in the management team exits this penny-wise, pound-foolish enterprise, and they don't have an agreement in place for dividing the business, and they have to go by the Commonwealth's default rules, which will make nobody happy and will result in at least one member getting away with far more than they deserve and another member getting totally screwed. It will happen, and they could avoid it, and I'll still be in my office blogging away saying, "I told you so" while they're crying to a court and pleading with their creditors.

Not mutually exclusive, no; you just have to be careful to blog the second reaction anonymously.