Best Practices Entrepreneurship may not be a part of the curriculum at professional schools, but today, doctors, lawyers and other professionals are learning to think like entrepreneurs--and build better businesses in the process.

Lawyers are famous for impenetrable jargon, but when Jeffrey Unger talks about how he practices law like an entrepreneur, his words are crystalline. "It means I am willing to make an investment of time and capital to grow this business like my clients do," says the 35-year-old Beverly Hills, California, attorney.

In any language, Unger's approach to running a law firm is decidedly entrepreneurial. While developing a specialty providing incorporation services to business owners, he's invested a six-figure sum creating technology to speed up and streamline the process using Web-based information-gathering tools. He has an annual marketing budget that he invests in advertising in trade publications serving accountants (a key referral source), circulating a free e-mail newsletter to 4,000 CPAs and others, and speaking throughout California to provide continuing education to accountants.

In six years, Unger has grown his firm to 10 employees and has a client base stretching from Chico, in Northern California, to San Diego in the south. He's also become a shining example of a professional services provider who runs his company like an entrepreneur. Attorneys, doctors, dentists, engineers and other professional service providers have reputations for being stodgy and unenterprising in the way they do business. But that's mainly a bad rap, according to Doug Hall, an Austin, Texas, business consultant who advises professionals on client retention. "A small law firm or engineering firm is run [in an entrepreneurial way] because there's no choice," says Hall.