For The Atlantic’s series of interviews with American workers, I spoke with Knight, Morris, and Reddick about what it was like building a law firm, why they pursued entrepreneurship, and the uniqueness of a law firm headed by three black women. The transcript that follows has been lightly edited.

Adrienne Green: How did the three of you get to know each other?

Keli Knight: Yondi and I knew each other through a mutual friend. We probably clicked because she was in law school, and I was a lawyer. Jessica and Yondi knew each other from undergrad: Yondi went to Spelman, and Jessica did an exchange program for a year there. They ended up reconnecting when Jessica moved to Chicago from Washington D.C. to go to law school. When Yondi and I ended up having a conversation about starting the firm, she decided to bring Jessica along to our meeting because they had been having similar conversations about entrepreneurship. We just hit it off from there.

Green: I've read that your business started with a single tweet. Can you tell me the story?

Yondi Morris: At the time, I was working at a law firm doing contract work. That meant that I was in a firm, but there was no real upward mobility. I would move from firm to firm doing document-review work. I was working for one of the big firms here in the city, and I just didn't love what I was doing, or enjoy the culture. At the conclusion of a meeting where there were lots of partners, associates, and contract attorneys in the room, one of the partners said to the whole group of us: “Okay slaves, get back to work.” I was saddened by his statement but more so by the culture of the firm, where you could call people slaves and it not be jarring to everyone. I was one of the only people of color in the room, and it impacted me in a pretty severe way.

That night I came home and I tweeted, “I need to start my own law firm.” Keli was on Twitter at the same time. She re-tweeted me and said, “Well, let's meet to discuss that.” I wasn't really that serious. I was just venting my frustrations. Jessica and I used to gchat all day long, talking about wanting to be entrepreneurs. After Keli and I decided to meet, I quickly gchatted Jessica and said, “I know this girl named Keli, she's a lawyer and she's interested in starting her own firm. Can we all sit down and talk about it?” Jessica and Keli had never met before, but when the three of us sat down at Starbucks it was as if we had been having this conversation for a really long time.

Green: Keli, what made you want to reply to the tweet?

Knight: I had wanted to be a lawyer my whole life, but once I actually got into actually practicing—I wasn't sure that it was really for me. I had been doing pretty well, and I had taken the place of a different attorney who was an older black man. I was being told that I was doing his job better. But then, I found out that I was getting paid substantially less than he was. I ended up leaving and going to a small real-estate firm, where I was on the partner track. When a shift in the market took place, they weren't able to offer me the same track. I just made the decision that I had to venture out on my own. When Yondi tweeted, it came to me that she was probably what I needed in order to move to a higher place in practicing.

Green: After the initial meeting, how did you set up the business from there?

Jessica Reddick: We actually planned for a whole year prior to officially hanging out our shingle. We're young, black, females—obviously minorities in our field, particularly law-firm owners. We wanted to be taken seriously; we wanted to be able to really compete with our counterparts. We literally met with everyone from our network—web designers, marketing and branding people, mentors of ours who had gone on to create large practices on their own—so that when we did step out, we were representing ourselves in the best way possible. Obviously there was a learning curve, because that's just part of entrepreneurship, but we wanted to be as prepared as possible. So many small businesses collapse in the first 18 months, and we didn't want to fall into that statistic.