Caveat: If you are not interested in building your practice, increasing your client base, or growing professionally, stop listening, reading, or following this! However, if you are looking to evolve your practice listen up! Realize this – you cannot be all things to all people! Sure, becoming a practice-area expert results in more legal matters, but as competition increases in each of these areas, you need to do more. How? Easy, get niche-picky! Here’s what this is all about and why you should move away from being the jack of all trades attorney…
As the American Bar Association so aptly points out, it’s no secret that the legal marketplace is in a hot mess of a state. The combination of tight-fisted consumers, an oversupply of lawyers, and increased competition from non-lawyers has created the perfect storm in the legal market. In this competitive environment, lawyers must distinguish themselves from the competition in order to claim an authority-building piece of the pie. One way to do this: Build a niche law practice.
Ellen Trachman (of Trachman Law Center, LLC) refers to herself as an “ART’ lawyer (Assisted Reproductive Technology – or as she puts it “Making Babies Law”). In her article Find Your Niche. Then Get Rich she describes the empty feeling of being left with only two options of practice when one of her professors asked everyone in their first day of IL to raise their hands if they planned to go into corporate law. Some people raised their hands, and then put them down. Then the professor asked to if students planned to go into litigation. Okay, those are two options, she thought. What will the next question be about? Oh wait, there was no next question. The professor left them only those two.
What about everyone else? There had to be more options. Well, good news. The variety of legal practices has exploded like never before, and many niche specialties are on the rise. The big trick is figuring out where your passions intersect with a market need. Some rare attorneys are successful at doing this while they stick around in Biglaw, keeping the best of both worlds. But most other attorneys strike out on their own, and start getting niche-picky (eventually).
Niche marketing or ‘power niching’ as I’ve also heard it referred to as – is the opposite of mass marketing – which positions you to speak in the most relevant way with your ideal audience of prospective clients. Other benefits including cost efficiency (so you can focus your resources on a specific group/industry), expert branding (you become the industry expert), level playing field (as an expert in a particular area, whether you are part of an Am Law 100 firm or solo practitioner, many clients aren’t too concerned about size as long as you knowledgeable on issues they need addressed in their lives or business.
Some of the most successful lawyers I’ve had the pleasure of working with and/or knowing, have had very specific niches including the combination of estate planning and safeguards preventing unscrupulous persons from defrauding seniors, technology law with a focus on intellectual property, property portfolio management, marijuana law illegal under federal law and conflicting state laws is creating a huge need for niche lawyers, real estate lawyers specializing in selling houses for people with physical challenges, or your ‘niche’ can simply be an different way of handling the case.
Last year, 2017, we saw a big jump into non traditional niche practices including aviation law, equine law, fashion law (yes, really, the Chair of Fox Rothschild’s Fashion Law Group combines intellectual property with unique issues related to fashion licensing, trademark, copyright, and “fashion litigation” – talk about getting niche-picky!)
Legal clients prefer specialists, and the comfort of trusting that their lawyer is really great at something. If you think about it, a firm that promotes itself as a jack of all trades will not do well convincing prospective clients they are the best law firm to handle their specific case. This is possibly a clients only chance to resolve their issue – they want the best.
Choosing a specialty does not necessarily mean you turn down other cases, but it does mean positioning yourself to set yourself apart from your peers. And, commit to this niche so your messaging, visuals, and outreach are all aligned with this area of expertise. Your story, your branding, should align to speak to your ideal client – this is what getting niche-picky is all about. Not about you.
After determining that your proposed niche is profitable and that there is a demand for these particular services, the next phase will include developing a comprehensive law firm niche marketing strategy. You will need to find a way to show how your particular approach is unique, locate your target demographic, reach out to them, and figure out a messaging plan that shares why they should hire you.
More work than setting up a billboard? Yep. But the return on this effort is serving much more qualified clients. Pretty easy, right? Well, maybe not if are busy lawyering, managing a practice and handling your own docket of cases. This may be where you want to delegate the work to law firm marketing consultant – who is an expert in their area of service.
Niche marketing is the exact opposite of marketing yourself a jack of all trades general practitioner. Once you narrow down your focus and practice area, your law firm and what you have to offer will stand out in what I often refer to as a “vast sea of sameness”
Quite simply – NICHE MARKETING BRINGS LAWYERS MORE QUALIFIED AND BETTER CLIENTS!