Finding your Niches and Developing your Strategy

Introduction

In law firms of all sizes, lawyers’ careers are often determined by the type of work they’re given. A young associate is assigned to a client and works on the same matter for years. A partner retires and their book of business is handed over to a younger lawyer. An industry becomes active, and lawyers in slower practices are encouraged to redo in the higher demand area. In all, many careers unfold more by default than design, resulting in lawyers who are unfulfilled and lack the motivation to enthusiastically build a great practice. The question you must answer is: do you truly want the practice you already have? And if your answer is no, what are you willing to do to change it?

Over the years, the legal industry have shown that those with the greatest passion, who love to meet new clients and hustle to get more work, are very often those who truly enjoy the type of work they’re doing. To unleash this energy, however, as a lawyer, you must take proactive control over your career. You must be clear about — the type of work you want to do, articulate the type of clients you want to work with, and define the type of firm that can best support them on your journey.

Why Strategy is Important?

In all, you must develop a plan and, more importantly, consistently implement that plan. This article will highlight some best practices for refining your thinking around developing a suitable plan for the right growth of your law practice.

Defining and differentiating yourself: Clients can choose between many lawyers. The big question here is — Why should they select you over someone else? What distinguishes you in a way that makes you stand out from the crowd?

One characteristic is your ‘level of engagement’. People generally want to work with others who are passionate about what they do. Think about it — would you rather hire a professional who is highly motivated and eager to do the work, or one who is virtually sleepwalking through their day? While the world may not be so black and white, experienced buyers of legal services can tell the difference.

Clients can feel the passion you have for your business. You can’t fake that energy and excitement!! If you have it, clients see it immediately and find it very enticing.

Lawyers are smart, hard-working, they look after their clients. But as a general rule, as they may say, they aren’t having fun. Many don’t enjoy the practice of law and have lost their energy. They need to step back and ask — What do I like doing? What case did I enjoy handling and why? What industries am I interested in that can be built into my legal practice? What knowledge do I have that other lawyers don’t possess? What hobbies, special interests, and lifetime experiences do I have – what job did I do before law school?

Try thinking over and answering the above questions; this will eventually help you find out — how you are different from your competitors in the market and what is your unique selling point. And will help you market you better in the market!

This applies equally to solo practitioners, law firms and lawyers.

Have balanced approach! Can a lawyer build an entire practice solely around their personal interests? For some, the answer is yes, but for many others, their interests, strengths, and experiences may represent just a portion of your practice. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. A lot of lawyers don’t want that full-on specialization —- they find it demotivating, and they prefer the intellectual challenge that comes with variety. Remember, you don’t have to focus on a single practice; you’re just sharpening your marketing attention and energy on certain people or groups for efficiency. Perhaps specialize a portion of your practice in areas you’re comfortable with. To get a feel for where you should spend your limited marketing time, again, try answering these questions — What do I love to do? What kind of people do I like to be around? How can I spend more time doing what I like?

Narrow your focus: In today’s world, lawyers are competing for a limited amount of high quality business. To stand out from the crowd, you need a laser approach to sell your services. By concentrating your business development energy toward a clearly defined audience, you can build deeper and stronger relationships and cut through the clutter of other lawyers who are flailing around trying to capture their attention. While some may need to reinvent themselves, most others can build on their strengths, utilizing the resources they already possess to enhance their opportunities. One approach is to identify where the bulk of your revenue comes from – this may be a particular area of law, an industry, or a specific set of referrers – and target those sources.

The fundamental problem lawyers have with business development is they don’t know who they are selling their services to. The ways, methods and approach to this are limited. Sometimes, you may have tried to sell your services to anyone you may happen to bump into wherever you happen to go. There’s a little structure or strategy behind it, thus it becomes paralyzing and often overwhelming, at times.

How to Strategize?

Trying to be all things to all people hinders your ability to get noticed and remembered, remember! The mantra is to ‘stand-out’. Have a niche! — This will allow you to focus on a more manageable portion of the market to display your skills in places where you are most likely to be noticed. You need to target and nurture a solid network of hundreds of people if you want to become an effective rainmaker!

Building a large personal network takes a significant commitment of time and energy. Given your limited capacity for both, you can’t afford to engage in a time-consuming and wasteful scattered approach.

Build on your strengths: There is no “one size fits all“ approach to building a law practice. Different personality styles lend themselves to using different techniques, so it’s important to build on your strengths when reaching out to the targeted market. In the early part of a lawyer’s career, they go through a good deal of training to find approaches to suit their individual strengths. But it is sometimes difficult to find out what exactly are your strengths. The top practitioners in the industry talk about how they found approaches that fit their strengths; they all have very different tactics and yet are equally successful. Collating all their approaches and strengths, the brands and qualities  that make most successful lawyers stand out can be categorized in these:

• Quality of work;
• Client service;
• Industry and expertise;
• Business acumen; and
• Cost-effectiveness and value.

Try to build on your personal strengths aligning with the above points to develop your law practice.

Case Studies

Let us better understand this with some case studies:

1. Service: A lawyer on a panel was a master at client service. He deeply understood the mind of the client. He delivers not so fancy like most lawyers or caters vide variety of services, but was quick, approachable and maintains good relations with his clients — assuring a 100% client satisfaction index! Some clients he has are with him fore more than 15 years. Consistently! Now, ‘client service’ is absolutely his niche and understandable why clients followed him!
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2. Public speaking: There’s a lawyer who is absolutely the best public speaker. He’s a partner of a firm, heading the tax practice; he speaks at tax conferences all around the world. He’s nationally and internationally recognized, and because he has this ability to connect with people through public speaking, he’s been extraordinarily successful.
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3. Business acumen: There is an individual who has been an attorney for many years, but he spent about five years in the business world, first as a general counsel and second as head of corporate development. He has an excellent capacity for speaking about business issues – not just as they relate to legal, but business issues in general. The time he spent in the boardroom allows him to give invaluable expert advice to his clients. An attorney who knows business adds tremendous value to a client in a way most others can’t. Having a good understanding of a business side is his niche.‍
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4. Writing and media relations: Another way to engage with prospective clients and referral sources is through writing and media relations. A lawyer who knows and works with journalists and who has a writing style that is different from most other lawyers. The attorney is particularly knowledgeable in his area of expertise, which happens to be employment, but the fact that he has an affinity for writing – and the interest in pursuing it – is what separated him from the pack.

Unless you have something outstanding to say, you will just be seen (or not seen at all) as “yet another lawyer”. According to various studies done by the experts, you need to meet people seven or more times before they are likely to consider giving you their business.

It’s just too hard to do that if those people don’t go to the same places and do the same things. Without some sort of strategy to target the right group of people on a regular, ongoing basis, your efforts will be extremely inefficient. By choosing a niche, you can zero in on the right people, send consistent messages over time, be seen as an expert, and thus be remembered when clients have those issues. By focusing on one or a few niches, you can better “own” that legal space in a prospect’s mind.

While you try to find out where you stand out from your competitors, I’ll try to bring to you an action plan listing the steps to be followed, in my next article.

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Originally posted on September 14, 2022 on LinkedIn.

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