Lawyer Niche Focus Builds Expertise, Value Over Price

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Summary

• A lawyer’s narrow practice focus builds deeper expertise and client confidence. Specializing in a defined problem set lets you see patterns, anticipate issues, and compete on value—not price.
• Generalist positioning as a lawyer hurts business development, making you indistinguishable, forcing price competition, and preventing a clear target-client strategy.
• A niche law practice focus creates a simple, repeatable marketing message. “This is who we are/what we do” attracts the right clients, makes referrals easier, and legitimizes turning down misfit work.

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Test Number 1

Here’s a test for your law firm business development strategy. If your lawyer bio page includes any variation of the phrase “extensive experience in a broad range of practices,” you’re doing something wrong. That probably seems counterintuitive. After all, you want to maximize the types of matters you could be hired to handle, so why limit yourself right off the bat by focusing on a specific practice, a specific type of client, or a specific industry?

Test Number 2

Now, ask yourself another question. Is business development really difficult for your practice? Do you get work in haphazard or seemingly random fashion; are you constantly competing on price, even for long-time or institutional clients (especially for those); and do you have difficulty setting a strategy for getting clients in the first place?

Are You a Generalist?

If this describes your practice’s business development, blame your “extensive experience.” No, not the fact that you have a lot of experience as a lawyer—that’s obviously good. The real culprit is the fact that you are positioning yourself as a generalist in a world that wants specialized expertise. Clients hire lawyers to bring more than just proficiency to their matters: That’s necessary, but not sufficient. They’re hiring you to solve their problems. Doing that effectively means you have to focus your practice so you know a lot about their problems.

There was a time when we positioned our firm as generalists. We wanted to be considered for as many types of work as possible and not foreclose any opportunities. Consumer finance, premises liability, employment, insurance—you name it. We’d do it all. We positioned ourselves as uniquely qualified lawyers for any type of matter. That made business development much harder than it had to be.

It turns out that there are a lot of uniquely qualified lawyers for any type of matter. By being generalists, we had positioned ourselves as just like everyone else. Potential clients compared us against other lawyers using the only true differentiator that we presented: price. A strategy for business development was elusive. Since we didn’t have a substantive focus, or an industry focus, it was difficult to identify an ideal client, or even a target client. Since we competed on price, every year the practice became less profitable as costs increased, but our ability to increase our fees stagnated.

Our Path to a Focused Practice

These problems persisted for the early phase of our firm. After analyzing these issues in those early days, many years ago we decided to take a very different approach. We set out to focus our practice exclusively on just one part of our practice: advising lawyers on legal ethics issues and business issues. We significantly narrowed our focus, reduced our infrastructure, and spent our time not on random business development, but on continuing to develop our expertise, engaging in thought leadership that interested us—and that we had a unique perspective on—and getting to know our clients, and their businesses, better.

Today, we focus our firm’s practice solely on being business and legal ethics lawyers for law firms, in-house legal departments, and law-related businesses. We develop and draft law firm partnership agreements and other governance documents and advise on law firm mergers and acquisitions, compensation planning, succession planning, partner departures, legal ethics, and law-related business issues. Our firm is a business and legal ethics advisory practice for lawyers and law firms.

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The Many Benefits, and Some Burdens, of a Niche Practice

We focus our practice by substance (business and legal ethics advisors) and by industry (law firms, lawyers, in-house counsel, and law-related businesses). Focusing your practice in this way—by what you do and for whom—is likely to unlock tremendous value in your practice and in your approach to your work for three main reasons.

First, when you focus on a particular area of practice, and for a particular type of client, you develop much deeper expertise on the client’s perspective, the types of problems they face (or may face), and the options available to solve them. We have many law firm and lawyer clients, and our work for them has led us to insights that we never would have had if we represented law firms or lawyers only sporadically. We can see the patterns in the issues our clients present, which helps us solve client problems and anticipate issues before they become problems.

Second, potential clients—people who need the particular type of expertise and advice you provide—will have an easier time finding you and will feel much more comfortable that their problem is in safe hands. If you had a heart problem, would you feel more comfortable going to a general practice doctor or to a heart specialist? Same thing here: Since you focus your practice on their type of problems, they will feel assured that you have handled and solved their issues successfully many times before. When the solution to a problem is what you are offering, price becomes less of a concern because the client’s focus is on the value that you can provide.

Third, focusing your practice gives you an inherent business development message: This is who we are; this is what we do; and we can do it for you. You don’t spend a lot of time guessing at who your clients would be or what types of problems they might have. When you present solutions for a known audience, the people with those problems will find you. Your business development strategy then becomes continuing to develop and refine your expertise and your approach and being open to letting your practice evolve as your clients’ needs evolve.

The obvious downside of this approach is that you will have to turn down some work that doesn’t fit your practice focus. We don’t see that as much of a downside. And since potential clients seek you out for your specific expertise, it’s relatively rare that they’ll ask you to do something that has no relationship to that focus. If that happens, refer them to colleagues who handle that type of work. Those colleagues will refer clients to back you who need what you do. Just like that, a business network is born.

What Kind of Lawyer Are You?

When you introduce yourself to someone you have never met, and they find out you’re a lawyer, the next question is reliable: What kind of lawyer are you? If your answer to that is “any kind,” then business development is probably going to be a challenge for you because that doesn’t convey any meaningful information. If you focus your practice on a niche and answer instead that you do a very specific type of thing for a very specific type of client, solving very specific types of problems that those clients have, then business development is much more likely to just flow.

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Endnotes

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Author

Daniel J. O'Rielly

O'Rielly & Roche LLP

Daniel O'Rielly is a business and legal ethics lawyer for California law firms. His practice focuses on counseling and advising firms on strategic formation and structure, partnership agreements, shareholder agreements,...

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Author

Daniel J. O'Rielly

O'Rielly & Roche LLP

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