The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

Law firms have a particularly hard time with lead intake.  It costs time and money to acquire leads in the first place, to the point where it’s devastating to whiff on those leads, once you have a chance to convert them.  Even when  law firms effectively engage  leads  and are responsive in contacting them back, oftentimes they don’t say the right thing, and therefore fail in transitioning the lead to a client.   One of the chief reasons for that is that lawyers are unwilling to respond to what clients most want to know.   Because clients choose lawyers based not only on their general expertise, but also based on their specific expertise in particular niche practice areas, they want to  know more about the legal process that effects their claim.   Only, lawyers  are reticent to talk with leads about the legal process for a couple of reasons: (1) they’re worried about overstepping ethical bounds; and, (2) they’ve ...

When most lawyers think about niche practice, their notion is that of a practice limited to one, or a few, practice areas.   And, that’s one of the chief reasons that attorneys approach the notion of a niche practice with s ome combination of trepidation and dread.  Because selling out on one or a few practice areas brings with it risk.   It could work out famously -- or, not so much -- which would necessitate a shift in the entire practice to resolve.  Of course, that’s not the only way to get niched.   If you work in a community with comparatively few lawyers -- not necessarily a ‘rural’ practice. just a practice operating as the sole, or one of a few providers in, a local community -- you can effectively create a niche as ‘the local attorney’.  Now, the nature of that locality  is almost entirely dependent on whether you can generate enough clients from it to support a practice.  Even so, the options are perhaps wider than...