There is a good post in the New Jersey Law Journal by Paramuit Mahli entitled Know Your Niche. It is a common refrain that I have blogged about a number of times, and it is something that I follow. As the author states, "knowing your target audience will help distinguish you from the competition." As she points out too many law firms "spend more money, time and energy than they’d like on marketing activities that don’t bring the desired results; there is no difference between their firm and the competition; and they’re trying to be all things to all people and getting nowhere."
Mahli goes on to say:
"Specificity is key. If you are an immigration attorney, all illegal immigrants cannot be your target group. You may, for example, focus on restaurant workers, illegal day
laborers or English speaking Europeans. If your firm does personal injury, you may narrow it down to medical injuries at birth, day laborers and accidents with public transport. When you have narrowed your target audience, you know the ins and outs of the target population, including their legal problems. Your marketing material should address their problems. When done correctly, a couple of things happen. Your marketing is no longer hit or miss, it becomes focused. You know what types of clients you like to work with, where your clients/prospects are, what they read and where they network."
As I have suggested in the past, if you are going into practice on your own, narrowcasting and developing a niche business is essential for success and peace of mind.
I was just advising someone on this today. They were thinking about re-enter the consumer bankruptcy field now that bankruptcy reform has greatly changed the practice, but they wanted to work from home and have a few quality client (meaning of course paying clients). My strong suggestion was not to compete with everyone else. My advice was to look at something like second chance bankruptcies where a bankruptcy case has already been filed and dismissed within a year. In these cases the automatic stay has to be extended past 30 days by the Court. Many attorneys do not wish to handle these second and third bankruptcies because (1) they are not set up to handle many emergency or expedited hearings; (2) courts monitor re-filings by attorneys and they are fearful of being targeted in some way; and, (3) they probably lost money on the last case.
However, were others see problems you could see opportunities. For example, courts do not think twice about those attorneys that only or mainly file refiled cases. It is not the same attorney repeatedly filing the client in bankruptcy. Every potential client will not be able to afford your upfront fees, but you are in a position to request substantially more down. (You will simply need to be upfront about this and weed out those that cannot or will not pay). It is possible to build a referral practice from bankruptcy attorneys who do not wish to handle these cases but want to offer help. A referral practice keeps fees under control. Because it is a referral of an older case, the referring attorney will likely have the inputed bankruptcy data that can be emailed to you for modification. The point is that you will not have to spend hours re-inputing this data. Because you will already have this data, you will be able to spend less time with the client. You can probably make arrangements to use the referring attorneys space to meet the client. The point is that the overhead is nil, marketing expense are small, staffing is not needed because most data has already been converted into one of two programs that can be transfered. The client has every reason to come up with more down given the risk of not undertaking action. Finally, if the automatic stay is extended there is a possibility of more money. If it is not extended, at least you have been paid for your legal time and effort. That is really all for which an attorney can hope.
The point is not to rush in and set up practices soliciting second chance bankruptcies from more established consumer bankruptcy attorneys. My point was to illustrate for you how you begin to break a practice area down into its component parts and begin to develop a niche practice that has little overhead, low marketing costs, a reasonable income, and low risk to you.
The point, further, is to show how to put the points of Paramuit Mahli's article into action.
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