So many law firm owners are feeling really overwhelmed, and overworked, and dissatisfied with the sheer amount of work it takes to keep the lights on at their law firm.
Why are law firm owners so busy?
I believe the main reason is because most law firm owners, and most lawyers, deliver such a wide range of different legal services to a wide range of different clients.
Here’s why that’s making you so busy:
For every legal service you offer and every type of client you serve, there are a number of processes and procedures you have to have in place.
You also have to keep yourself up to date with the law, and changes to the law, which creates a lot of chaos and extra work.
I used to be in the same situation with my law firm.
I served lots of different types of clients in lots of different areas of law. There were a whole lot of different types of legal services we offered.
As a result, I was in burnout town in my late 20s.
But hitting that breaking point made me go out and look for help.
I looked around me and saw all the other lawyers and law firm owners that were in the same situation as me.
They all served lots of different clients with lots of different legal services, and everybody was burnt out and miserable.
I went and talked to some law firm experts and some coaches, and they pretty much all told me the same thing…which was that to solve the problem, I needed to hire more people to help me with the work.
That didn’t sit right with me, because I felt like I already had so much going on in my firm, and adding more people would only fuel that chaotic fire even more.
So I started looking to other industries, particularly accounting and technology sectors, to see what was going on there and how they were dealing with this sort of thing.
Something I could see they were doing was niching.
They were focusing on solving one particular type of problem for one particular type of client.
I decided to do the same thing. I decided to niche my law firm, and I chose conveyancing.
That’s what we started focusing on, and we concentrated on helping first home buyers get into their first home.
The benefit of this was that it cut out all the complexity in my law firm.
Instead of trying to go through all these different processes and documents and procedures for all these different areas of law, we were able to focus on conveyancing, and that was it.
We could get the right technology in place, and standardise our processes and systems. All that meant we were able to train our team to a really high level so that it was like a well-oiled machine.
For me personally, I could step back from the day-to-day and actually be the CEO of my law firm.
I could be an actual leader, and focus on the projects I was really passionate about.
So I’ve broken down how to make that your reality in a five-step framework to help you niche your law firm.
Step 1: Segment your market
If you’re a lawyer who practices in a number of areas of law, and you help a range of different types of clients, the starting point is to choose one area of law.
Chances are it’ll be the area of law that you’re most passionate about.
Like I mentioned, for me that was conveyancing.
Once you’ve chosen that area, you need to segment it down.
What I mean by that is, within that area of law, there will be different types of clients that you can serve.
With conveyancing, there were all sorts of clients, from first home buyers, to other people buying and selling houses, to residential property investors, commercial property investors, property developers…the list goes on.
All those different types of clients represent segments of the market.
So apply that same segmentation to the market you serve.
Once you’ve got that list, there are some key questions you need to ask about each segment to figure out your niche.
Step 2: Are you passionate about helping this client?
Are you passionate about solving the problems this client has?
You need to really think about that, because life’s too short to fuck around helping people that you just aren’t passionate about.
I’ve heard some people say you don’t need to work in your passion, and that may be true for some people. But for me, life’s just too short to work day in, day out, helping people that I’m not passionate about helping.
So asking yourself whether you’re passionate about a particular type of client is a really important question, in my opinion.
Step 3: Do you get this type of client really great results?
Think about all those types of clients you’ve helped over the last couple of years.
Generally, do you get excellent results for these clients?
It’s really important that you’re helping a client solve a real problem in a way where you’re helping them to get excellent results.
You may not even have realised before now, but chances are there will be some types of client who you tend to get excellent results for more often than others.
Step 4: How profitable is each type of client to you?
This is important as well, because obviously you need to have profitable clients to have a profitable business.
So think about how profitable the different types of clients are.
Think about how profitable they are now, but also how profitable they could be in the future too.
If there is a type of client that you’re really passionate about helping, and you do get really good results for, but perhaps they’re not that profitable, think about how you could make the work you do for them more profitable.
You’ll probably find the answer is yes.
If you were to only focus on serving this client, are there things you could do with your pricing or with your costs so that client was more profitable?
Nine times out of 10, if you’re committed to helping this type of client, you will be able to make them more profitable.
Step 5: Do you have access to this type of client?
If you’ve already got an established firm with a mailing list or a client list, and you’ve already got lots of your ideal clients, that’s a great leg up.
It means that within a few hours, you can literally go out to a whole lot of ideal clients and talk to them, or pitch to them, or tell them about the service you offer that can help them.
But not every firm has a big client list or a mailing list, or you might just be starting out with your law firm.
So if you don’t, that’s OK.
Instead, think about whether you have access to the ideal client in that niche in other places?
Are you in some Facebook groups with a whole lot of these people? Could you join some?
Do you have a whole lot of these people in your network?
Could you partner with another person you know who has access to a whole lot of these people?
Start to think about access and how easy it will be for you to get access to a reasonably large group of people that are within your niche.
Once you do that then you can appeal to them and let them know about how you can solve the problem they have.
Speaking of online communities, you can sign up to my Savvy Lawyers Facebook group for plenty more tips and ideas on growing and scaling a modern, successful, 7-figure law firm.
