FOCUS your marketing for faster client-development success.

[Sample excerpt from page 46:] Your fourth year of practice is the time to start focusing your efforts more narrowly, particularly toward an industry group or subspecialty practice niche.

Here’s the larger point: When the next downturn hits, you don’t want to be just another smart and skilled but generic and easily replaced generalist. You want to offer more, a skill or expertise that your firm can’t find equally in every other associate in your class.

You also become much easier for others to cross-sell if you have a unique and memorable expertise that the partners can mention in conversations with prospects.

“You manufacture bicycles? [Or build prisons, or license offshore oil-rig technology, or do energy litigation in Angola, or…?] One of our corporate associates has expertise in that area!”

For new grads who are starting their own solo practice, it’ll be some time before clients will hire you for your legal acumen. But if you’re the lawyer who knows their industry best, you’ll have an advantage over those who may have superior technical skills but don’t offer your industry insight.

The fastest way for a newer lawyer to gain client-development traction is to find that specialty niche. Use these unique attributes of your life to your advantage.

For example, I know more about Industrial Tire Manufacturing than just about any lawyer in the world — it’s my family business. My father and grandfather designed and built tires for heavy equipment, like underground mining crawlers, loaders, etc.

Growing up, typical dinner conversation included new tire sizes and the composition of tire fill. As a child, I played with toy forklifts and vulcanized rubber at my fifth-grade science fair. I worked in the filthy factory in high school; I know what it’s like to walk through a sticky cloud of carbon black dust. I’ve flown in the Goodyear blimp (it was amazing!).

That is, I take for granted an insider’s nuanced understanding of this narrow little industry. But practicing as a litigation associate it never occurred to me that some category of companies would have found that unique insight to be valuable. Instead of unsuccessfully marketing “general commercial litigation to Chicago-area businesses,” I should have been broadcasting my tire-industry expertise to companies like Goodyear, John Deere, Caterpillar, the rubber importers, chemical manufacturers, and other satellite industries that support or relate to it.

They would have valued having a lawyer who knew their industry as well as they did. But it simply never occurred to me that I possessed any uniquely useful information. Now I know better.

It’s not enough to specialize in the obvious industry sectors like real estate, health care, construction, financial services, or insurance — they are simply too broad. You must be more precise and find a sub-niche within them (e.g., FCA litigator in health care in Texas, D&O liability insurance in Louisiana).

You will also find opportunities in smaller, more defined and obscure areas where you have existing experience, interest, or contacts. Think in terms of focusing on Pest Control rather than on Banking. Not Transportation Law but Transportation of Infectious Biological Material. See the video at: goo.gl/3GWNQa.

Consider segmenting it further by the particular type of company or the size of the matter. The answer might not be obvious now; just start looking for it and recognize it when it comes along. It takes at least a few years to build this, so start being proactive in this regard beginning around your fourth year.

- "The Ultimate Law Firm Associate’s Marketing Checklist" (4th Ed., 2024, page 46) SEE: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D6TGH65H

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