“The Riches are in The Niches”
In this episode Jim and Tyson share with us their personal experiences about niching down and how it helps to grow your law practice and firm!
You can’t do more than 2 practice areas well and neither market more than 2 well. Niching down makes your marketing and processes easier, it makes you more efficient.
Referral network. You can feed it and it can feed you right back (clientwise). Other lawyers who work on other practice areas refer you and you refer them.
Fact: Look around and see the most successful lawyers in the country, you’ll notice they do 1 thing or 2. If you have 12 practice areas in your website, it may look better but your message is garbled.
Get the client to the door, then you can be the best lawyer, but to be the best lawyer you must know and master your practice areas. If you focus on many you will never be a good lawyer.
Tyson’s Tip: Slack. https://slack.com/
An app for mobile and desktop to communicate with your team. It’s free. You can share and coordinate everything.
Hacking’s Hack: A simple Hour Glass (or 50 minutes) to FOCUS.
Shut down everything that distracts you and just work for 50 minutes. Then take 10 minutes to stretch, walk, talk with your employees.
The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Partner up and maximize your firm!
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Transcript: Niching Down
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Episode Five Brother
Tyson Mutrux
What is up? Yes, made it
Jim Hacking
and you survived trial, congratulations on your victory.
Tyson Mutrux
Thank you it was a tough one. But the plan is vert was good. So I’m happy clients happy. So that’s what matters.
Jim Hacking
That is what matters. Alright. So today we’re talking about niching down about trying to find or developing particular focus or practice areas within our law practice. We both sort of have different approaches to this, we’re going to talk about sort of the value and maybe the negatives in niching, down picking that one practice area to practice areas. So I’m going to open it up to you.
Tyson Mutrux
I think we have similar perspectives on this. I don’t think I wouldn’t quite call him different, I think with two different perspectives. So you do one practice area and one practice area only. And you do it really well. I do too. And I feel like we do them? Well, I don’t personally think that you can do more than two very well. And there’s two reasons why I don’t suggest doing more than two. And that’s one you can’t do more than two very well. The other part is you can’t mark it more than two very well, I’m able to do it in a way where like, whenever a client asked me, you know, what other practice areas do you do, if I’m on a personal injury case, I tell them I only do criminal defense as a criminal defense, because I get to try a lot more cases that way. And it’s a selling point to personal injury client, because they know I’ve been in the courtroom a lot more than most personal injury attorneys, because most personal injury attorneys that just do personal injury, aren’t they don’t get the courtroom that much anymore. It’s just, that’s just a fact just doesn’t happen as much, unless you just absolutely force yourself to. So I think it’s a good selling point as a way to market. But that doesn’t mean that whenever I market that I market, hey, I do both. I think if you were to look at the subprime 90 95% of my marketing, other than looking at my main website, it’s going to be directed towards one practice area in one practice area only. And they don’t typically find out that I do other things until after the fact. So that’s my perspective on it. What’s your what’s your take.
Jim Hacking
So for me, it was always about following the need, like I went where people asked me to go, so I had a lot of friends and acquaintances in the immigrant community. And and when I opened up my law practice, my thought was that I would be sort of a general lawyer who did things for immigrants, including immigration. But as time went on, people kept asking me to do more and more immigration and less and less personal injury stuff. And so it just became pretty clear to me that where I needed to be was immigration. And so it became relatively easy for me to decide to focus. And I think there’s so many benefits to focusing on one or two practice areas that we’re going to discuss in a little bit, that it totally outweighs this quote unquote, lost opportunities of turning down that one case that you might want to take that you could probably handle. But if it takes you off your your A game and what your focus is going to be, I think that can really throw you a curveball,
Tyson Mutrux
I want you to tell your story. So I don’t know if we’ve really gotten deep into your story. How you got to niching down. I mean, yeah, you you started taking less and less of other practice areas, but tell the whole story about how you niche down to immigration only and how you started getting those clients. Cuz I think it’s a really interesting approach. And you just you just made the commitment and you did it. But tell tell people how you actually did it.
Jim Hacking
So when I graduated from law school, about a year after that, I changed religions, I converted to Islam and I became a Muslim. And I would always go to the mosque and people would ask me to help them with their civil rights things or their immigration things. And this was especially true after 911. At the time, I was a barge attorney representing shippers and insurance companies moving freight up and down the river. And when I would be at the mosque, people would ask me, Can you help me with immigration? And I would say, Well, I’m a barge attorney, and they would look at me like I was from Mars. They didn’t know what the heck a barge was. And I would try to refer them to some of the immigration attorneys in town that I knew. And those immigration attorneys always told me that they were too busy and I thought that would be a good problem to have. So you know, the story of me going out on my own is sort of a long one. But basically, my wife and I talked it over for quite some time. And even though I was a partner at that maritime law firm, after we had our second son, we bit the bullet and I went out on my own. And like I said, I thought it was gonna work for immigrants and all different kinds of practice areas. But really, it became clear pretty quickly that we’re the greatest need was immigration. And it was nice for me because I had been a litigator for 10 years or 12 years. And so to bring that litigator mindset to immigration, I think was sort of a different approach than a lot of immigration attorneys, who I mean, there are plenty that are really strong advocates. But there are also a lot that just sort of push paper and hope that USCIS and government gives out these benefits out of their good graces. And that’s not sort of the approach I take. So, for me, it was pretty easy to focus on immigration. And then, as time went on, I just developed more and more of it. And I came across a quote, or I heard something one time, where the speaker basically said that people’s attention spans are short these days that basically, when you’re an attorney, and you want people that when they think of you, they think of one word, and when they think of that one word, they think of you. And so I decided about six years ago to make that word, immigration, G immigration, baby, that’s right, immigration, I still need to register that domain name. Somebody’s got it. Actually, I need to get it from them. But yeah, I mean, that’s really it. And so I think that plays itself out in lots of different ways. You know, I think that people feel comfortable referring me immigration work, because they know, I’m not going to, quote unquote, steal their clients, I’m not competing with them, you know, if I were doing car accidents, and you were doing car accidents, then you might not want me to be as successful as, as you are. And there might be some suspicion there or whatever, about people stealing clients, I also think it makes it easier for the larger firms in town to send me immigration, because a lot of them don’t have an immigration attorney. And if I were out suing their clients, that would make it hard for them to refer to me. So I just think, for me, at least, there have been a ton of benefits to niching down and then, you know, it makes your marketing easier, it also makes your processes easier. You know, like if I had to handle a car accident case right now, and I had to do, you know, discovery and get, you know, you have systems for all that stuff, and you’re very efficient at it, because that’s what you do. And so we’re very efficient with getting a citizenship case or green card case out the door. And just to bang our head on the wall for nine months for $7,500, rear Ender, you know, that’s not going to, it’s not going to do it, I’d much rather focus and limit what we do. And I think it really frees us up to scale.
Tyson Mutrux
I think that what you just said cannot be overstated. If there’s a takeaway from today, there’s gonna be multiple takeaways, hopefully, but that’s probably number one, I think is your referral network, when it comes to just niching down to one or two practice areas, because if you do it right, all your peers know you as that immigration attorney, and I know you do it, right. But I’m talking to other people on the call or on the podcast. But you’re also if you’re doing it right, you’re also sending your other cases to other people. So there’s a reciprocity principle to this where you’re sending all your cases, and they’re gonna have this obligation is to feel this obligation to send them back to you because you’re the immigration guy, you’re the immigration guy, you’re not the criminal defense guy, you’re not the injury guy. You’re not the family law guy. You’re the immigration guy. And so any family law case goes your family law, people, any any person your case goes your personal injury people in a criminal case, because your criminal people and so there’s a huge benefit of your referral network, you can feed your referral network, and they can feed you right back. So I think that you make a great point with niche down. It totally just it helps make that stronger, that referral network stronger. Now, I’m not even talking about marketing purposes. I’m just talking about your your just your referral network, because everyone has a list of attorneys, at least they should. They’re the ones that refer them cases on a regular basis. So you want to feed them as well.
Jim Hacking
Yeah. And, you know, I just know, you’ve been focusing on immigration, how hard it is to market just to that topic, because I thought that just being an immigration attorney was niched down enough. And right now I’m struggling with whether or not I want to do all the kinds of immigration that we do. So I really have no idea how people can send out a consistent message if they’re doing seven different things when I land on a lawyer’s website, and it shows that he does, you know, wills and estates, car accidents, criminal, and immigration, I know that he’s just an immigration dabbler. And I think I think clients really pick up on that and that they, you know, and the other thing with me is I really tried to have a distinct distinctive voice within immigration. You know, I call it like, I see it, and I portray the immigration service in the way that I view it, which is that they are basically big bullies who do what they want that it’s a very arbitrary place, there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason, and that a lot of these officers are abusive, and really take advantage of people and that immigration is a zero sum game. And it’s basically a battle to get you the immigration benefit that you want. And I think that because I focused on one area that frees me up to be able to say what I want,
Tyson Mutrux
here’s a way here’s proof. The proof is this. If you look around you see the most successful the attorneys in your area or in the country, you’ll you’ll notice they do one thing, they do one thing or two things and that’s it, they’re known as being the top and whatever industry it is. And so that’s proof number one. And one of those excuses, I Get I get two main excuses, right? The first one is, well, someone comes to my website, well, that makes me look bigger. I do all these different practices, so it makes the firm look bigger. I think that’s ridiculous. Do you want to make money? Or do you want to look bigger, and if you want to make money niche down, because you’re gonna get started getting the business and those one or two practice areas, because your message is garbled, your message is garbled. Just like you said, people are going to know they pick up on that you just dabble. But if someone goes to your website, Jim, they know you do immigration and you do really well. You don’t have a garbled message. If you go to someone’s got 12 practice areas on the website. You know what they may look better. But if there’s only one attorney, they’re gonna look up and see how many attorneys are in your firm. It’s all one attorney. They know you’re not doing all those practice areas. That’s ridiculous. People are smarter than what some attorneys give them credit for. The other excuse I get as well, I’m in a smaller town. And in smaller towns, it’s more of a general practice kind of thing. Well, I mean, that’s maybe one of the better arguments I’ve heard. But still, if you’re still the guy in town, you’re the guy in town that does one or two things, all that business is gonna go to the guy in town, it’s not going to go to Joe Schmo over there that does everything. It’s just not going to because you’re the Pro. You’re the one that everyone looks to. If your marketing messages in a small town. Yeah, he may do everything. But he referred me his is criminal cases, because I do him really well, then. So you should hire me, not him. Those are the two main excuses. I hear from people. Do you hear any other excuses for not niching? Down?
Jim Hacking
Well, I think maybe that would be another topic for one of our podcasts is what if we were in a small town? How would we how would we market ourselves? Or how would we do things a little bit differently? That’s something I’d like to think about. I did want to get back to your comment about niching down. And that is one of my favorite phrases is the riches are in the niches and I really think that rings true, I think you’re right. And you know, we’re not talking about law firms that do a bunch of different things. I just think as an attorney, you have to own your practice area, you have to be the go to person, you have to be the wise person on the top of the hill, you have to be the person that takes the tough cases. And obviously on all this, you got to do good legal work. And I really think that putting aside marketing, putting aside referral, that really focusing on one practice area, I mean, just within immigration, it’s so freakin complicated, that we have to go look things up. And, you know, sometimes I’ll get these criminal defense attorneys. Literally, this has happened probably five times in the last few years. Rob, a criminal defense attorney, who has an immigration client, and they’re literally it’s 1230. And they’re like the police at one o’clock. And we’re trying to figure out if there any immigration consequences to his plea, can you help us out? And I’m like, Yeah, I’m gonna help you out. Here’s the first thing you do, you go in, and you see the judge, Judge, I can’t play out my person today, because I don’t know the immigration consequences of his police. So I can’t give them good counsel on what he’s about to do. And then we sit back, and I start over every single time looking at a criminal immigration matter. And I start from scratch. And that’s after having done it for almost a decade. And so I think that just dabbling is bad for marketing and bad for networking. But most importantly, it’s bad for your clients. If you’re not living this stuff, breathing this stuff every day, you’re just not going to have the expertise and the skill set to be able to give good representation to your clients.
Tyson Mutrux
And that’s the other part of this too, right? It’s the good representation part of it. It’s not just the marketing. And I know I always ask this question, and I speak at classes at SLU or WashU, or wherever I say, you know, what’s the most important part of running a firm? And they always say, well, it’s doing a really good job representing your clients, you know, being a good advocate. And I said, No, it’s getting the client to the door. That’s absolutely the number one thing, right, so, but it’s not everything, it’s number one things, gaining them through the door, because then you gotta go to number two, being an advocate, and you cannot be a good advocate for someone if you’ve not gotten them through the door. So that’s number one, get through the door. So that isn’t, it’s very important. But it’s, it’s not everything.
Jim Hacking
Now, here you’re talking about the survival of your business, not your skills as a lawyer, because obviously the most important thing, from an overall legal standpoint is to get your client the best possible result.
Tyson Mutrux
What I’m saying is, is that you cannot be good at your job unless you first have the client because you if you have no clients you can’t practice,
Jim Hacking
right, you can be the best lawyer in the world. And if you don’t have clients, you’re out of business.
Tyson Mutrux
Right? And so the second part of that is you have to do your job really well. And you can’t do your job really well once you have those clients unless you’re doing one or two things. I’m a firm believer that because you and I both spent an immense amount of time just getting better at our craft and how are you going to get better at your craft. If you are doing family law cases on one day the next day you’re handling a criminal case and next day you’re handling a personal injury matter. Oh you you’re taking a small business matter for this guy that you know the represent on his divorce three years ago? How are you going to know all that stuff? You don’t? I am sorry. You may be the smartest attorney in the world. You cannot be great Did anyone practice theory? If you do everything, you just absolutely cannot? You can’t convince me the other way? I mean, I don’t know if you have an argument for it, but I don’t. There’s no way, no way you can be the best attorney in that field or even a good attorney in that field. If you do everything. It’s just not possible. There’s just too much law out there to have to know.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, you know, we might want to have a guest or two on here, if someone has a contradictory view, I think that there are some sort of high end commercial litigators who feel like they can pick up a complex matter and learn not only the like they have the litigation tools skill set to, to navigate the court system, but also the intellect to dive in and pick up a whole new fact pattern and business background so that they understand the nuances of the of the case. But I just think that those people are pretty rare and that it’s pretty hard.
Tyson Mutrux
I mean, yeah, they could they just think you have to relearn it or not relearn, they’re going to have to learn it. Yeah, just picking up that file. Whenever a client comes to your office, right? They’re asking you a bunch of questions. How are you going to answer those questions when they first come into your office? Or as your answer going to be? Go look that up for you? I mean, and so that’s gonna make it less likely you’re gonna get the case anyway? Because, well, if I had to look it up, where you this other guy, who does only immigration work, answers all of my questions, and it has 150 videos online? Who are you going to hire me? You’re gonna hire this big fancy law firm. Great, that’s awesome. Wonderful, whatever, but you don’t know anything about immigration? Or am I gonna hire this guy who he eats, breathes and sleeps immigration? I’m gonna go with the immigration guy that does the latter guy, you people like you.
Jim Hacking
Okay, so I think to like, if we were meeting with new attorneys and talking to them about this, I think that one of the things about picking your niche is that there has to be a need, I don’t want to underestimate that are under emphasize that you know that there has to be a need, you could declare yourself The Social Security Disability Lawyer, the best one in town, but if nobody needs, that, it’s really not going to matter much. So I really think that following the the needs of the clients or your clientele, or your potential clientele is important.
Tyson Mutrux
I agree. And it’s interesting you say that, because we had one point. And I’ve always been a firm believer that niching, but I had hired an associate. And he had an interest in small business matters and some litigation stuff. And we had a client who was a criminal client had had some Medicaid fraud issues. And so we had recognized a niche. And so we had done a bunch of research and started targeting Medicaid fraud clients. And we actually started to build that book, there was a need there. But what we found, though, is that it was just too hard to do criminal offense, personal injury in this other niche over there, because it’s, it’s a very time intensive practice area, there’s not a whole lot of people that do them. And the cases are pretty complicated, because there’s multiple administrative agencies that you have to deal with. So there’s multiple hearings, separate hearings, and then there’s also the criminal aspect of it. And so we were following what we thought may have been a need, but it was pulling us away from our core practice. And so I agree with you, you have to follow the need. But if you do feel like it’s getting away from your other stuff, your main main practice, I think you need to jettison it. And that’s what we did. I mean, I think that someone if they just wanted to do Medicaid fraud defense, they can do a great job at it. So if anybody wants to steal that practice area, go right ahead. Because it’s not a lot of people do it. And not many people do it. Well. We even interviewed people, the state of Missouri and multiple agencies just to get their feedback on it. And not many people do it. So but that’s just kind of a sidebar. Well, I
Jim Hacking
don’t think it’s a sidebar at all, I think it’s actually a really important point. Because once you put your stake in the ground and declare that these are my practice areas, or these are the kinds of cases that we want to take, I think that you have to re make that decision over and over. And you were sort of enticed by the opportunity. With a Medicare fraud issue. I had an interesting situation lately. I have a good friend who’s an attorney and a mentor, he’s he’s getting ready to wind down, but he still has a pretty full course load. And he’s been looking for associates to sort of come in and work with them. And he’s been wanting to transition out of the practice eventually, like in two or three years. And so he has a personal injury, med mal kind of a practice a lot of employment discrimination litigation. And he and I were talking about maybe me bringing my immigration practice within his and then eventually taking over that where we become sort of a much bigger, much bulkier law firm, doing a lot of different things. And I thought about it for about 48 hours. And it just became crystal clear to me that I need to just keep doing what I’m doing.
Tyson Mutrux
There are points in your career we have learned or yet to decide whether or not you’re going to pivot and if you’re going to pivot into a different because that’s a different career move for you. That’s not just for sure. That’s not just you know, partnering with another firm and we sounds like you’re gonna be below him and immigration and then maybe Take it over. I mean, that’s just a huge shift for you. Especially whenever you’re, you’re used to come into the office whenever you want. I know you’re always there, but you can come and come and go as you please, you don’t have a boss other than Amani, obviously, who’s who’s your definite boss, she runs the ship. But that’s so you gotta learn when to pivot, I guess is my point.
Jim Hacking
I mean, I literally envisioned in my head, a big cruise ship trying to turn left or right. And all the way around. And, you know, I’ve just got so much into this now, from a marketing standpoint, and a messaging standpoint that for me, I mean, part of it even just felt disingenuous, if I were to go and do all that stuff, you know, that’s it,
Tyson Mutrux
that is a tough your, your analogy of basically turning the ship around is it’s a good one, because you’ve built all this momentum going in one direction, one practice area, even niching down that one practice area, it would be very, it would be tough. I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying it’s disingenuous, but it would definitely be tough to turn that ship around.
Jim Hacking
Another thing. And this might be a topic for another day is that I’ve had two of the largest law firms in town talk to me in the last six months about bringing my immigration practice into their law firm. And I mean, I think you and I can really spend some time maybe next week talking about, you know, what we like about being on our own and sort of where the benefit from a messaging standpoint and a lifestyle standpoint really comes from? Yeah, cuz
Tyson Mutrux
you and I both worked for larger firms, and we just were not cut out for it. It’s definitely not that we don’t have the work ethic for it. Because I think we can outwork any of those guys any day of the week, or any any week of the year, or any year of a decade, whatever it is. But it’s just a mindset thing. It’s just a different approach to things. Yeah, I think that’s a great topic for next week that we can talk about, because it’s, there’s a different lifestyle to it, for sure.
Jim Hacking
Oh, so we have our first teaser. That’s right. That’s right. My wife loves when the episode ends, and she always wants to see scenes from next week. So there you go. I am for Tyson’s tip.
Tyson Mutrux
My tip is slack. It’s an app that can you can put on your phone, you can use it on the desktop as well. It is great. We use it to communicate with our team, I use a lot of virtual assistants, and I’ve got in house people. And we you and I use Slack for this. And so it’s a way of coordinating with different people. You can share audio files, you can share notes, you can share PDFs, you can share videos, you can share websites, whatever it is. And so I have on my team, people from 12345 different countries, coordinating on a daily basis when it comes to videos, podcasts, legal matters. And I haven’t separated where people that don’t have access some people that have access to the more marketing types of things. For example, podcasts, videos, things like that website, don’t have access to the legal part of things. And so there’s it’s just a really good way of segmenting your life in general segmenting your practice, and communicating with your team. And so it’s it’s fantastic, and it’s free. And the only time you’ll have to pay is if you want them to save more than 10,000 of your messages. It’s free up to 10,000 messages, and then they started deleting them, if you want to keep those and you have to pay. But the things that we share on there usually are not things that we need to save. So we don’t pay, we have the free version. And it’s unlimited users too. So it’s hard to be
Jim Hacking
I find that most of the messages I get from you. I don’t want to say
Tyson Mutrux
no offense, David, no mistake.
Jim Hacking
All right. So hackings hack. So I’ll put a picture of this in the show notes. Mine is a simple hourglass, and my hourglass is not really an hour, it’s about 50 minutes. And what I use it for is focus. And you know, I get distracted a lot. And I don’t know if this ever happens to you, but I get in the click here, click here, click here. I go from Facebook, to Twitter, to email, to LinkedIn, to Facebook, to Twitter, to email to LinkedIn to see if any updates have come in, or any news has come in or any clients have contacted me those kinds of things. And I tend to get distracted. And so I like to take 15 minute chunks and use my hourglass to keep track of that. And I shut off all the social media shut off the email, people downstairs know not to bother me. And I just work for 15 minutes and then I take a 10 minute break, get a soda stretch, walk around, talk to the people in the office, and then I do another 50 minutes and it really helps me I certainly don’t think I have ADHD and I never been diagnosed with it. But I do chase the shiny object a lot and I and I see the value in you know, limiting my periphery and the things that are on the sides to really drill down and get things done.
Tyson Mutrux
I do use focus finders as well to fit them into focus but not as often as you do. So they I do recommend them. They’re great. They’re a great way to just get everything out on a page so you can organize it.
Jim Hacking
Alright, so that’ll wrap up this up Episode of the maximum lawyer podcast. If you like it, please give us a comment on iTunes and please check us out on Facebook at maximum lawyer.com backslash FB sounds good. Thanks, Tyson. Have a good week.
