One of the absolute worst things that I think that people can do when they are leaving a comfortable job at another law firm and they’re making an entrepreneurial move is to practice door law. Anybody that walks in the door, I’m going to take on as a client. And I think that in the early going, as you’re pushing your way through that first dip that’s part of a bigger dip that you’ve got to push your way through if you’re going to be successful, if you’re like me, you’re the breadwinner, you’ve got all these expenses on the personal side, you don’t have any big financial backing, there’s no huge amount of money saved. You’re only bringing two clients with you from the big law firm. There’s really the temptation that the phone rings, somebody needs some legal services and it is not what you do, but what the heck?

I can litigate anything. I’ve been a litigator for 20 years, no problem. I think that is absolutely wrong. In my former life as a big firm lawyer, I was a design and construction attorney. I helped a very certain kind of client do a very certain kind of thing. And at the beginning when I launched my practice in 2019, it was very tempting for me to stray out of that zone of familiarity because I wanted to take on work and I wanted to survive. But you need to niche down or die. If you are going to be a business to business lawyer and there is a certain area of, I don’t want to say expertise because that’s kind of a dirty word in legal marketing circles, but you’ve been doing something specific for a long period of time. You absolutely need to not fall prey to the trap of taking on other kinds of work in the early going.

It is going to be essential after you get through that first dip and you’ve survived and you are entering into the world and you are beginning the second phase of your marketing to not be crashing into the marketplace with a different message than what you started with. You got to come out of the gate, you got to know who you are targeting and you got to get the right kind of attention at the moment when you’re going to have maximum goodwill. And when you come out of the gate and you say that I’ve left the big law firm and I’m on my own, there is going to be all this positive attention. Whatever your first LinkedIn post is going to be, it’s going to be really important. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about how to do it right and how to do it wrong.

And there are different seasons for the way that you digitally market. There’s different seasons for how much content or time you have to put into a website and what you need to do to launch. But the one thing that I can tell you for sure in my experience is that I knew who the clients were that I wanted. I knew what kind of work that I wanted to do. It was exactly the same kind of work that I’d been doing at the large law firm. And you absolutely need to get the right kind of attention at scale out of the gate. You need to niche down, you need to hit the marketplace with exactly the same message or a very similar message to the one that you’re going to be bringing to market at a higher level of sophistication when you’re six months in and you’ve got more ability to invest in marketing.

And now the videos that I shot eight years ago are evergreen. They are exactly the same message that I’m taking to the market right now. And I can’t tell you how important that is. And so for myriad reasons having to do with branding and your positioning in the marketplace and what you want to do to try to stay top of mind to people, there has to be a level of consistency. And so you must niche down or die. And however far that you have niched down, you probably need to niche down further. As a matter of fact, I spent a lot of the first year of my practice thinking that being a design and construction attorney that only helps people build buildings. And I mean, let me tell you, I’m not a real estate lawyer because it would be a mistake for me to do real estate law, even though I could probably do it.

I wanted to niche down further and I wanted to scream that I do the thing that you need to a certain kind of client for that first six months or year. I even thought that my positioning was too broad. I thought I might need to just hit the market and say that I only do this specific kind of work for architects. Because at the time, first of all, I think I probably should have been an architect instead of a lawyer and I find it to be fascinating and architects are among my favorite clients. And I really want to bed for dozens of nights wrestling with like, am I too broadly positioned to just say that I help people build buildings? Even though I’ve shed all the other real estate stuff that’s adjacent, I was like, do I need to just say one kind of client?

And so where you’re going to really run into this problem, I think is if you are like just a general corporate attorney and you’ve got a very broad spectrum of corporate ability, I think you got to pick some lane within that and you’ve got to say, “This is what I do. And boy, let me tell you, if you are a general litigator, if you’re a trial lawyer and you’ve got the mentality that like I could try any case, you could bring me any kind of a business dispute and I can handle it. ” I think that’s great. And I don’t think that it’s necessarily wrong for you to lean into that in certain ways. However, I would encourage you for reasons that are relevant in the very first part of your firm, the very first part of the dip and relevant in the second year and relevant in the fifth year and relevant in the second decade for you to say that, okay, I can do all this kind of work, but I am particularly experienced at this particular thing.

Because when you get into trying to position yourself in the market and to brand yourself in the market, you’ve got to differentiate yourself from the competition. You’ve got to be able to get the right kind of attention. And general litigators are a dime a dozen. If you are thinking that you’re going to hit the market and say, “I’m a trial lawyer. I could try anything fantastic. You know what you’re going to get? ” You’re going to get very little attention on the internet because people are not throwing, “I need a general litigator into Google.” And if they do, they’re going to find you on page 1000 or you’re going to be invisible in a AI LLM type world. And so the more that you can present a perspective, the more that you can enter the market, not just with a certain kinds of client and a certain kind of service, but to say that even within that niche, this is what I do.

That is really important. It’s not to say that you can’t take on work that’s a little bit outside of that. I do that all the time, but you don’t want to practice DORA law. You’re going to have to learn to say no, particularly in the early days. And I can tell you that the best thing that I ever did in the first six months of my practice was to say, “I’m not going to get distracted doing work that isn’t exactly what I want to do. I’m going to lean into the marketing really hard for what I want, even though it might mean that I won’t have a client this week, but I’m going to have one next month.” And so you got to niche down or die and you have to successfully target the right kinds of leads, or I think that you’re really going to suffer a dozen negative consequences that are likely to play out over not just the first few months, but into several years into your practice.

I don’t know any firms, I don’t know any lawyers that left the employee of other lawyers. I don’t know any other business to business lawyers who have done something like what I’ve done that are a wandering generality of like, “Oh, I’m a litigator that had any success at all. ” Niching down and having a consistent message, a consistent branding, entering the marketplace, targeting a very specific kind of work for specific kind of clients is essential for anyone thinking about making an entrepreneurial movement all like the one that I did when I left the large law firm without a lot of clients, but with fairly depth experience, a good depth of experience within a certain lane.