Profession: Lawyer Entrepreneur – Adapt your offer to demand - #2
You have decided to settle down and wish to become a recognized or even recognized lawyer in your chosen field. As explained previously, you have every interest in devoting yourself to one of the branches of law that best suits you.
Unfortunately, to successfully develop your business, it is not enough to practice the law you love. There still needs to be sufficient demand to sustain you. A brilliant salesman may be able to sell ice cream to eskimos, but if there is no market an entrepreneur will have difficulty surviving. The main factor in the failure of start-ups is the absence of a market (in 42% of cases, according to a CB insight study).
So, as a lawyer-entrepreneur, you too must ask yourself the question of the market. That is to say whether your skills can meet clearly identified needs. If you confirm that there is a market large enough to support you, you will then need to estimate your ability to emerge in this market.
Identify the needs and the number of potential requests in your sector and catchment area
No need to convince yourself of the development of certain branches of law and the phenomenon of judicialization of society.
There are simple market sizing techniques that you can adapt to any branch of law. Thus, it is easy to estimate certain personal law needs. You don't need to look at the statistics to realize that the demand for a family law lawyer is there. If you wish, you can define the family law market (number of potential recourses to a lawyer) by consulting public data such as the number of births, divorces, etc. A lawyer specializing in the defense of victims of car accidents. the road will also be able to quickly identify the number of annual accidents and potential victims.
The work of the lawyer being far from being dematerialized, it is important to estimate your market based on your geographic area and plan to adapt your offer to your environment.
Indeed, most of the time, the location of your firm will matter a lot: a business law lawyer based outside a large metropolis will logically not meet the clientele to which he aspires. On the other hand, if your desire is to practice personal law, an installation in a judicial desert will allow you to easily attract local clients.
If your main location does not allow you to capture a large enough market, opening a secondary firm in a strategic location may prove wise: close to the coast in maritime law, in a border region in international/European law, etc.
An offer nor too wide
To quickly become comfortable and emerge in the medium/long term, it is important to quickly dedicate yourself to a branch of law. Indeed, the general lawyer risks suffering from his clients and having to reinvent the wheel for each case.
In my opinion, practicing more than 3 very different areas (such as: family, criminal, work) risks blending into the mass of lawyers in your bar. But above all this will not allow you to acquire the reflexes necessary for efficient processing of files. Although it is customary to regularly consult a general practitioner who will refer you to a specialist, you will not be able to build up a clientele ready to consult you (paid) for every legal question. At best, you risk competing in vain for your clients' legal assistance.
I encourage you to define your offer based on the 26 specialties established by the national bar council can be judicious and not too complicated.
... nor too restricted
While it is important to offer a relatively limited offer so that it is clear, you should not lock yourself into too narrow a practice of law, especially at the beginning.
If you start without a clientele, you will probably find it difficult to survive by focusing on only one subject. This risks either not meeting a sufficiently large audience or due to a lack of need (e.g.: rights of in-laws, joint ownership disputes, assistance to defendants of Georgian nationality, etc.) or, in niche areas, due to a lack of notoriety. of the cabinet. In the latter case, an offer that is too limiting appears incompatible with a small, beginner structure, with niche firms having been able to prosper thanks to sufficient experience (e.g.: VAT, employee savings, agricultural companies, etc.).
Once your offer has been sufficiently defined, the challenge is to disseminate it to your potential customers. In other words, communicate well! This will be the subject of my next article.
About the author
Presentation and introduction by Maître Chloé Schmidt-Sarels.
Having graduated from CAPA in 2012, I did not at all want to practice as a lawyer. So I started my professional career as legal manager of a start-up.
After a very enriching experience, a need for autonomy and a certain nostalgia for public law led me to set up as a liberal lawyer.
