Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Riches in Niches | Behind the Scenes at a GLM Mastermind pt. 1
This episode explores the profound impact of niche branding in the legal profession, highlighting how specialization enables attorneys to attract ideal clients and maximize marketing effectiveness. By sharing practical strategies, actionable insights, and real-world examples, we illustrate how narrowing focus can lead to greater satisfaction and success in law practice.
• Importance of niche branding for law firms
• Examples of successful niche practice areas
• Higher ROI on advertising through targeted strategies
• Benefits of developing a strong referral network
• Identifying and developing personal interests into a niche
• Crafting a consistent brand message across platforms
• Impact of storytelling in marketing
• Actionable steps to facilitate niche focus in law firms
• Encouragement to participate in Mastermind Group for further growth
____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
Hello and welcome to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design. I'm your host, brian Glass. I run a car crash practice in Northern Virginia, so if you have a referral for me I would love to handle it. And our second business is a business called Great Legal Marketing, which is a consulting, coaching and mastermind program for owners of solo and small law firms. And the next couple of episodes what I'm going to be doing is going over some themes that have come up in our Hero Mastermind group during our January meeting. So I don't talk an awful lot about our mastermind groups on these podcasts, but I want to share with you what we do. So the hero group generally is firms that are doing less than a million dollars in revenue. Generally, we're talking about marketing and sales issues in that group, because your largest problem if you're doing less than a million dollars in revenue is your current inability to market and sell more than a million dollars of legal services per year Above the million dollar threshold. We start talking about how to run a better business, how to attract better quality of employees, better quality of clients, so that you can elevate and truly do work that's only in your zone of genius, below a million, like we've got to teach you marketing and sales so that you can generate enough revenue to support the kind of business where you can only do the things that are in your zone of genius.
Speaker 0:And our format is this we have about 15 member firms and at any given quarterly mastermind, 12 or 13 are able to attend. Everybody has conflicts, maybe once a year where you're not able to get there. So 12 or 13 firms show up in our office once a quarter and we host a two get there. So 12 or 13 firms show up in our office once a quarter and we host a two-day event. We usually bring in a guest speaker and then the other part of what we do is what we call hot seats, so 30 or 45 minutes of you in front of the room explaining your problems to the group, problems and opportunities. So the first thing we ask you to do share a resource, share something that's working well for you. Usually that ends up being a book or a podcast or a vendor, and we've started to scrape all of those and we're compiling the list of the things that get most recommended.
Speaker 0:But after that you're in this group and you're paying money to be in this group so that you can get your problem solved and so that you can maximize your opportunities. And so people will lay bare I have this revenue issue, or I have this cash flow issue, or I have this personnel issue, or my marketing is not working. What do you think? And then a group lovingly rips their business apart and tries to find a solution, and then our ask of members is that you work in the next 90 days on really identifying with particularity what that problem is and what you're going to do to solve it, so that when you return the next quarter you can tell the group here's what I've done, here's what worked, here's what didn't work. And then everybody learns from you, and what we recognized, maybe 18 months ago, is that it's really hard to be in front of the group and present and take notes and also listen to the things that people are saying to you.
Speaker 0:And so we began recording these sessions. We don't release the recordings anywhere, but we record them. And then we have AI transcribe it and we send each member a copy of the AI summary including the resources they shared, problems that they identified, solutions that were offered and then what their commitment was at the end of their hot seat. And what I did for the first time after our January meeting is I took everybody's hot seat summary and I ran it through AI, to run it through JetGPT to come up with some common themes. And so the next couple of episodes that I'm going to put out are common themes that we're solving for in the group. That is doing less than a million dollars in revenue per year, and so if that's you, if you were doing less than a million dollars in revenue a year in your law firm, these next three episodes or so or maybe it's going to wind up being three of the next four episodes, because I might have a report from Funnel Hacking Live to interject in here at some point but the next handful of solo episodes are going to be for you and if you get value out of these episodes, you will get exponentially more value from being in the room laying your business bare and asking the group to solve in your business. I will be up front with you. The price tag on our Hero Mastermind is $20,000 a year. It's not cheap, but if you're serious about growing your business, it is an unbelievably good investment in your firm. So if you want to have a conversation about that, reach out to me either on LinkedIn or find me, brian, at greatlegalmarketingcom, and we'll have a conversation. So let's dive in.
Speaker 0:This episode is about the power of niche branding, and I talked about this briefly in the last episode is that big firms are finding it cheaper and cheaper to operate their businesses because they can go from American-based employee to VAs, which is a way to change the cost structure of your business. So firms that were spending 40% of their revenue to produce the client file between the lawyer and the paralegal and the legal staff work now are finding that they can do it for 30%, 35% and, unlike you and I, unlike back into advertising, and they're taking more and more market share, which is why you see PPC and LSAs becoming more expensive year over year. The way to counteract that and the way to stand out in the crowded market is not to be the firm that does everything. It is to be the super niche go-to firm for that one thing. And so in our mastermind group we have a family law lawyer who only represents fathers, will not represent women, or if she does represent women, will charge them twice as much. At least jokingly, that's what she says, and so we'll talk in this episode about how she determined I'm only going to represent men.
Speaker 0:There's a nursing home lawyer in the Midwest who only does nursing home cases. To me those seem like awful and tragic and sad and it is not how I would want to spend my day. But he enjoys these cases and he's really good at it and so in this major Midwest city he is the guy for this and he's got an unbelievable marketing strategy that maybe I'll talk about a little bit later in this episode. But here's the benefit of niching down you get higher ROI, right, number one your advertising performs better because you're only advertising into that one little marketplace. You're not saying I do car crashes and slip and fall and medical malpractice and nursing home. You're saying I do nursing home.
Speaker 0:But not only does your advertising perform better, but operating within the niche allows you to perform more efficiently. This is the problem with general practitioners. Every legal malpractice case that I've handled in the last five or six years has been a general practitioner who took a niche area case and fucked it up. When you are operating in the niche area and that's all you do, that doesn't happen and you get really good really fast operating those cases. You don't have to ping around from nursing home to car crash to premises, to medical malpractice, to defective food product. It's really hard to be a master of all of those things, even though they're all different flavors of injury law, but if you're operating only in that one niche, you know exactly where to swing the hammer to get the result that you want. Last thing it does is it gives you a better and a stronger referral network. You see this on LinkedIn with guys like Brewster Rawls who's running an FTCA practice.
Speaker 0:If a Federal Tort Claims Act case came into my office tomorrow, I would not touch it and I know exactly where I would send it, even if I weren't in Virginia, because he's branded himself as the FTCA guy and I hope for you. If you're familiar with my firm and a long-term disability appeal came into your office, you would send it to us because we do more long-term disability appeals than anybody else in the state of Virginia combined, and probably anybody on the Eastern Shore I don't know Mid-Atlantic Eastern Shore board, that's not right. Probably anybody in the Mid-Atlantic area. That's just how we're known. Anytime an ERISA case gets mentioned on the Virginia trial lawyer's listserv, my dad's name comes up. It's just what we're known for, and so niche branding works, and it doesn't matter how small that market is, because if you only had the five mile radius right outside your office even though that's a relatively small office, like you would be fat and happy with cases.
Speaker 0:And so the easiest way to identify your niche if you haven't done that yet is to look at your current client set and try to figure out like which problems do I actually enjoy solving? Life is just, and the building of a law practice is nothing more than the search for a set of problems to solve that you actually like solving. So look at that current client base and try to identify are there demographic areas where I enjoy working with clients more? Are there areas where I enjoy working with clients more? Are there areas where I enjoy working with client less? Are there areas of law? Are there easier for me defense lawyers to deal with? The way to become rich is to find a problem that's easy for you to solve that everybody else thinks is really hard, and so if you can find that area that everybody else thinks is really hard, or convince everybody else that it's really hard.
Speaker 0:There's a lawyer in our area, doug Landau, who does airport cases, because it's a Geneva convention or some Hague convention or something I don't know, but anytime a slip and fall comes up in an airport or a claim for a baggage handler comes up on our listserv, he's the only guy that gets recommended. Now, are airport cases any harder than any other case? I have no idea. What I'm not going to do is go and try to figure it out, because I know somebody who I can refer a case to, who will send us a referral fee check back. Who will send us a referral fee check back.
Speaker 0:And so there are people who, if you think about it, in your area, there are people who have just branded themselves into a niche, just declared that this is all that I do. There's a in Ryan Serhant who's a real estate agent from like Million Dollar Listing, new York, but in his book Big Money Energy, he talks about his evolution and his branding evolution as a real estate agent. So I think his story is he went into real estate right after the 9-11 market crash or right after the 2008 market crash. It was a terrible time to get into real estate, and so he started as a renter's side agent. And then the first time he got a listing for a rental now I'm only a listing agent. And then the first time he leveled up to a buyer's side buying agent now I'm only a buyer's agent. The first time he leveled up to a seven-figure deal now I'm only a seven-figure deal agent.
Speaker 0:And so you can just declare yourself to be the person, the expert, in your niche. And this isn't fake it till you make it right, but it's having the gravitas that if you are the best person to solve your client's problem either if it's an airport case or an FTCA case or a nursing home case if you know how to do that better than the vast majority of lawyers in your market, you should be branding yourself as the expert in that niche. Okay, and now, after we've picked the niche, how do we build the brand? It's about crafting consistent messaging across all of your platforms your website, social media, all of your materials, and so, for instance, if you look at my friend, janine Clark, who's the family law lawyer in Maryland who only represents men, she's written a book called five things she's doing to prepare for divorce how to protect your assets and your relationship with your children, branded as most men who are presented with divorce papers find themselves shocked and confused. That's because they miss the signs that their marriage is going downhill and, by the time they get the divorce papers, their wives has done all the necessary legal work, leaving them at a disadvantage, and this book explains why every husband what every husband needs to know to protect their rights and preserve their relationship with the children when filed with the divorce. Now, if you are a man in Maryland who's looking for a divorce lawyer and you're presented with this choice of two otherwise equal lawyers, one of whom is a lawyer that represents both men and women and one of whom who has written the book on all the things that your spouse has done to prepare to divorce you, who are you going to hire? I'm hiring the woman who's written the book about all the things my wife has done to get ready to wage battle on me and my kids. I think that what Janine has done up here in Maryland is brilliant, and then she hosts seminars on Saturdays in local libraries where she only lets men in. Guy shows up with his girlfriend his new girlfriend. Whatever she can't come in. She will be the negative voice in your head throughout this process, and you need to listen only to me. I think that's brilliant.
Speaker 0:My friend in the Midwest who represents the families of people who've been hurt in nursing home abuse and neglect cases is Barry Doyle. He's written a book called Built to Fail how the Nursing Home Business Model Causes Injuries and Death for Patients. Why? Because it's not about a single event, it's about systemic failures. That's how you build value in these kinds of cases. But, more importantly, part of the marketing that he does that's really smart is he scrapes these Illinois Department of Health or whatever governmental body polices, nursing homes and he looks for their reports where they have these systemic failures, and then he makes those reports available and does what you would call newsjacking.
Speaker 0:Right? Hey, here's this incident. If you'd like the report, I have the report. You don't have to request it from Illinois Department of Health. You don't have to wait, I've already got it. You can have it in exchange for your email address or your phone number or whatever.
Speaker 0:And, by the way, has this also happened to your family member? But again setting himself up as the authority on why this happens? Because in a medical malpractice or in a nursing home case, oftentimes the family, as important as money, is understanding the systemic problem or the root cause of the injury to their loved one and affecting some kind of change, if they're able, in that process. And then so having the guy who's branded himself on somebody who understands that it's the business model that's to blame, it's not the individual nurse who's been, maybe lovely, who's been taking care of your family member, but she's been set up to fail by the business model itself. I think it's just really smart branding.
Speaker 0:And so you know, summing this up the more narrow, that your focus can be again, by starting a divorce for men only law firm, you cut out 50%, 51% of your I guess 50%, 50% of your client base. Many business people and certainly a lot of lawyers would tell you that's a stupid thing to do. You cut out 50% of your potential market, but you are more appealing to the 50% that you actually like serving. And so part of Janine's branding choice was I don't really like serving women. They're difficult to deal with, they complain more than the men do and they think they know it all, in part because they've been preparing for this divorce and they've read all the blogs and they've listened to the podcasts and they think that they know what they're doing, and so by pivoting and talking to the men who aren't as well-versed in quote how it should be it's an easier client customer service experience, she gets along better with the men and it's an easier sale, right? Because she's set up as the expert to that 50% of the market.
Speaker 0:And so the actionable takeaway for you is to look at all of the things that you're doing and if you look at your website and you got 12 practice areas on there, get rid of nine of them. Let's pick three potential niches and just start testing your marketing, right? You don't have to do it in all channels, but go into one channel, go into LinkedIn and start writing only about a certain type of case and see what happens. See if you don't get more referrals and you don't get more leads by holding yourself out as the expert in that one thing. If this is interesting to you and if you'd like to be in the room when these conversations are taking place, live, reach out to me either on LinkedIn or brian at greatlegalmarketingcom.
Speaker 0:We have a couple of positions open. Our next meeting is going to be in April. I don't have, I should give you the date. The next meeting will be April 24, 25 of the Hero Mastermind Group. It's in our office in Fairfax Virginia. It's a wonderful day and a half. We get dinner after the first day and you will come out of that with more ideas than you could possibly implement in the next 90 days. But this group is really good at helping you focus on what's the one thing that you could do in your business to move your law firm forward in the next 90 days. Focus on that and only that. All right, until next time. See you guys.
