This post is Part 3 of the series, How to Grow a Probate Practice.
As I told you in last week’s posts, you need referrals from other attorneys if you want to get your phone to ring with probate business.
The best (and most profitable) way to become known for doing probate work is to become an expert. And it is easier than you might think.
What is an Expert?
Before I tell you how to do it, think with me about how people generally identify experts. What is necessary for someone to be termed “an expert”? Mainly, three traits come to mind.
Experts are:
- Experienced in their line of work
- Focus their line of work in one area.
- Demonstrate they have authority in their line of work.
In summary, the three traits of an expert are: Experience, Niche Practice, and Authority. If you have all three, you are probably a true expert in your field.
Yet, there is another layer to this. Specifically, there is a difference between a true expert and a perceived expert. A true expert has all three traits above. You may not be a true expert right now because you don’t have enough probate experience. On the other hand, if you have at least one of the traits of an expert listed above, you could be perceived as an expert. Being perceived as an expert is sometimes just as good as being an expert.
I’m advocating that, beginning today, you can do things to create the perception in others’ minds that you have expertise in probate no matter how new you are to the practice. This is no card trick. I know that the word “perception” may bother you. I’m not at all suggesting that you should lie and pretend to have a practice you don’t have. In fact, you probably won’t want to claim to be an expert among potential referral sources, if for no other reason than staying clear of such prohibitions in the rules of professional conduct.
Let’s take it from another perspective. When I went to school for an M.B.A., my professors called “creating a perception in someone’s mind” the act of “branding.” Your firm has a brand, for better or worse, whether you know it or not. Your brand could be “excellent customer service”, or your brand unintentionally could be “bad customer service.”
Your brand is what your client thinks it is. That is, your brand is the perception others have of your practice.
For example, you may want your firm’s brand to be “excellent customer service” and therefore you have a policy of returning client phone calls within four hours. However, if a client expects phone calls to be returned within an hour and you don’t do it, for that client, your brand is bad customer service.
Again, branding is your client or potential client’s perception about your practice. The perception may be based on good evidence (e.g. “My attorney never calls me back!”) or it may be based on unfair standards (e.g. “My calls should be returned within an hour!”).
My point is simply this: you can shape a potential client’s perception of your practice so that you will be perceived as an expert. Doing so will help grow your practice as you gain experience and become a true expert.
How to Become a Perceived Expert
So how do you build your personal brand as an expert in probate? You start by targeting one or more of the three traits of an expert listed above (Experience, Niche Practice and Authority). Since this series of posts is on growing your probate practice, I’ll assume you don’t have a lot of experience in doing probate cases. Accordingly, we’ll focus on the latter two traits: Niche Practice and Authority.
Niche Practice
Creating a niche practice is simply the idea of focusing your practice of law in a narrow area. Probate practice is a niche practice, though you could narrow it even further (e.g. probate litigation, probates in Ramsey County, representation of creditors in probate, etc.). There are a number of advantages to focusing your law firm in one narrow area of practice. You can do a Google search on the issue and find lots of articles about law firms that have done it and their experiences.
For example, there is one law firm in South Carolina that has formed a niche practice in golf litigation. Another firm in Alabama focuses on pest control litigation (the “bug lawyers”). Before I started doing probate, I was making plans to focus my practice on business issues related to coffee shops and even went so far as to buy the domain www.coffeelawyer.com (I’ve now put it up for sale).
But for our purposes, the advantage of narrowing your practice to probate helps you grow your probate practice because it tends to convey that you are an expert in that area. Taking one of the examples above, if you were a golf course owner and involved in litigation over your course, wouldn’t you consider giving the golf law lawyers a call?
The point is that people tend to assume that niche practitioners excel in their practice area and have handled a lot of cases.
It also helps make you memorable. I learned this by experimenting at local Chamber of Commerce meetings. When I first got involved with the Chamber, I attended quite a number of networking lunches and business card exchanges. I had my “elevator speech” down pat. When people asked what kind of areas of laws I did, I would tell them “estate planning and probate, real estate law, and small business law.” The problem was that people I had previously met kept asking me this question on subsequent meetings: “What kind of law do you do again?”
What I learned was that if you tell people you do four areas of practice, the likelihood that they’ll remember any of them is small. But if I tell people I focus my practice in one area, the chance they would remember what I did was much greater.
So I changed my elevator speech. I told people, “80% of my practice is probate and estate planning.” That was truthful– I did other things, but my main practice area was probate and estate planning. What happened was that people started remembering that I did probate. In other words, I was creating a brand.
I don’t think you necessarily have to abandon all the other areas you practice in. But be aware that for every practice area that you market actively, you erode your credibility as an expert. Does it change your opinion of the pest control litigators if I tell you that their firm also practices in 19 different areas that range from the automotive industry to mental health and disability law? Hmmm, they are starting to sound less like experts already.
Authority
Another way to build the perception that you are a probate expert is to demonstrate you are an authority on the subject. Two ways to do this include speaking on probate and writing about it.
Regarding speaking engagements, find a group that wants to know about estate issues and approach them about doing a presentation. The goal of these speaking engagements is not so much finding clients, but building your resume to future clients who are trying to decide between you and another attorney. Having spoken about probate tends to lend credibility to clients that you know what you are talking about (even if the client didn’t hear you speak).
Regarding writing, the easiest way to get published is to self-publish on a blog like this one. In fact, my next planned series of posts is on how to start a probate blog. For now, I’ll keep it short. Blogs are easy to set up. Just go to a site like blogger.com and you can have a blog started in 15 minutes. Once you’ve created it, make it your goal to write one probate related post every week for 3 months. Tell others about your blog. Make sure it can be discovered by Google and Yahoo. Put the blog address in your email signature. When a question comes up on a lawyer listserve (such as the MSBA’s estate listserve) that you’ve covered on your blog, point that out. After you’ve been doing it for a while, make sure your blog gets listed with practicelaw.org, if you are in Minnesota.
The key to blogging is consistency. If you blog once every few months, your blog is essentially dead. Waste your time some other way. Blogs are about consistent updates. If you follow my plan outlined above, you’ll soon have a digest of your probate knowledge on your blog and people will take notice. Even better, the perception will become that you are obviously a probate expert because you’ve written so much about it!
Regarding getting published outside of your blog, the secret is that editors are always looking for good articles. In recent months, I’ve seen requests for new authors for the MSBA’s New Lawyers Section newsletter and the Probate & Trust Law newsletter. Write something good and submit it. In the past, I’ve heard of opportunities to write for Bench & Bar Magazine (the official magazine of the MSBA). Keep you eye out for opportunities and you’ll find them. If your blog gets popular enough, some opportunities will even find you.
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So that’s how to become an expert and why it is important in order to grow a probate practice. As you can tell, it is really a lesson in branding.
Next Tuesday, I’ll tell you why you should forget using probate paralegals when starting out and also when its time to start hiring them. Probate paralegals can help make your office sing. But if you get one too early, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice.
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