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Where do you find niche areas for legal blog and business?

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I was scrolling through my RSS feeds this afternoon and noticed the headline “Plaintiff’s lawyers take a liking to employee defamation claims.”

The Recorder’s Marissa Kendall (@marisakendall) was reporting on a growth of defamation suits by workers against employers are on the rise.

The claims often crop up in wrongful-termination and discrimination suits, where plaintiffs say their bosses gave false reasons for firing them. While adding a defamation claim generally won’t increase the value of an employment lawsuit, it opens one more avenue to recovery.

Not only were defamation claims on the rise with social and digital media, but the amounts recoveried were nothing to sneeze at. One defense lawyer said he was seeing defmation claims being made on 60 to 70% of wrongful termination claims he was handling.

Not all of the claims will have merit, but many will. In addition keeping as many balls in the air during negotiations increases the amount of settlement.

I am not necessarily championing defamation claims or employee versus employer actions, I am just saying this is how you see niche opportunities as a lawyer.

Maybe you do plaintiff’s trial work, employee work or defamation claims. Rather than a push to grow business in these broader areas, though defamation is narrower, why not grow a niche in employee defamation claims? Why not an employee state defamation law blog? There’s a lot of people in California, New York, Texas, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

Niche blogs open doors and business growth the likes of which is hard to imagine if you have never blogged before. You establish yourself as a ‘go to lawyer’ in a niche and pick up a state-wide or national reputation.

You don’t burn the boats behind you when you begin a niche legal blog, you keep doing the legal work you are doing. You just begin a blog in the niche by following what is written in the area. You will report what you are finding and offer your take.

Worried that you do not have the expertise? Start reading and following an area of the law and networking with thought leaders in the area coast tio coast. That’s what you do in blogging. You will become an authority in time.

You’ll find reporters calling you, bloggers citing you and legal/business leaders sharing your content across social media. You’ll be invited to speak at conferences at CLE’s. That’ll be followed with work via people finding you directly via Google and social media as well as referrals from other lawyers.

At some point you may decide to do only this niche work because you are enjoying your new found stature and steady stream of work. Of course you can do work beyond your niche. Niches do not limit what a lawyer does. That’s an unfounded fear.

One law firm leader adressing his firm said they don’t compete with other law firms. They play money ball ala the Oakland A’s, they do what others don’t. The firm goes after niches by following the news and jumping on new found oppoortunities. He said they may find a niche in a petri dish.

Too many lawyers struggle doing a little bit of everything. Other lawyers start general area blogs that are destined to draw little interest or work.

Start reading legal publications from ALM, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times or the Washington Post. Read them with an attitude that anything is possible with niche media today, why not me?

Image courtesy of Flickr by Renee Prisble

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