Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

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Anyone enjoy reading obituaries?

I do actually. And it’s not some prurient fascination with death or anything like that, for me, it relates to my love of history and in this case the very personalized tale of someone’s life. And oftentimes a good obit. can be very instructive as to a persons decisions and accomplishments and I can learn from them.

Recently I was struck by the death and story of Theo Albrecht of Frankfurt, Germany, a co-founder of the Aldi grocery store chain. It wasn’t anything personal but rather some of he and his brothers business practices that jumped out at me thinking there’s some application to the business of law.  Here’s some of the language from the obit. (from the NYTimes) that I want to tease out a bit and wonder if there’s not an application to running a legal services business:

After being released from Allied prisoner-of-war camps following World War II, Theo and Karl Albrecht took over their parents’ small grocery in the bombed-out city of Essen and, out of necessity, sold only a small number of essential items. When the economy began to boom, competitors expanded their inventories to include thousands of items, but the Albrecht brothers realized they could operate more efficiently by limiting selection and keeping stores fairly small.

“The Albrecht brothers said, ‘Why do I need all these other products? I make most of my sales with these few products and have a lot less complexity and costs,’ ” said Matthias Queck, research director in Frankfurt for Planet Retail, a market research company.

Rather striking isn’t it, maybe less is more? Although there’s an Aldi about 5 minutes from where I live I think I’ve only been in an Aldi once in my life. My wife who is the resident “foodie” in our family and the person who also does the weekly grocery shopping has remarked that Aldi has great deals but she can’t complete the full weekly shopping there because of their slightly limited selection (consistent with the above). I didn’t realize that Aldi owns the Trader Joe’s chain as well which essentially uses a similar “limit selection” model for more higher-end foodstuffs. We’ll go to “Joe’s” more frequently but again you can’t quite do your total weekly grocery shopping there.

Is there “Aldi” application to the business of law??

• Sold only a small number of essential items. In lawyerland this is practice specialization, no? The opposite of this “Aldi” model would be a general practice where you may work in a limitless number of subject matters. Why is this practice area limiting concept so hard for me to pull the trigger on? At some level it just sounds counter-intuitive…the idea that limiting your market somehow would increase your business. Of course there is a ton of evidence inside the law and outside the law to support that premise yet I still hear subconscious whispers saying, “Don’t drop that 10% practice area because that might be the chunk that grows into my million dollar niche.” Yet I know that even I have a negative perception of lawyers (at least in an urban market like Chicago) who claim to be general practitioners or list a bunch of unrelated practice areas on their business cards because I KNOW she can’t be an expert in those many fields.

• They could operate more efficiently by limiting selection. These next two points are really the supporting points to the first point and what I need to use to argue with my own subconscious when it’s telling me to maintain small, unprofitable practice areas. I’d focus on intellectual efficiency and marketing efficiency particularly. It is HARD WORK to represent someone well if you practice in oh more than 5 practice areas. An example from last week, a friend asked me to review a commercial lease for him. I’ve done that before but it’s something that is in that 5% area of my practice and it took a lot of time to pull up some old leases and grab a checklist off the Internet and I still probably didn’t do an A+ job. Conversely if he had wanted to discuss the defense of an indirect civil contempt preceding within the domestic relations division of the Circuit Court of Cook County, I likely wouldn’t have had to do anything other than draw on my experience from the tens of similar cases I’ve handled just this year. With marketing I’m not sure I would focus on “efficiency” so much as simple effectiveness. I don’t use much paid advertising where I’m paying for multiple ads or something since I practice in multiple practice areas, however, in our e-mail newsletter and Website presentation I’m sure I have lessened our marketing EFFECTIVENESS by garbling our focus and likely leaving people guessing as to where our practice expertise lies.

• Make most of my sales with these few products and have a lot less complexity/costs. I’m reading a lawyer/management book now (I’ll likely post a review when I’m done so I’m not naming it yet) that says if you don’t have systems or processes for everything you’re doing in your law practice, then, all you own is a “job” you don’t really own a legal services business separate from yourself because too much is dependent on just you. McDonalds being the opposite example where it can have huge turnover of immature teenagers flipping burgers but continue to thrive because of its operational manual, i.e. their “systems.” I can totally see how I can cut complexity/costs by cutting practice areas and really systematizing my law practice. I have decent systems for billing and marketing but I’m SORELY lacking in my systems in the substance of my practice and it’s surely because I’m too broad.

Can you apply the above to your legal services business? Is this concept holding you back? Are you too broad, too general? I believe this “breadth of practice” challenge has been the #1 or #2 hurdle for me in growing a great legal services business. Why not give it a try for 6 months to a year?