Tips For Starting Your Personal Injury Law Practice

A Successful Beginning

Any business pursuit will have difficult, costly aspects that require determination to overcome. Some of those can be worse in law than anywhere else—legal landmines, if you will. At the same time, there are definitely advantages. Payout in terms of legal fees is substantial. If you’re able to tread water in a legal practice long enough, you’re likely going to get a break eventually. rnStill, there are ways to maximize your success. For example: what kind of law are you looking to practice? If you’re wise, you’ll choose something that has a statistically constant—and even increasing—level of court cases. It’s better for you to have more work available than you can take, than for you to go constantly hunting the “big fish”, as it were. Thinking of your legal practice like a fishing boat can be an effective way to illustrate the reality, as a matter of fact. Your crew are your fellow attorneys, interns, receptionists, and infrastructural personnel. For everybody to make a paycheck, you’ve got to return a sustainable “haul” of legal “fish”. rnAccordingly, you want to go after schools of fish known to bring a good price at market, and to be easy to catch. Doing so allows you to increase the size of your “fishing boat”, allowing you to branch off into more specialized fishing when you’ve got the budget to absorb a few losses later on.

A Closer Look

To break down the analogy, something like personal injury law may be characterized as the tuna of the legal sea. It’s everywhere, it’s in demand, and you can rely on it; allowing you to go after those deep sea corporate client squid that lurk in murky legal waters as you become more established. rnIn terms of personal injury law, there are a number of concentrations you should consider. Slip and fall injuries are common, negligence cases are common, wrongful death cases happen regularly, medical malpractice is a biggie, and perhaps one of the most prescient founts of cases comes from car crashes of varying degrees. Batta Fulkerson points out: “You never think that an auto accident can happen to you, but the reality is quite different. According to the car insurance industry, the average driver files an auto accident and property damage claim every 17.9 years. That adds up to three or four accidents over the course of a lifetime.” At that rate, in a community of 50,000, a division of four produces the total number of accidents throughout a lifetime. If we calculate that lifetime at 70 years, on average, that means you can expect about 178 accidents that result in a filed claim per 50,000 person community annually, assuming all variables remain constant. That’s a wreck every two to three days. If you expand that out for a community of around thirty million, like LA and its surrounding metropolitan area, you’d be looking at over 100,000 a year, and over 200 accidents a day. That’s a lot of “fish”, if you will.

Maximizing Your Potential

All these things being said, you ideally want those legal fish to swim to you; it can be costly to go dredging through the deep ocean of legal assistance. To that end, you want solid marketing which includes Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, Social Media Optimization, or SMO, and the maximization of client referrals. rnAdditionally, you want to go where you can expect the fish to be. Work with insurance agencies, work with government programs, work with police stations and fire departments. Networking will certainly be key for your burgeoning personal injury law practice. Find personal injury law which you can depend on in your area. Crunch the numbers and find a discipline which matches not only your ability but the available caseload.