Lawyers today face increased competition, diminishing profit margins, and pressure to improve ROI and other acronyms. Even a lawyer’s traditional bread-and-butter practice areas are threatened by non-lawyer legal services such as LegalZoom. Instead of hunkering down and trying to decrease expenses, attract clients, and make your practice more efficient, it’s easier to diversify your practice and invest in strategic dabbling. With more free time available to attorneys, the coming year presents one of the best opportunities to dabble in more than a decade. The following five areas hold the most promise for dabbling.
International Child Abduction.
So far, LegalZoom has not decided to provide forms for international child abduction cases. Thus, it offers a great opportunity for real lawyers to dabble. First, not many judges understand international law and many states are now prohibiting international law from being considered in cases, thus limiting the body of law and making this practice area even easier. Besides, it’s unlikely you’ll see more than one international child abduction case in the course of a month. All the better. Dabbling in this area is a natural.
Patent Litigation. Know what patent litigators call their own practices? IP, which means Insanely Peasy. Guy invents something, another guy steals the invention. Most patent litigation cases come down to “geek said, geek said,” so you already have sufficient legal training to understand the basics. If you also have technical skills, such as operating a Bates Stamp or clearing a copier jam, you possess more than half the skills needed to dabble in patent litigation.
ERISA Law. Most attorneys freak out when you mention ERISA, and for good reason: who the hell knows what it stands for? ERISA lawyers have been keeping it a secret for decades and continue to rake in the profits from their monopolistic greed. How can you get a piece of the ERISA action? You could either pay someone like this guy thousands of dollars and sit through 5 DVDs for the answer, or you could just listen to us right here, right now. Eastern Regional Indoor Sports Arena. Now, go out and dabble and give those jizztissue ERISA bastards hell.
Antitrust. If you are still steamed about ERISA lawyers, antitrust law is a great area to dabble in and take them on as the drooling monopolistic meatslappers that they are. Antitrust is a fairly straightforward area of law. If a company gets really big and a small group of people get all highbrow and snarky about their products, it’s a monopoly. Think of it this way: Microsoft is a monopoly. Google is not. See, insanely peasy.
Felony Criminal Law. There’s a trendy group of criminal defense lawyers out there who get all hacked up about fresh-faced lawyers making stupid mistakes and sending people to jail for a few more years than what they should have received. Blah blah blah. Listen close: felony criminal law matters are imminently dabblable. Did you skip school growing up and watch Let’s Make a Deal? Then you’ve got the skills necessary to take a felony case. But get the money up front. One thing the curmudgeon crowd lawyers are right about is getting payment first before dabbling with the future freedom of a client.
Dabbling in the law is a time-honored tradition that many non-lawyers are now enjoying. Don’t sit on the sidelines and let the lay people get all the action. Jump in, dabble up, and increase your ROI immediately. It’s that insanely peasy.
