Top legal practice areas revealed
Online ad prices and search volume data reveal vastly different types of legal practices – from those involving few cases worth millions, to those involving numerous cases worth little. We crunched the numbers to found four distinct types of practice areas. Read on to find out what they are, along with which types of lawyers are most in demand.
Most in demand practice areas
Diving into one month of Avvo’s search data made it clear that demand for legal services is not evenly distributed across all practice areas. In fact, it’s not even close, with demand for nearly 80% of lawyers confined to only 20% of practice areas.
Here’s a picture illustrating the legal “practice area long tail“:
Here is a closer look at the top 10 practice areas:
Some interesting notes about practice area demand:
- Criminal law is the number 1 searched for practice area, with roughly 70% more searches more than the number two most searched practice area, immigration, and over 100% more searches than the number three searched practice area, divorce.
- People were roughly 10x more likely to search for a divorce lawyer than a prenuptial lawyer.
- People were 17% more likely to contact a child support lawyer than an auto accident lawyer.
The cost of online advertising
Google has a cost-per-click, auction-based advertising system called Adwords. When many lawyers all want to their ads to show up for the same keyword (like “DUI lawyer”), they bid up the cost per click of that keyword. Sometimes bids are driven so high that being number one becomes a Pyrrhic victory at a cost of $100/click. Here is a sample of practice areas and their average cost per click in Adwords.
Consider these four practice area buckets based on the data:
1) The big leagues (top 25% volume, $20+ cost/click)
Top 7: criminal defense, DUI, personal injury, auto accidents, tax, medical malpractice and appeals
2) Volume practices (top 25% volume, $8 or less cost/click)
Top 7: divorce, employment, landlord/tenant, litigation, real estate, speeding tickets and debt collection
3) Waiting for a big payday (bottom 25% volume, $20+ cost/click)
Top 7: birth injury, brain injury, trucking accident, motorcycle accident, tax fraud/evasion, aviation and wrongful death
4) Hyper niches (bottom 25% volume, $8 or less cost/click)
Top 7: equipment finance/leasing, computer fraud, animal law, biotechnology, copyright application, agriculture, election law
Researching your own opportunities
Keeping in mind these four general types of practice areas, conduct your own research into volume and ad prices. By using the Google Adwords tool, you can find out the cost/click of any keyword and find out how many searches per month occur. Meshing your experience with online data, you might be able to find niches where you can cost-effectively reach a large number of clients without getting into a bidding war.
February 25th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Generous (and clever) of you to share this information. Not a lot of surprises, but certainly good support for getting involved in web marketing.
March 6th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
[...] look at a more specific example in the one of the most searched for practice areas, criminal defense. An individual has been recently arrested for a crime. Now they are at home and [...]
March 23rd, 2010 at 1:19 am
What I do not understand is why DUI/DWI does not appear in the list of practice areas in the first chart, but appears in the Top Ten on the second chart?
March 23rd, 2010 at 9:15 am
It’s because the first chart lists so many practice areas that it can’t show all of them.