Richard Susskind first introduced the concept of the "Latent Legal Market" back in 2001. Since then, some legal professionals have weighed in on their ideas for tapping into this market. I agree that there is a latent legal market of individuals and organizations who are ill-served by the current pool of legal professionals. However, I have a radically different approach to tackling the latent legal market.
When I think about ways to tap into the latent legal market, I think up not down. I think about how to provide more value to the client, not less. One way to provide more value to the client is to segment your practice areas into Tactical Practice Components™. TPCs transform and adapt basic marketing principles to an elawyering application.
A TPC is a segmented portion of your overall practice aimed at serving a particular niche market. For example, a family law firm can have several TPCs as follows:
- Divorce
- Child Support
- 1st Party Custody
- 3rd Party Custody
- Relocation
- Domestic Partnerships
- Enforcement
- etc.
As you can see, some TPCs may involve the invocation of other TPCs. A divorce that requires child support and custody orders is a good example of this. Once you determine what your Tactical Practice Components are, you can begin to determine the client profiles that fit each TPC. For example, a child support TPC may have many client profiles including: an obligor with an administrative child support order; an obligor with a Superior Court order; an obligee with a Superior Court order, etc.
When you have completed the task of assigning client profiles, you then determine the permitted and likely actions of the client profiles. For example, an obligor with a Superior Court order would likely want to lower their child support order. It will be up to you to decide whether they are permitted (within your elawyering application) to perform other actions such as clarifying a portion of the order or raising the order.
The aforementioned is a high-level overview of using Tactical Practice Components™ to begin to tap into the latent legal market. Of course this method is specific to elawyering applications and requires a significant effort to implement. However, I believe the effort is worth the reward of gaining a serious position in the latent legal market.