Episode 173 – Achieving More With Less – Finding The Vital Few In Your Law Practice

In 1906, Vilfredo Pareto discovered the 80/20 rule, aka “the law of the vital few”. As applied to your law practice & specifically to your law firm’s website, 20 percent of your website (the top 10 pages – the vital few) brings in 80% of the total traffic. Conversely, if you look at your clients, 20 percent of your clients will be responsible for the 80 percent of your headaches and 80 percent of the clients will never bother you.

Look for the Skew, take advantage of it and focus more on the vital few to grow your law practice. For detailed take on this, listen to the audio below. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

 

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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Authority Marketing. Today, I am going to bring up a subject I brought up a couple of times but one that’s extremely important. It’s called the 80/20 rule. So an Italian economist named called Vilfredo Pareto came up with the Pareto principle a 100 odd years ago, maybe more. What he found when he studied the populations in various parts of Italy is that a very small percentage of the people in a certain area held most of the wealth. And he saw this and he came up with the rule called the 80/20 rule. It means there are the vital few that get most of the result. So this phenomenon happens pretty much everywhere you can look. I had seen statistics from the social security administration in the 1970s or 60s and it shows that at retirement, about 1% of Americans are wealthy, 4% are moderately wealthy where they can take care of themselves, 15% were able to take care of themselves where they can take care of themselves, 15% were able to take care of themselves but barely got by, and a full 80% of Americans had no money for retirement dependent on the government or friends or family or essentially were broke and died penniless. Fast-forward to 2007 when this statistics came out again that I looked at, this is now 40 or 50 years after. The breakdown of American was exactly the same.

So in any population, there is always going to be a very few that succeed tremendously and a vast many that don’t succeed long. So I am not saying this to you about economics or politics or any of that; I am saying this to you because in your law practice and in your marketing, the same phenomena comes up. So with my clients, my attorney clients, for instance, we look at their websites and we see that no matter how big the website is, and whether the website has 100 pages or even 1,000 pages, about 9 or 10 of those pages are responsible for 80 or 90% of all the traffic that first enters their site. So when an attorney says to me, “How do I improve my website? What do I do?” I said let’s get those top 10 pages and let’s focus on those pages first because those are the vital few, the ones that will get you the most bank for the buck because that’s where most of the people are coming in the door.

Now, this also shows up when you are trying to rank for keywords. So many attorneys think that, “Oh, there are just a few keywords that are important and if I rank for those, I am going to do really well and get a lot of business”. And this is where the 80/20 principle kind of goes in reverse because what I have found is that there are keywords called “Question Keywords” where people type in things like “Was arrested in downtown LA, second DUI, will I go to jail”, or, “Been married for 20 years; will I have to pay perpetual spousal maintenance?” “Filing bankruptcy, can I keep the house even if it’s in foreclosure?” These are question keywords and these make up 95 or maybe even 99% of all the things people type into Google and these are the keywords that you want to rank for instead of just a few at the very end such as “Los Angeles Injury Lawyer”, or, “Houston Disability Attorney”, or, “New York DWI Lawyer”, those few actually are not going to get you the results and the vast many in this case which is the opposite of 80/20 but still askew is what rules in this scenario. A couple of other scenarios. If you look at your clients, a few of them will refer and they’ll probably refer several times and most of them will never refer. Again, there is the 80/20 right there. Of your clients, a few of them are going to be real pains in the ass and ask for all kinds of stuff and take up all your time and 80 or 90% of them are going to be fine. They are not going to bother you. So you look for the skew, you’ll see it everywhere in everything you do. And the power in this is that if you take advantage of the skew and you find the vital few that give you the outsized result and you’re focused on that, you’ll get a lot further than most people that treat everything as equal and think if they just work on something and they just give equal treatment to everything that they’ll get a good result. You actually get a much better result by not giving equal treatments of things and focusing on the vital few, you’ll get 4/5, maybe even 20 times the result. So I encourage you to look for this in your marketing, in your firm and everything you do and look for those skews and capitalize on them and you’ll seed your goals in whatever arena they may be.

If you need help with your marketing and interpreting and finding the 80/20, finding the skews in it to get outsized results compared to what you used to get or what you’re currently getting, call 888-225-8594 or email Richard.Jacobs@speakeasymarketinginc.com. Thank you.

 

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