Should the Practice Area of a Law Firm Determine its Location?

If you are considering whether the practice area of a law firm should determine its location, the short answer is that it should. However, other factors might play a role in answering this, such as the size of the practice. Contact our skilled team today for more information regarding the importance of location and legal marketing.

How the Size of a Firm Plays a Role

The arena for legal marketers or smaller practices with one to five attorneys, and a staff of 30 or fewer, tends to be hyper-competitive. On the other hand, an enormous 500-attorney law firm typically deals with corporate clients where things like SEO results and location are not as important.

Big corporations already have individuals and entities vying for their business left and right, and most of these relationships come from word-of-mouth. If a big law firm wanted to be in a small suburb or a quiet rural area, they could do so because they are not relying on receiving new clients from Google.

Alternatively, for personal injury firms, divorce attorneys, and criminal defense lawyers, most of their competition will not be big law firms. They are going to be competing against other small firms of similar size. This makes the location of their practice significantly more critical. To put another way: the smaller the size of their law firm, the more important it is that they choose the right spot.

Practice Area and Physical Location

The most common reason firms evaluate a potential location is to ensure their practice is easy to get to. However, there is more than just ease of access to consider, and practice area should, and often does, play a major role in choosing a property location.

For example, in the case of a personal injury firm specifically, they might choose to have their law firm close to highways and major roads so that it is easy to find, but also because of its proximity to accidents. If the majority of their cases come from car crashes, they will want to be close to the roads with a lot of traffic and more accidents happening on them. This is because if someone gets into a collision, they might immediately Google “personal injury lawyer near me” or “car accident lawyer near me.”

There is a reason why bail bond agents are in close proximity to jails. It is the same reason why personal injury lawyers are near major cities, and divorce lawyers are close to super affluent neighborhoods. They just want to be close to where the people who might need their services will be. For a bail bondsman, that is the jail.  For personal injury attorneys, that is the roads, major highways, and high-traffic areas. On the other hand, a transactional business attorney or business litigation attorney might want to be in a commercial area where they are close to other businesses.

Contact a Legal Marketing Guide for Advice on Law Firm Location Based on Practice Area

If you have been asking yourself whether the practice area of a law firm should determine its location, hopefully you now realize that the answer is typically yes. It is important to be close to where potential clients could be. If you have questions regarding this or other legal marketing matters, contact our office today for skilled guidance.