Today’s post, Part 3 of Debra L. Bruce’s 4 Part series on deciding where to locate your law practice, takes a look at the demographics of your peers/competition.
Attorney Demographics
Give some thought to where your competition is located, too. The SBDC (Small Business Development Center) can usually tell you how many other lawyers are located within a certain range of your proposed office.Does your state bar association have demographic information about lawyers in your state? You can probably guess that you will find more lawyers near a law school or a seat of government, but what are the practice area distributions?
The State Bar of Texas, where I’m licensed, publishes reports on demographic and economic trends for attorneys in the state. You can see the number of attorneys per capita in various counties, the median income of attorneys in different practice areas and regions of the state, and the median hourly rates there. A lot of other information is available. When combined with census data and other information that you can obtain on the internet or from the SBDC, you may be able to identify a trending growth region in your state that has not yet been completely inundated by lawyers in your preferred practice concentration. That can give you a chance to grab a foothold in advance of the tide.
My upcoming and last post in this series, Part 4, will take a look at locating in a small town versus the big city. For the other posts in the series, follow these links: Practice Focus, Client Demographic Data, and Small Town or Big City.