discuss Legal niche domains is there a future?

[MrXBack]

Im talking about domains which include legal terms such as legal forms, power of attorney, bill of sale etc?

Do they hold value when we expect to sell them? or do they only sell if its been developed and its making money...i saw a few sales on flippa which were above 20k and the niche were related to legal terms..

What are you thoughts on it?

 

[platey]

I have a few city based legal domains i grabbed at a good price for lead generation, but I try to stay away from doing business with lawyers as much as possible in case things ever go sour.

i have a few legal domain names two

but have let 3 peach legal .coms expire and a .legal domain expire

 

[mhdoc]

If you have a Kindle unlimited subscription you can read Online Law Practice Strategies by Mark Homer for free.

I ended up with about 80 law related .infos and found it while deciding if I should let them drop or try to do something with them.

The SERPS for city/state + lawyer/lawyers/attorney seem to be dominated by directory type sites. Clearly some big budgets at work.

The book pointed out that a good website is the only thing that matters for the solo practitioner. I also learned there are a lot of nuances to the different practice specialties. For example, lawyers who specialize in DUI cases add extra staff to answer phone calls on Monday morning. That's when the weekends arrests call and they want answers in a hurry. They are not going to wait for a call back. They just call the next lawyer in their search results. That means a lead gen site needs to make sure any referrals they send are handled appropriately or they will be wasted.

So determining the development potential of my domains and how to identify the right kind of content is still a work in progress.

 

[youdoyou]

Haha it's absolutely true, Mondays, especially after long weekends, are hellish, although it's because the cases are backed up, usually you get the call Monday afternoons or over the weekend since most jails don't release in the morning, and you'd have some 2L take the calls. I did the bond hearing docket for a few months before moving to felonies and like day after Memorial day you can have 32-33 new arrestees and you're the public defender doing everyone's bond hearings and you had exactly 90 minutes to review their files to see who can get ORed and who's not looking too sharp. Private solos get conflict work pretty frequently and in my experience Don't actually do this, but I would've preferred to deal with a hit and run rather than a straight DUI because all this administrative BS you have to go through separately but you can't really charge too much extra for it because you almost never win those and expectation and enumeration go hand in hand... anyway...

Lawyer aggregation sites are interesting, as in, I don't think lawyers run almost any of them. Maybe the bar association somewhere does, but you're more likely to see lawyers hire law students or grads to write blogs and maintain their sites under their firm name (do not reg these you just threw money away) or use some sort of legal jargon that only people in trouble and the attorney will know. InReBarrPleas.com anyone? (Again, DO NOT DO THIS, this is the equivalent of "PleadGuiltyToBullshit.com" in Washington state). Maybe only we find it funny but a few of us always wanted something along the lines of FeloniousJunk but only as a joke because you can't advertise that.

The fact is, since most people have no idea what to look for in a good lawyer for most cases ordinary people run into (hint: not winning percentage), it gets incredibly tricky, and newer attorneys don't yet have the wisdom to not sue over small change. I won a small claims case out in the desert in Nevada that netted me a total of under $200. At least I'm a Nevadan so was only 4 hours from mom and my own bed and my girlfriend happened to actually live in that very sparsely populated county, otherwise who the hell would do something like that? But I didn't even think about that when I sent in the demand letters and affidavits (free for me, not for you). So watch out for those, we're not gonna go out of our way to get sanctioned but we'll find a way.

Niche words might be good but ultimately I think ancillary legal services would be a field you want to look into for investment. eDiscovery is hot. I hate eDiscovery and I hate the fact that the current format is even allowed, but every legal startup has a new idea and I have one too - get rid of it, who else sends TIFFs and unOCRed documents? Hours of recordings, hours of video, all sorts of crap. Is someone's facebook post relevant? Sure, but for the most part you will not win a case based on that but eDiscovery will get you that kind of crap. Legal tech incubation is still very much underdeveloped. West/Lexis has a good handle on their products (nobody really uses Bloomberg unless they're being forced into it), Denton is funding.... a lot of eDiscovery, but you want to invest? You can jump into the field, just read some blogs, the ABA publishes a LegalTech blog or whatever it's called, Abovethelaw, influential lawyer-blogger ones like Popehat, those are all good places to start. I'd say get something avvo-like that doesn't require what avvo became - just another ad board.Read up on big cases, read up on big concepts, realize that you'll never be able to sell someone the word estoppel and nobody wants to buy Blockburger.com unless Blockbuster comes back selling burgers but there are a lot of service providers that aren't firms, or aren't strictly firms (owned by lawyers, as mandated, but provide additional services), that would be looking, and they won't be looking for something too technical.

I think people are generally thinking about the legal field in the wrong way. We didn't just go to school, we interned and externed and did hundreds or thousands of hours of free work, slept in our offices, I know what 3 different county jails smell like in a blind smell test. If you take my firm's name I don't need to pay anyone to sue you, we exchange favors. My buddy will cover this one while I cover his sister's 4th degree assault, or if we have good mentors, bring out the big guns. But how many lawyers maintain their own pages anyway? Most solos have law students write their blogs in my experience. But look a little out of the box and you can find areas of growth, even if you don't know what the best metrics of finding a good lawyer is (ask another lawyer who they'd have to represent them, repeat, repeat, repeat, hope they're not fucking with you but still give you an answer). The attorneys at the big New York Wall St adjacents all have federal income poverty guideliens tacked onto their walls because they can't take all the cases, but cases skew in demographics and in scope, so find the under-represented niche and find someone willing to populate that and you have something going.

Just a suggestion though, no idea what goes on below the Mason Dixon, but I hear in Texas things are wild.