Niche marketing has been practised by the legal profession for a great number of years.

Creating a niche involves many of the techniques which would be applied to generic marketing or promotion.

The difference is that the product or service is being tailored to a highly defined group.

Most law firms now identify niche marketing as a part of their marketing strategy.

In my view, certainly in London, niche marketing is the only way to establish a small firm.There are many solutions found in nature for scientific dilemmas.

Recently, business management gurus and theorists have also turned to nature itself for explanations.

In relation to my own firm there is an answer from nature: we have survived, so far at least, as a specialist feeder.When I set up the firm in 1983, the profession in the UK was enjoying a boom time.

Everyone appeared to be making money, firms were merging, and commercial and conveyancing work were expanding.

There were considerable changes taking place in the sports business, which was to become the firm's present staple diet.

The changes were principally to do with a move away from public funding in sport.

Initially funding came from stadium advertising boards, coupled with the change in television regulations which permitted these boards to be seen on screen.

This was happening at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s.The relationship between sport and business matured first in football, with the soccer world cup in Spain in 1982.

This formed the structural commercial model for the other programmes in sport from athletics through to rugby.

Involvement in the development, structuring and selling of these first commercial programmes for major sporting events gave me the specialist experience in order to digest my staple diet.The creation of the niche business was made possible through a combination of a completely new market, from the influx of money coming into sport, and the acquisition of skills and experience which enabled me to understand how the new market should be addressed.Developing a business is very much like building a house.

The foundations are critical.

You can never put too much effort into recruiting the right staff and gaining knowledge and experience.

Staff are the most important asset of any services business.

Getting the marketing strategy right is part of the foundation.

Developing management skills is, however, critical to the survival and development of the business structure.

Management enables the transition from technical knowledge to a business.

Some lawyers do not wish to make the transition.Niche businesses tend to be created at time s of change in the marketplace.

For small firms innovation is the key to survival.

It is part of the management process for larger firms.

The insolvency specialist, for example, had its heyday when everyone was going bust.

A number of small firms did very well in this market before the 'big boys' moved in.

In the case of sport, if there had not been a material change in the way sport was funded then a niche could not have been created.The fracturing and segmentation of markets caused by present day economics helps in niching.

Change is something that every business has to take into account.

It has to be important therefore in any niche to know when to switch.

It is important to know the right time either to move on to the next niche or to reposition the product or service in such a way that it could, for example, become a niche within a niche.The introduction of solicitors' advertising in 1984 led to a change in the way in which the profession was viewed by its clients.

Much of the mystique was taken out of the legal process and solicitors began, in response to competition, to seek to distinguish their services from those of their competitors.

One way in which this could be achieved was by promoting a speciality.

Clients began to understand that there were GPs of the profession, but also specialists.

The client would not want to rely upon a GP for major surgery.

People were prepared to pay a premium for a specialist service.Through advertising, firms gained access to the public by promoting a speciality which might not have been available to it before.

After the initial round of solicitors' advertising had finished, cut price economics and the recession had destroyed the conveyancing market.

This had a dramatic effect, particularly in country and provincial practices, where conveyancing provided the staple diet.

This, coupled with the economic climate, caused a serious erosion of margins.

Faced with competition firms needed to make the decision to change or die.In a competitive world specialist feeders are more likely to survive.

I believe the principle is vital for any new firm.

Research has established that to enter the same market as everybody else with the same product or service it is likely that you need to be at least 40% better and 40% cheaper to grab any significant market share.

That ignores the firm's set-up and advertising costs.The same principles apply to larger firms.

However, in a rapidly changing world with increasing competition, there is a constant need to keep an eye on existing work and to innovate with new products or services.

In the product sector rather than the service sector, the shelf life of new products is becoming less as society becomes more consumer driven.

Law firms, like product industries need to innovate and continually keep an eye on new opportunities and new services.