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Our chapter on ethics is not a throw-away chapter. For a business-niche-driven, small law firm, there is great benefit and strategic power to making the small sacrifices it takes to hew to ethical guidelines. We’ll share with you how to include ethical considerations into many of your firm’s activities and gain the meaningful business advantages from doing so.

We present ideas about how to sustain a new firm well into the future. Sustainability is often overlooked when all eyes are on handling cases and growing a new business, but if it is ignored, all the time, money, hopes, and work you’ve invested in your venture can be brought down fairly quickly. These will be the principles and practices of nurturing the long-term health of your new firm.

In this chapter we describe our story and how we came to understand the fundamental strategy to which we attribute our success. We identify this strategy as business niche specialization. We describe how we used business niche specialization to our advantage, why business niche specialization is ideal for independent law firm and career success, and how to pick the right business niche for building a successful law practice. This chapter sets the foundation of the book – the business niche specialization strategy – which supports the remaining chapters’ discussions of other business tactics and practices complementary to this strategy.

In this chapter, we examine a critical decision in the process of starting a business niche law firm: whether or not, and with whom one should begin a partnership. We identify three key factors which are critical to partnership compatibility: trust, complementarity of skills and motivational alignment. We then detail the hows and whys of vetting a prospective partnership for long-term likelihood of compatibility and future success.