The Monopoly Game that Almost Ended My Marriage
You can easily have a monopoly as the best and most trustworthy criminal defense lawyer a few dozen other lawyers know.
Board games are a big deal in my wife’s family.
About a month after we got married, we were playing Monopoly. 4-5 people were playing including my wife and me. We all had at least one Monopoly except for my wife.
She offered a trade.
I asked, “Why would I do that?”
She said, “So I’ll have a monopoly.”
“That will make it harder for me to beat you.”
She didn’t like that answer. She basically gave all her properties to her dad who easily beat the rest of us. We were very mad at each other for a couple of days.
Ah newlyweds.
Why play without a monopoly?
My wife knew that you’re not going to win the game of Monopoly if you don’t have a monopoly. There’s no point in playing at that point.
I thought about that fateful Monopoly game when I read this quote from Peter Thiel:
All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem.
All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
Thiel’s point is that there’s no point in operating a business unless you can get a monopoly on something that’s valuable to your customers.
Peter Drucker said something similar:
If a business cannot be number one, number two, or number three in a marketplace, it ought to get out of that market.
Thiel and Drucker are both saying that if there’s a close alternative to what you’re offering you’ll end up in a price war. The only way to avoid competing on price is to offer something unique. You have to earn a monopoly to build a happy company.
Does this apply to criminal defense lawyers?
Thiel didn’t manage a law firm. He co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook. PayPal wasn’t trying to earn a 7% return on investment. It was trying to earn a 70,000% return on investment.
No one has ever become a billionaire by practicing criminal defense. So maybe Thiel’s advice doesn’t apply to small law firms.
But I believe that happy criminal defense lawyers have a monopoly on something. And unhappy criminal defense lawyers usually don’t have any monopolies.
Happy criminal defense lawyers have a monopoly on being the best and most trustworthy criminal defense lawyer a few dozen other lawyers know.
There are around 1.3 million lawyers in the United States. It’s really hard to be the best lawyer in the U.S.
There are about 12,000 lawyers in Utah. It’s hard to be the best lawyer in Utah.
There are hundreds of criminal defense lawyers in Salt Lake City, Utah.
You get the idea. How can you possibly be the best out of all of them? How would you even measure that?
But can you be the go-to criminal defense lawyer for 30 divorce lawyers? That’s pretty doable. You need fewer referral partners than you think, so it’s also probably more valuable than you think.
Lawyers vs. Laptops
Sometimes we think about shopping for lawyers the way we think about shopping for laptops. If you want the laptop with a certain minimum amount of storage, it’s pretty easy to sift through hundreds of options and sort them by storage and pick the cheapest one with the storage you need.
Lawyers are much harder to shop for. You can look at the lawyer’s website and Google reviews. You can speak with them during a consultation. But you still can’t really tell if they’re good at cross-examination.
Comparing lawyers is difficult and time consuming.
So one of the most common filters clients use is to think of the lawyers they know and maybe the lawyers that lawyer knows.
They call a friend who does commercial litigation and say, “My son got arrested. Can you recommend a good criminal defense lawyer?”
Now you’re not competing against 1.3 million lawyers. You’re competing against the other lawyers this commercial litigator knows. Can you be the best criminal defense lawyer that commercial litigator knows?
Can you have a monopoly on that commercial litigator’s referrals?
Market Share
Google search has 91.47% market share. That’s billions of customers and trillions of searches every year. You can’t have that type of market share because you couldn’t possibly serve that many clients.
And that’s a good thing.
Market share within an entire state is meaningless to criminal defense lawyers. The busiest criminal defense lawyer in Utah doesn’t come close to serving 1% of criminal defendants in Utah.
Those thousands of other criminal defense lawyers aren’t your competitors. You’re competing against the other criminal defense lawyers a particular lawyer knows. Or a particular therapist. Or a particular hair stylist.
That monopoly is valuable. If you want to be a happy criminal defense lawyer you need to have a monopoly.