The more types of matters your practice handles, the harder it is to become known for any of them. Adding a practice area rarely brings in more of that work. It adds complexity and takes attention away from the work the practice already does best.
Most attorneys justify a general practice as prudent: more practice areas mean more potential clients, which feels like more security. In practice, the math works the other way.
A generalist practice competes on availability and hourly rate. A focused practice competes on reputation and outcome. Those are different markets, and only one of them compounds.
The Three-Test Practice Focus Audit gives the attorney a diagnostic to run on their current practice before making any positioning decisions. It identifies where focus already exists, what the market currently sees, and where premium positioning is already taking hold.
This article is for the attorney who has described the practice as “general” and wondered whether that is a growth strategy or a habit. The work in How to Define Your Practice Area So Referral Sources Know Exactly When to Call You is the natural next step once this audit is done.
Why General Practice Feels Safe and Produces Commodity Positioning
The obvious appeal: a general practice can serve more clients and faces fewer empty weeks. The fear that specialization will limit revenue is real and understandable.
The less visible cost is positioning. A general practice cannot be described in a sentence that triggers a specific referral. Referral sources default to “she does everything” or “call her if you’re not sure who to call.” Both descriptions are accurate and both produce calls that waste everyone’s time.
The structural problem is that “general” is not a competitive advantage. Every attorney can handle a wide range of matters. What a general practice lacks is the reason for a client to choose this attorney over any other. In a market with many competent options, the attorney without a specific reputation has no natural claim on any particular client’s attention.
The counterintuitive finding from practices that have made the transition: narrowing focus typically increases revenue rather than reducing it. The reason is referral quality.
A precise practice description produces more targeted, more qualified introductions. Each referral is more likely to become a client. Each client is more likely to generate another referral in the same practice area.
The Three-Test Practice Focus Audit
The Three-Test Practice Focus Audit evaluates where a practice stands on the generalist-to-specialist spectrum, using the actual matter record rather than the attorney’s self-assessment.
Test 1 diagnoses the actual matter concentration
Pull the last three years of closed matters and group them by practice area and matter type. Count the percentage of work that falls into each category. Most practices that feel general have a matter distribution that is actually more concentrated than the attorney realizes.
If 60 percent or more of matters fall into two categories, the practice has a natural concentration the positioning can reflect. If the distribution is genuinely spread across five or more categories with no clear leader, that is useful information too. The test gives a fact, not a judgment.
Test 2 reveals how the market currently sees the practice
Ask three of the most active referral sources this question: “When you describe my practice to a client, what do you say?” Write down their answers verbatim.
Those answers are the market’s current description of the practice, independent of anything on the website or bio. They reveal whether the positioning that has been communicated is actually landing, and whether the practice has been described as a generalist or as a specialist in something specific. The gap between what the attorney says and what referral sources repeat is the positioning gap to close.
Before: The attorney describes the practice as “full-service business law.” After: Referral sources describe it as “the firm that handles partnership disputes,” a description that reflects the actual matter concentration rather than the official bio.
Test 3 identifies where premium positioning already exists
Which matter types generate the best realization rates? Which generate the most repeat clients? Which produce the referrals of which the attorney is most proud?
These signals are already in the practice’s history. They indicate where the practice has built something beyond a generalist offering. The matter type where outcomes are best, referrals are most qualified, and rates hold strongest is the area where a reputation is already forming.
How the Conductor Reads Your Practice Focus
Many attorneys believe they have a clearer sense of their focus than they actually do. They describe the practice as “primarily business litigation with some real estate work” when the matter records show real estate work is 40 percent of volume and the litigation work is concentrated in one narrow subtype.
The gap between self-perception and the actual record is common. It is also exactly the kind of gap where an objective read of the practice’s own history changes the answer.
The Living Library is the practice’s working knowledge layer, where matter records accumulate and become queryable over time. The Conductor, which is Kiluma’s context-aware AI, reads across that record to answer questions that would otherwise require manual review. Asked how concentrated the matter mix actually is, the Conductor returns the distribution: the actual percentages, not the attorney’s sense of them. The attorney sees what the data shows rather than what memory suggests.
The output serves all three tests: the actual concentration, the description that fits the data, and the areas where premium signals are strongest. The audit that used to require an afternoon of spreadsheet work takes a focused conversation.
Run Test 2 Before Anything Else
The easiest test to run, and the one that surfaces the most useful information fastest, is Test 2. Call three referral sources this week. Ask them what they say when they describe the practice to a client.
Do not frame it as research. Ask it conversationally. The answers will tell you more about the practice’s current market position than any website analytics or directory profile.
If all three answers are vague, the positioning work starts with Test 1 and the concentration analysis. If the answers are specific and accurate, the positioning is working and the task is to amplify it.
The Question That Matters
What would your most active referral source say if you asked them to describe your practice in one sentence?
If the answer would embarrass you for its vagueness, the Three-Test Focus Audit is the place to start. If it would make you proud, the task is to make sure every referral source in the network can give the same answer. Try Kiluma free for 14 days at kiluma.ai.