Yesterday I was on a call with a lawyer we’ve known for two years. Two years ago, social media was out of the question for him. Too tacky. Not serious enough. Yesterday, he told us himself: he changed his mind, you have to live with your time, he’s ready.
Good news? Not really. He didn’t change his mind because he thought about it. He changed because his peers started doing it. And that’s the whole problem: if you move when your peers move, you will never be first. And on the internet, almost everything goes to whoever is first.
The mirage of the pie
Lawyers like to believe the market shares itself. Each good lawyer gets his reputation, and each gets his part of the pie.
It’s a mirage. I’ve run acquisition for dozens of law firms over four years. I’ve never seen a market share itself. I’ve seen markets get taken. Someone tries a new approach, it works, and they take a huge part of the market. Not because they’re twice as good at law. Because they have all the attention.
The loop
The whole thing is one loop. Once you see it, you see it everywhere:
- You’re first, so you get more clients.
- More clients, so more reviews.
- More reviews, so even more clients, and more budget.
- More budget, so press and TV, so more visibility.
- More visibility, so you’re even more first. And so on. Forever.
We work with a lawyer whose number one competitor was about 15,000 euros ahead in monthly revenue one year ago. Today the gap is closer to 25,000. Nothing changed in the quality of their law. The leader just went on TV more, got more reviews, and the loop did the rest. Catching him head-on is almost impossible.
The cycle never ends
Almost. The loop has one weak point: it runs on a channel. And channels get born, get normal, and die.
The cycle is always the same. Someone dares to try a new approach. They take the market. Peers copy them, years later. The approach becomes normal. Competition spreads out again. Then someone has to innovate again. There will never be a fair split of clients. There will always be injustice, because there will always be people who dare first.
And AI doesn’t slow this cycle down. It speeds it up.
The reset button
Here’s the good news if you’re not first: every new channel resets the score. You never beat the leader on his own ground. You beat him by being first somewhere else. First on Instagram yesterday. First on YouTube. And right now, first in ChatGPT’s answers. The leader has too much to lose to bet on a channel his peers still find tacky. That’s exactly his weakness.
Check your reference point
So if you’re where our lawyer was two years ago, here’s what I want to tell you. What feels normal to you is just the average of the people around you. If nobody around you does it, it doesn’t mean it’s risky. It means your reference point is local. Go look online. Lawyers are doing it, and winning. Watch them long enough, and what felt tacky will start to feel normal. It’s mechanical.
But the calendar won’t wait for you. Waiting for something to become normal means moving when everyone moves. It means never being first. And now you know the loop: on the internet, almost everything goes to whoever is first.