Practice Management

My friend Corinne Tampas at What's Your Authority brought this niche to my attention.

That is the expungement niche.



In Texas, I believe it is called expunction, and it involves the process of all records of an arrest, any jail detention and court records being destroyed or sealed, including things like fingerprints and DNA samples, so it would appear as if the event never took place.  It allows the person to legally deny the occurrence of the arrest and the existence of the expunction order.

From what I understand, having your record expunged is trick and only applies to some limited circumstances, such as someone was arrested but never went to court, there was a no guilty finding, the grand-jury no-billed, an appeal was won, and/or charges were dropped.  I have also head that this matter comes up in terms of charges and issues related to identity theft.

Now, obviously, there are a number of attorneys that can help you with this, and a number of criminal defense attorneys that list this service in the overall menu of what they can do for their clients.  But, we are talking about limiting the focus of what an attorney does, or at least specifically isolating and narrowing what an attorney markets, to those looking to have their criminal record expunged.  It would appear to a very specific service that those people with records would looking for a lawyer that does this specifically.  It is something those in need can easily Google in other words.

In doing so, it also seems to offer opportunities in collaborating with other lawyers in different part of your state or the country.

A good example of this is RecordGone.Com by the California law firm of Higbee & Associates.  The law firm has associated lawyers not only in California, but also in Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, and Washington to make its marketing more effective or at least to give it a larger reach.

There are others as well.  There is Texas Fresh Start, and Fred Dahr of Texas Defense Law.  But, wheras the field of criminal defense might be crowded, what this narrower legal task manages to do is carve out that simpler, needed, recognized, identifiable and most profitable portion of a broader practice area.