Sometimes you learn something brand new. Other times you find a new way to look at something old.

The other day I was at a meeting (no surprise there; Bar Association life includes a LOT of meetings...) of the NCBA Law Practice Management Section Council. Our new section chair is my friend Lee Rosen of Divorce Discourse; Lee is fairly well known in our state as an innovative law firm managing partner with an outside the box approach to, well, just about everything.

So I knew this section council meeting would be a little different.

I came to learn that the meeting would be different in two main ways. First, we spent the beginning part of the meeting doing an ice breaker. I have kind of a love/hate thing with ice breakers; on the one hand, I hate getting up in front of colleagues and having to go through the ritual mortification that is your average ice breaker (if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?), but I undeniably feel better and more connected to the people around me after I do.

In short, I am the guy ice breakers are made for.

This was the first section council meeting of the year and after we went round robin around the room and everyone participated in the ice breaker there was a palpable camaraderie and closeness in the room. We all knew and liked each other a little better and felt a little more at ease. It set a positive tone for the rest of the meeting and had me wondering why I don't do more ice breakers in the meetings I chair.

The second, and even more impactful, difference in this council meeting was that we dedicated a portion of the meeting to something really cool.

We had a couple of young lawyers come in (not council members) who had just opened a law firm. They presented an issue -- how to best go about marketing their new firm -- to the members of the section council and then the section council spent about a half hour helping them generate ideas and solutions to help solve the issue. The lawyers and legal administrators on the section council have a lot of combined experience in firms of different sizes and practice areas and was able to put a lot of concentrated horsepower on helping these young lawyers.

One of the ideas that came up was that in marketing a new law practice, the smaller your practice niche (a word I insist on pronouncing like it rhymes with "itch" because pronouncing it with a French accent makes me feel like an effete movie villain) the easier it is to be remembered.

One of the two young lawyers is an avid college sports fan interested in building a criminal practice, so naturally, one of the ideas that came out was to work on becoming the criminal defense lawyer every student on campus at the local university calls for traffic infractions, etc. Drilling down even more, he could become the criminal lawyer known by the football and basketball teams on campus -- groups that have demonstrated, over time, an historic commitment to keeping criminal defense lawyers busy.

(Interestingly, shortly after the meeting I came across a new legal blog called The Law on Campus published by Jason Reddish, which is dedicated to serving this same niche in Maryland.)

Now, marketing your practice in a small niche is not ground-breaking advice, but it is good advice. And like most good advice it is given far more often than it is followed.

The usual reason given for why a narrow practice niche is desirable, is that it is easier to market a narrow niche than a broad one. If you are a general practitioner who serves a 15 county area in any and all legal matters, it is very hard to know how or where to focus your business development time and resources. If you want to be the go to person for DUI infractions on one college campus, it suddenly starts to look a lot more straightforward. That is the reasoning I would have given.

But there was a bit more: listening to everybody discuss the issue gave me a different view on something I thought I knew.

The folks on the section council emphasized that what was great about a tight niche like the one we discussed was not just how it made marketing easier and more effective. Because it draws on the lawyer's life experiences, interests and passions it creates a nexus between the lawyer and the group of people she hopes to represent - a closeness - that helps the lawyer to better understand and ultimately serve the needs of her clients. It's the win-win that is so frustratingly elusive sometimes in law practice.

So while I didn't learn something brand new, I did get a brand new way of looking at an old issue.

It was probably even worth enduring the ice breaker.