(Disclaimer: this post contains discussion about hourly rates. Reader discretion advised. 🫣)

If you ever wanted to put a dollar value on your domain expertise for objective comparison vs. others, this chart might make your day.

Hubspot published an interesting peek into the world of expert witnesses and the eye-popping hourly rates and annual revenues an individual can rake in by offering their unique lens to a high-stakes trial.

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The highest rates on the chart are in the medical field which makes sense.

I often use medicine as a proof point of a generalist vs. niche strategy (e.g., if you needed a knee replacement, would you go to a primary care doctor or an orthopedic surgeon?)

This chart aligns with that idea:

The narrower the specialty

The scarcer the expert pool

And the greater the market leverage the expert can wield.

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As you move down the list, you get more into the tech/business disciplines and other trades, but notice they’re nearly all still quite niche.

Even last on the list, “horse expert” commands $225/hour. Not bad!

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There are a couple more generic “marketing” or “advertising” categories, but notice you don’t see anything like “strategist” or “corporate athlete”.

Now, I’m not proposing you niche down just to build out a revenue stream via the court system.

Instead, this simply paints the picture of how markets assign value to specific domain expertise.

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One more layer -- the feature mentions a ‘yellow pages’ of expert witnesses called SEAK, where you notice immediately that even within one’s domain, experts have to differentiate to stand out from the crowd.

Zoom in to this page on Psychology experts, and you’ll see subdomains such as:

• Jail suicide expert
• Flight crew psychology
• Military mental health

Once again, why go this granular with your marketing position?

So that when presented with a sea of otherwise seemingly similar expert help, you’re the one that stands out as the obvious match for your client’s dicey case.

Sound familiar?

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💡

-Wes