British Columbia’s plaintiff personal injury bar has spent the past five years absorbing two separate shocks: the move to Enhanced Care in May 2021, which took most motor vehicle tort litigation out of the courts, and ICBC’s October 2025 consolidation of its external counsel roster, which further narrowed the work available to firms still built around a single claim type. Most firms in this position have responded the same way: they diversified. Practice-area lists that once read “motor vehicle accidents” now read closer to five or six lines – medical malpractice, insurance denials, class actions, employment law, family law. That part of the story is well understood by now. The part that isn’t: diversifying a practice and running a diversified practice well are two different problems, and a lot of firms have only solved the first one. 

The visible diversification, and the operational one 

Adding a practice area to a website is a marketing decision. It can be made in an afternoon – a new page, a rewritten bio, a service added to the intake form. Running that practice area at the standard a BC client expects, alongside three or four others, is not an afternoon’s work. It is an operational build: workflows, staffing, reporting, and technology that most single-line practices never had to develop, because they never needed them. 

This is not a criticism of the diversification decision itself – it is very likely the right one, and firms that diversified are, on the available evidence, in a stronger position than firms that stayed single-line. The question this piece is concerned with is different: what does it actually take, operationally, to run that many practice areas without any one of them quietly underperforming? 

Four places the strain shows up 

Intake and workflow. A triage process built around motor vehicle accident claims assumes a fairly standard shape: a police report, an ICBC claim number, a predictable medical documentation trail, a limitation period most staff can recite from memory. Medical malpractice files, long-term disability denials, and class action inquiries do not follow that shape. They arrive with different urgency signals, different initial documentation, and different first questions a client needs answered. A firm that has added these practice areas to its marketing but not to its intake process risks routing every new inquiry down a workflow built for a different kind of claim – which shows up, eventually, as missed limitation dates, mishandled files, or clients who feel like an afterthought in a practice area the firm supposedly offers. 

Marketing spend and channel fragmentation. Each new practice area needs its own positioning and its own referral pipeline. A marketing budget and a set of channels built to generate motor vehicle accident leads for fifteen years does not automatically produce long-term disability or medical malpractice leads simply because a page was added to the site. Prospective clients searching for those claim types look for different signals of credibility, in different places, than the ones that built the firm’s original book of business. “We added a practice area to the website” is not, on its own, a plan for how that practice area will generate revenue. 

Finance and reporting. A single-line contingency practice can track profitability with a single mental model: cases in, settlements out, a fairly consistent fee structure across the book. A multi-line practice needs practice-area-level visibility to know what is actually happening – realization rates, work in progress, and cost to serve, broken out by practice area rather than rolled up across the whole firm. Without that visibility, it is entirely possible for a firm to be growing its top line while one or two of its newer practice areas quietly lose money, and for nobody to notice until year-end. 

Case volume versus headcount. A diversified caseload does not scale headcount in a straight line. A firm that doubles the number of practice areas it markets does not need to double its staff to service them – the work is often lighter in volume per practice area, at least initially. But without some form of triage or document-review support, increasingly AI-assisted, partners end up either turning away files in the newer practice areas or spreading their own time across areas they know less well than the one that built their reputation. Neither outcome shows up on the website. Both show up in file quality. 

What separates the firms that will actually benefit 

The distinction worth drawing is not between firms with a broad practice list and firms with a narrow one. It is between firms that diversified on paper and firms that diversified in their operations. A firm running three practice areas well – each with its own intake path, its own reporting, and its own realistic marketing plan – will likely outperform a firm marketing six practice areas on the infrastructure built for one. The practice-area list on a website says nothing about which kind of firm you are looking at. 

A short self-check 

For any firm that has added practice areas since 2021, three questions are worth sitting with: 

• Does each practice area have its own intake path, or does everything still funnel through a process built for motor vehicle claims? 

• Could you say, this month, which practice area is actually profitable – not just which one has the most files open? 

• If your newest practice area’s file volume doubled next quarter, would case quality hold, or would something quietly slip? 

These are not questions with comfortable universal answers. They are, however, answerable – and worth answering before the next shock, rather than after it. 

Closing 

Firms navigating this shift are increasingly looking outside the firm for operational and financial perspective on exactly these questions – not because the strategic decision to diversify was wrong, but because running the resulting practice well is a different discipline than practicing law, and one most firms were never built to have in-house. That gap, more than the choice to diversify itself, is likely to separate the firms in a strong position five years from now from the ones still catching up. 

By Andrew Terrett, BLS Consulting