What I would do in this situation is create decent unique content/ sales pages based on long tail or less important KY's you want to target and then link to them in the footer as opposed to the main navigation. These will basically act as landing pages for people searching those keywords. Then I would create more broad content based on the niche and do like a 5 page site around it (home, about, service 1/ main ky1, service 2/ main ky2, contact, etc.).
What I've noticed in the local niche is that exact match page title is golden. Most lawyers want to target their city and surrounding cities or areas and having a unique landing page for each with "City Name Keyword/phrase" in the title is 10x more effective than having "Main City Keyword/Phrase" in the title and then listing other areas serviced in the body or sidebar.
Local SEO is very tough for lawyer niches, but I notice that most of them tell their SEO guys what they want to rank for, which often leaves a lot of decent volume searched KY's still unoptimized for by competitors. This is where you can have the quickest impact. I'm working with a friend in a similar niche and at least half of the long tail type (terms with 30-150 searches per month) pages I create hit the first page and stick as soon as they get indexed. This doesn't seem like much, but it adds up - especially when the guy makes between 2 and 25 grand per conversion. With just the tiniest bit of off page SEO, these pages hit #1 or 2 very quickly. Also, a lot of long tail terms don't show local map results... which kill #1 organic ranks in the regular listings.
