Writing articles for promotion - the how and the why

‘Write articles!’ it says on page one of the How to Market a Law Firm manual. Unfortunately, this is chocolate teapot territory with regard to how helpful these two apparently inoffensive words actually are.

Whether you are a one-man band or a 300-strong law firm, getting lawyers to write articles is not easy. Even assuming that you actually receive some text, the articles in question often appear in a style more suited to a textbook than one which might seduce a lay reader.

There are two key issues: first, the desirability of writing articles and, second, the process of obtaining text.

Why we write
In the private client sector there is no doubt that the concept of writing articles has found favour as a powerful marketing tool. Demonstrating legal expertise and, through publication externally, becoming known for doing so, is a way of differentiating yourself from the pack.

The legal aid community is no different in terms of needing to communicate to its customers that it exists to provide legal services. My firm, Duncan Lewis, targets local newspapers and newspapers aimed at minority communities – sometimes translating articles into relevant languages.

The second use of such articles is to avoid the most heinous of website crimes – having a legal updates page with no content that post-dates the First World War. In this regard, the website is still a marketing tool, albeit one which validates a consumer’s choice rather than attracting them to you in the first place. This ignores the Google potential of keywords within the articles themselves, although the way that this works is another subject.

There is much to be gained from writing articles that reflect your firm’s expertise in respect of current legal issues, which is as true of the legal aid sector as of the private sector.

How to do it
If articles are desirable, who is going to write them? If lawyers won’t or don’t do it, or if they do and the articles are less than perfect, the obvious answer is to go to a third-party provider. There are two types of provider. The first prepares legal articles that can, with the addition of the name of a person and/or firm, be made bespoke to your firm. The second provider is a ‘news feed’ based on current affairs, albeit those with a legal bent.

The easiest way to understand the distinction is that you would expect a lawyer to provide legal articles to a newspaper for publication, whereas you would expect a newspaper to write news feed content for itself.

There are some excellent newsfeed services but they only address the second part of the marketing equation referred to above – they look great on a website, but they are no good for external marketing.

There are also some dreadful news feed services. Though it is slightly tangential, allow me a brief aside to share the worst example I have ever seen. The updates page of one law firm’s website appeared to have been linked to a Google search on the basis of the keyword ‘law’. Far from having cutting-edge legal articles, the website turned into something more akin to a celebrity gossip column. The apparent popularity of the actor Jude Law meant that the website regaled tabloid tales of Mr Law – not the slightly weightier details of the revisions to the rules relating to the Child Support Agency.

Help wanted
There are also some very good legal article publishers. But none of them provides content on many of the subject areas relevant to legal aid. I have spoken to some publishers about this and they don’t write them because no one buys them, and (I say) no one buys them because no one has written them.

I have spoken to a publisher who is prepared to generate content based on housing, social welfare, family, immigration and other issues relevant to legal aid. But for them to do this, there needs to be some interest from the legal aid sector. The louder the interest, the lower the likely price of the articles. Is anyone else interested?

Adam Makepeace is practice manager at Duncan Lewis & Co