Your attorney bio is one of the most important pages on your site. A lot of attorney bios are just uninspiring; they contain bullet point lists of what an attorney has done — where they went to law school, what bars they’re admitted to, what clubs they belong to. A potential client may find these things hard to relate to, and they don’t say much about who you are as a person.
But when you turn your attorney bio on your firm’s website into something that’s a living, breathing piece of biographical information, it can do more to inspire potential clients and referral sources to reach out to you than any other page on your website. When written correctly, an attorney bio can be a powerful business generator.
Your potential clients will likely look at your law firm website bio. It’s often one of the most visited pages on your law firm’s website. They’re wondering who you are. If you craft your bio into a story — a narrative about you that they can relate to — you’ll have established a rapport and trust that a bullet point list just can’t do.
Here are five elements that make better attorney bios and can make your attorney bio work harder for your law firm.
1. Write about your journey to the law.
It’s said that “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” And that applies to your bio, too. You need to show your potential clients that you care about them, their case, and your practice.
Consider answering the following questions:
- How did you get to where you are right now?
- Why is that you chose to handle the cases that you do? (The types of cases that your potential client wonders if you can help them with?)
- What inspired you to become a lawyer?
- What inspired your career path?
- What happened during your formative years to make you decide you wanted to practice law?
2. What motivates you as an attorney and a person?
The deeper you can dig for the things that motivate you outside of just winning or making money, the more you can make it about your potential client and your success being dependent on the valuable benefit you provide to clients, the more relatable you make yourself to a potential client. And it’s not just drafting a will or getting a case dismissed. It’s about things like getting a client through a difficult situation with peace of mind, or getting a client set up in a business with momentum and positive energy for success. Ask yourself: what drives you to do it and what inspires you?
3. Who do you surround yourself with?
Potential clients want to know who you surround yourself with. Not just in the law (though that’s important, too) but also in your life. What kinds of extracurricular activities are you a part of? Do you support youth soccer? Are you a member of charities? What do you do for the community? What helps you define yourself outside of the law? People will often read more into who you are based on the company you keep more than anything you say on your bio.
4. Who have you helped?
LawLytics provides a special module for doing your attorney bios — and a separate special module for case results, representative clients, deal flows — things you’ve done within the law to help people. We also provide a separate module for recommendations from clients and your peers. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here.
Your attorney bio isn’t a place for discussing individual cases, but instead to discuss cases more generally — whether people come to you because they were arrested, injured, facing debt collectors…whatever the case may be, think about the type of person you typically help. You want to paint a picture of who you’ve helped and why you enjoy doing that.
5. What have you done?
Talk about what you’ve accomplished in your law career and education. What qualifies you? This can be honors, case results, publications. But instead of just listing those, talk about what it meant to you. Take a publication, for example. Talk about what it means to you to have been selected; how the selection process worked; why it’s a big deal.
For example, maybe you’re selected as a top lawyer in your area by a local magazine. What went into that? What was the criteria? How do they define it? What does it mean to you? The reality is that many potential clients don’t understand what the various terms of art attorneys use to compare themselves to one another. So if you’re AV rated, it’s good to explain what that means. If you have a perfect score of 10 on Avvo, what does it mean? What have you done to earn it? How many clients have you helped? What do you typically do during the process?
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but the more of these things you write about in your attorney bio, the more ideas you’ll have for other things to talk about.
To learn more about what makes a good attorney bio, watch our on-demand Attorney Bios webinar.
