I recently wrote about why lawyers are struggling with client acquisition and what to do about it. When it comes to what to do, it often helps to get specific. In this post I’ll discuss an opportunity that is here for the taking for all lawyers who currently have a website with a blog, and very easy for lawyers using LawLytics.
In the United States, we currently live in the most uncertain and politically fraught environment any living lawyer has seen in their lifetime. If you’re a lawyer in private practice you have an outstanding opportunity to serve your community and contribute to the national discourse while building your online visibility, credibility, and reputation. Doing so will lead to more visitors to your website, and ultimately to more business.
In this hyper-charged partisan environment, as a lawyer, you can add a much-needed voice to the online discourse. You can supply a confused, and often times manipulated population with much needed reliable information. You can be the voice of (legal) reason.
There is currently a huge appetite for legally accurate content that answers a range of questions on peoples’ minds. And there’s a compelling case for answering their questions on your firm’s website. This is true even if there’s not a direct connection between the question and representation that you can monetize.
There are many pundit lawyers stoking fear and mistrust much more effectively than they ever practiced law. They appear on cable news as members of panels or they have crackpot YouTube shows that espouse conspiracy theories about the law with the confidence of a well-published legal scholar. And the average non-lawyer can’t tell the difference between what is legally accurate and what is not.
As a consequence, there is a confused and contentious populous of non-lawyers who cite pundit lawyers, who trust them, who share their materials, and who debate about them, or their theories, on social media. They are algorithmically served information to support their point of view, which they lob at those on the “other side” of an equally confused information void. And they are manipulated by hits adrenaline or dopamine and they go from Twitter skirmishes to Reddit debates, to Facebook tirades, to trolling comments below articles on news sites favored by the far right, far left, and everywhere in between.
As a lawyer, you have the opportunity to be a voice of reason and a trusted source for truth. Using your law firm’s website, you can correct the misinformation. You can quickly build yourself and your law firm into a trusted source for truth. Your website can be the source people use to fact check information about the political wedge of the moment.
You can do this by blogging about what people are debating about or worrying about. By being a voice of legal reason, and steadiness, in an uncertain moment, you’ll provide the context that many non-lawyers are lacking.
When a blog post that you write becomes the dispute-settler that is shared, you become the authority on the topic. Even if that topic is tangentially related, or not related at all, to your primary area(s) of practice, it is valuable exposure and builds your credibility on all legal topics with both human beings and search engines.
All you need is a law firm website with a built-in blog, a topic, and a few moments to put your thoughts into writing. The blog part is easy when you’re with LawLytics. All LawLytics websites come with a built-in legal blog that every attorney can use without any learning curve because it’s essentially like using a word processor. The topic part is also made easy with LawLytics because we provide direction, ideas, and guidance.
If your website is already with LawLytics and you’d like guidance around getting started with this type of blogging, or help taking it to the next level, we’re here to help. If you don’t have a website, if your website lacks a built-in blog, or if you are on a platform or with an agency that makes blogging difficult or complicated, switching to LawLytics is easy and affordable. Stop letting opportunities pass you by and see how easy it is to grow your practice by doing a quick interactive demo of LawLytics.
