Speed kills . . . your ability to provide actionable insights and impress your target audience when discussing recent legal developments.
When covering legal developments, many law firms think they’re in the business of breaking news.
They think that by being the first to publish content about these developments, they’re showing the world that they have their fingers on the pulse of the areas of law they practice and the industries they serve.
They’re wrong.
When they’re the first to publish content about a development, they’re almost certainly providing superficial insights, if any at all. That will not impress their target audience.
That’s why they should strive to be the “first to contact,” not the “first to publish.”
Law firms are insight outlets, not media outlets
Clients do not look to law firms for up-to-the-minute dispatches about legal developments and developments in their industries. There are plenty of people and organizations whose business is providing this service.
Clients turn to their law firms for insights about those developments. They want to understand the “So what?” and the “Now what?” of them.
When law firms think they’re media outlets, they race to be the first to publish content about developments in the law and in their clients’ industries. Too often in the race to be first to publish, law firms don’t address the “So what?” and “Now what?” of a development because they haven’t had enough time to think through the ramifications and repercussions of it.
If you’re writing about a legal development because you want to publish a few hundred words about it within a few hours of first learning about it, you probably haven’t given much thought to how the development affects your clients. Naturally, you’re likely to come up with superficial, “Yeah, no kidding” effects.
But current and prospective clients want more than superficial, “Yeah, no kidding” effects. They want to know which issues might surface tomorrow and next year that could significantly affect their organizations.
The benefits of a first-to-contact mentality
If they want to position themselves in their clients’ eyes as go-to firms, law firms would be wise to eschew a first-to-publish mindset in favor of a first-to-contact one.
They should focus on producing content about legal developments that includes analysis so robust that it signals to consumers of that content that they should be the first firm those consumers contact to learn more about the development and to guide them through adjusting to and complying with it.
The key to creating content about legal developments that positions a law firm as the first to be contacted is ensuring the content speaks to its target audience. Law firms shouldn’t be subtle here. A piece of content about a legal development should call out the audience it’s speaking to and include specific details on how the development affects that audience and what the audience might want to do now in light of it.
(If a firm has several target audiences, there’s no reason it can’t produce multiple versions of content regarding the same development, or at least a single piece of content that addresses multiple audiences by name.)
A recent client alert I read took this route and did a marvelous job positioning its author and firm as first-to-contact rather than first-to-publish.
Delaware’s governor recently signed into law a new Assignment for Benefit of Creditors Act. Several firms covered this development within the first few days after the act went into effect in the manner that you would expect them to. They covered the substance of the act, such as what changed, and little else.
But three weeks after the act went into effect, one law firm published a blog post about it that didn’t simply cover the act’s text. It explained in straightforward bullet points what two particular audiences of importance to the author’s practice should know about the act: private equity sponsors and distressed acquirers.
Obviously, this post will make a more favorable impression on readers from those two audiences than generic content that doesn’t speak directly to them, positioning the author as someone members of those audiences should reach out to with questions about the act and how it could affect their organizations.
The rewards are bigger when you’re first-to-contact versus first-to-publish
Now, let me be clear. Being first-to-publish and being first-to-contact are not mutually exclusive. If attorneys can promptly produce content about a new legal development that includes thoughtful, targeted analysis for their target audience, more power to them.
And, to be fair, this pressure to fire off content about recent legal developments doesn’t come from nowhere. Publishing speed is easy to measure and easy to reward.
An attorney or law firm that publishes first gets bragging rights. A law firm’s marketing team can pat themselves on the back that their firm was the first to publish content about the development—and that they helped the author(s) obtain those bragging rights.
These rewards are fleeting and aimed at the wrong scoreboard. Producing content with the goal of being first-to-publish rarely wins work from clients because its analysis is lacking. The content that can help win work is analytical and targeted.
Attorneys should not let the pressure to produce content about legal developments as quickly as possible override the need to produce content that’s insightful and helpful to their audience.
It might feel good to be the attorney or law firm that was the first to publish thought leadership about a particular legal development.
But I can promise you it will feel a whole heck of a lot better to be the attorney or law firm that’s the first to be contacted by a current or prospective client about working on a new matter stemming from that development because of how the attorney or firm thoughtfully analyzed it and explained how it could affect particular members of its target audience.