Just because attorneys have traditionally written their own thought leadership doesn’t mean they should have — or that they were qualified to do so. They shouldn’t — and most of them aren’t.
Throughout history, there are countless examples of practices in society that were “the way we did things” until they weren’t any longer.
We waited for people to deliver milk to our homes, until we didn’t.
People dressed up in suits and dresses for everyday errands, until they didn’t.
We went to restaurants with smoking and non-smoking sections, until we didn’t.
And attorneys traditionally wrote their own thought leadership as part of their marketing and business development efforts, until they didn’t — or, at least, that’s what I hope happens.
Just because attorneys have traditionally written thought leadership as part of their marketing efforts doesn’t mean they should.
Their doing so is a relic from yesteryear, when the key marketing strategies they employed were networking, speaking at events, and writing—and they were forced to execute on these strategies themselves.
But today, it’s a whole new ballgame. Attorneys, no matter their practice or the size of their firms, now have resources to support their marketing efforts.
And when it comes to thought leadership specifically, attorneys no longer must go it alone. They’re increasingly able to turn to internal or external thought leadership ghostwriters to help them strategize and write their thought leadership.
With this in mind, here are four reasons why most attorneys should not be writing their own thought leadership today.
Legal writing” is not the same as “marketing writing” — even when “marketing writing” covers legal topics
It’s cliché, but it’s true: legal writing is not the same as writing for marketing and business development purposes.
Just because an attorney writes extensively for their practice — whether it’s court papers, deal documents, or other work product — doesn’t mean they know how to write marketing and business development materials, including thought leadership.
Legal documents tend to be written in a style that includes:
- Heavy use of the passive voice
- A detached, overly formal tone
- Exhaustive detail (such as including every possible argument to support a party’s position in litigation papers, or every contingency in deal documents)
Effective marketing writing demands the opposite: an active, engaging voice; a conversational and accessible tone; and enough substance to make a point, but not so much that you drown a reader in details.
Some attorneys can switch between these writing styles, but most can’t. They’re different skill sets that most attorneys do not have.
Attorneys approach thought leadership from a legal perspective, not a marketing perspective
Yes, attorneys recognize that when they write thought leadership, they’re writing it for marketing and business development purposes. But they normally don’t write for marketing and business development purposes, which affects the quality of their thought leadership.
They often don’t understand that when they write for marketing and business development purposes, they should orient their writing to their target audience’s needs, whether that audience is clients, referral sources, or another group.
That means crafting their thought leadership to prioritize the questions, concerns, misconceptions, etc., held by their target audiences, speaking in language their audiences understand (including industry jargon), and providing insights that are relevant, valuable, and compelling.
In addition, attorneys rarely know how to write headlines that capture readers’ attention. Nor do they know how to write shorter, punchier sentences and paragraphs that are now a hallmark of the writing style we most often see in marketing and business development materials.
That’s why they so often produce thought leadership content that reads more like a legal document than a marketing asset—content that often fails to engage or resonate with its target audience.
Attorneys don’t understand best practices for thought leadership
Going one step further, most attorneys aren’t students of the thought leadership game. They don’t see that thought leadership is its own world within the larger marketing and business development landscape.
They’re missing critical knowledge about:
• The creative process: They haven’t created a regular, reliable process for coming up with ideas and tinkering with them to produce compelling thought leadership.
• Content strategy: They don’t know how to break apart larger topics and cover them from many angles over the course of multiple articles. This gives them more (focused) content to publish and gives readers more digestible chunks of content to consume.
• Objective perspective: They’re often too close to their own knowledge and wisdom to realize how interesting or novel thought leadership that draws from that knowledge and wisdom might—or might not—be. They lack the necessary distance to assess its relevance to their target audiences.
• Learning from others: They’re probably consumers of others’ thought leadership, but they’re not reading it with an eye toward what works and what doesn’t, and how they can add or subtract those things from their own content to increase its quality.
• The competitive landscape: Perhaps most importantly, they don’t appreciate that their content is competing for attention alongside every other piece of content out there. They’re not just competing with other attorneys’ or law firms’ content — they’re competing with every piece of content on every browser tab their target audiences have open at any given time.
Without understanding these best practices, attorneys’ thought leadership is likely to fall flat.
Attorneys don’t get enough practice at thought leadership to get better at it over time
The issues above that support attorneys not writing their own thought leadership are fixable. But attorneys are unlikely to get around to fixing them because they don’t get enough practice at thought leadership to do so.
For the vast majority of attorneys, thought leadership is something they spend relatively little time on compared to their billable work and other marketing and business development efforts.
An attorney who writes between one and six articles a year — or even between six and twelve articles a year — isn’t getting much practice. Writing at those frequencies won’t provide enough repetition for an attorney to make a meaningful improvement in their ability to write thought leadership.
Attorneys who frequently write thought leadership, which I’d define as more than once a month, have not only found a system for producing that much volume while juggling other responsibilities, but they also tend to get better at it as they gain more practice. On the other hand, the attorneys who don’t get that much practice will almost certainly continue to produce mediocre (at best) thought leadership.
A solution for the (ubiquitous but often unspoken of) quality gap in legal thought leadership
When we think about the obstacles attorneys face in consistently producing high-quality thought leadership, the first thing that comes to my mind, and probably yours, is that they’re too busy billing time to consistently produce high-quality thought leadership content.
But what if that’s not really true?
What if the biggest obstacle isn’t one of time, but of skill?
If you read enough attorney-produced thought leadership articles, you’ll see there’s a range of quality among the articles. For the reasons I described above, not every attorney has the skills and time to regularly produce thought leadership content that’s relevant, valuable, and compelling to their target audiences.
Those attorneys who regularly have topics in mind for thought leadership articles but don’t have the skill (or time) to write them should consider turning to an internal (i.e., in-house) or external thought leadership ghostwriter to take those topics from ideas to published content.
Whether it’s a colleague at their firm or an external ghostwriter, professional thought leadership ghostwriters bring expertise, strategy, and execution at levels well above what most attorneys can muster.
These writers eat, sleep, and breathe thought leadership. They understand the nuances, stay current with best practices, and deliver consistent quality because it’s their primary focus — not an add-on to their everyday work.
Professional thought leadership ghostwriters bring three critical elements to the table.
First, they know how to design optimal thought leadership strategies. They understand how thought leadership fits into attorneys’ and law firms’ broader marketing and business development efforts, and can conceptualize thought leadership initiatives that drive actual results.
Second, they know how to execute effective thought leadership programs. They know best practices inside and out because they stay current with what works in content marketing and thought leadership.
Finally, they know how to write high-quality thought leadership content that maintains a consistent voice and quality across all pieces and that resonates with audiences.
When attorneys work with internal and external ghostwriters, they do so collaboratively. Attorneys provide legal expertise and unique insights, while ghostwriters handle strategy, execution, and writing. As a result, attorneys publish higher-quality content under their names that better builds authority and attracts clients and referral sources.
Attorney-written thought leadership should go the way of the milkman and restaurants’ smoking sections
Receiving milk deliveries at your home, putting on a suit to go to the grocery store, and sitting in a smoking section of a restaurant are all relics of days past.
I nominate attorneys writing their own thought leadership as a future relic of the past. Not because attorneys are incapable, but because specialized skills produce better results.
Just as we’ve come to realize that home milk delivery isn’t the most efficient system anymore, it’s time to recognize that attorneys sitting down to write their own thought leadership 100% of the time isn’t the optimal approach to a vital component of their marketing and business development efforts.
The future of legal thought leadership is collaborative: attorneys provide the insights and expertise; professional thought leadership ghostwriters provide the strategy and execution.
And that’s good news for everyone involved — the attorneys who can market themselves without having to invest as much time as they would if they wrote thought leadership articles themselves, and their target audiences, who stand to gain from having access to more relevant, valuable, and compelling legal thought leadership content.
Thinking about bringing on an outside writer to help your law firm strategize and create compelling thought-leadership marketing and business development content? Click here to schedule a 30-minute Content Strategy Audit to learn if collaborating with an outside writer is the right move for you and your firm.