Legal Ease Blog

How Lawyers Can Get the Most out of Writing Articles

You may have heard the advice that creating content can help you build your practice and the saying, “content is king,” so if you’ve written an article – excellent! But don’t stop there. Now is not the time to take a break.

Whether your article was published on your own website or blog, in another online location, or in a print publication, that article is valuable content that can be leveraged to reach even more readers, potential clients, influencers, referral sources, or even the media.

 If you create great content and nobody knows about it or sees it, it won’t do much for your marketing or business development efforts. The more people who see your article, the more it will help build your reputation, establish you as an expert, boost your credibility and grow your network – all of which can help you build your practice and bring in business.

Get more mileage out of every article you write

Use social media to your advantage

If the article is already online, you’ll want to post the link to all of your social media accounts. These may include: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and even Pinterest or Instagram (good reasons to include images in your article).

LinkedIn

There are several ways that you can get more visibility for your content using LinkedIn. Post an update on your personal Profile and on your firm’s LinkedIn Company Page. Look at the LinkedIn Groups you belong to and use the article as a jumping-off point for a Group discussion (your Groups will likely contain many more – and different- contacts than you will reach by posting an update alone), and don’t forget to include a link to the article in each of these.

You can also add the article to your Profile under the Publications section (now part of Accomplishments on LinkedIn), or as a link or attachment under your Summary, Experience or Education sections on your Profile.

If the article is not already online, you may want to pull one or two points from the article and create a blog post or mini-article from your original article to post online, either on your own site or, if you don’t have one, on LinkedIn, using LinkedIn Publisher. You can also take articles that are already online (for example, an article that is on your firm’s website) and re-purpose that into a LinkedIn article using the Publisher platform, and then link back to the full article on your site.

For example, let’s say you’ve written an article on the five most important things to know before you prepare your estate plan. Pull out the five points – perhaps a sentence or two about each one, write an introductory sentence, a conclusory sentence with a link to the full article on your site, and publish it on LinkedIn Publisher. Or choose just one or two points to include in your LinkedIn article and link to the full article for the remaining points with a read more link (don’t forget to include images here too).

Other social media platforms

In addition to LinkedIn, think about the other social media platforms you participate in or have accounts with. Some of these may be “strictly” personal, and others you may use for mixed business and personal reasons. You may even have separate personal and business accounts on many of these platforms.

As you can see, using social media for this purpose provides a substantial amount of options to help get your article seen by a wide variety of people. Every article may not be appropriate for every platform or for both business and personal accounts, but don’t rule out the possibility of sharing your posts on personal accounts, particularly if the article contains information that is written specifically for the kinds of people who follow your accounts on these platforms and contains information that could be valuable or helpful to them.

Keep in mind that even if you are using a platform mostly for personal reasons and not for business reasons, it makes sense every once in a while to remind friends, family and followers what you do for a living, and posting a link to an article that contains helpful information is a great way to do that – it promotes you without being “promotional.”

Schedule posts wisely

Remember that your social media followers don’t see everything you post all of the time. Post the same link more than once on same social channel; try posting at different times of the day and emphasize different points from the article in your posts to reach different audiences.

If your article content will be relevant for a period of time, while you are creating those initial social media posts immediately after the article’s publication, use a scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule social media posts into the future. Consider scheduling several posts about your article in the first week or two after publication, and then schedule additional posts for at least several months thereafter.

Use email

If your article is especially relevant to specific clients, referral sources, or to a certain segment of your contact list, send the article link or a PDF of the article in an email. Or include the article in a firm newsletter that goes to your clients or prospects. You may also wish to include links to articles or other related content on your site.

Other ways to re-purpose articles

You can get even more mileage out of articles by taking the content and converting it into other formats. Some ideas for doing this include:

• Create an infographic using the main points in your article – post the infographic on social media sites with a link back to the original article
• Design a slide presentation from your article content
• Animate the slide presentation to create a video (add audio for even more impact)
• Develop a live presentation based on the article to use for speaking engagements or to present to clients
• Turn the article into a script for a podcast

Even if you don't do all of the things suggested here, taking just a few of these suggestions should help to improve the visibility of articles you write in the future - and if you've got some articles that you have already written that didn't get the exposure you wanted, try some of these to breathe new life into old (but still relevant) content.

Related articles

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5 Tips for Managing Client Expectations: Infographic

Managing clients' expectations is not always easy, but this infographic contains 5 quick steps you can take to manage client expectations better in your legal practice.

Meeting and managing expectations well creates loyal clients. In order to manage expectations well, you need to identify what they are, and to recognize that clients have expectations around both outcome and service.

The client's perception about whether you did a good job as their lawyer will be colored by the expectations they have for the engagement from the moment they walk through your office door. The way you communicate with the client at your first meeting will set the tone for the rest of the engagement.

Clients with "identical" legal problems, may not have identical goals and expectations. Find out the backstory behind the client's matter. Learn about their background, family, business or employment and gauge their emotional reaction to the legal issue at hand and to the discussion as a whole. Each of these factors may influence the client's perception of the matter, as well as the result they would like to achieve.

LISTEN to the client before jumping in with your solution or plan to solve their legal issue or accomplish their goal. Ask questions not only about the client's substantive legal issue, but also about their expectations during the engagement. These might include expectations about how often and in what manner they would prefer to communicate with you about the matter, about the budget and fee, or other non-legal, non-substantive issues that can make or break the attorney-client relationship.

Finally, assess the client's expectations. Are they realistic? Are there potential pitfalls to the course of action the client wishes to take or the result they want to achieve? Provide options and suggest alternatives that might serve the client's overall objectives more effectively.

 

Productivity Tips

The April 2017 Expert Roundtable post on Law Technology Today is a survey of productivity tips. A group of lawyers (including me) were asked to answer five questions about productivity.

Here's a quick list of the tips I shared on the post:

Write everything down

Develop systems for storing the information you save so you can find it easily when you need it

Don't multi-task!

Use your calendar effectively- schedule time to complete work

Use an editorial calendar to schedule marketing and writing projects

Invest in resources, technology and/or people to improve your productivity

Although we were asked to provide only one or two tips in response to each question, it was hard for me to narrow down my responses. 

One of my favorite productivity tips that didn't get mentioned was breaking large projects down into bite-sized pieces; looking at an entire project can be overwhelming, but tackling only one small piece at a time can help build momentum and confidence. And the project is likely to get done much faster.

Some of my other favorite productivity tips were covered by my colleagues in the roundtable. These tips include:

• Never use your email inbox as your to-do list
• Don't use your email inbox as a place to store communications - file or delete messages
• Set a schedule and stick to it
• Know your "power hours"
• Create workflow checklists
• Do the worst first
• Use automation tools available in programs you already use
• Don't check email constantly!

You can get all of the tips in more detail here, and the post also contains a great list of productivity resources.

 

Need Help Choosing Law Practice Management Software?

Practice management software provides advantages for firms of all sizes, whether the firm is a solo practice or a larger firm with employees at all levels: partners, associates, paralegals, legal assistants and others. In this post, I talked about some of the advantages lawyers can expect when using practice management software.

More recently, in this interview with Law Firm Suites, I mentioned practice management software as one of the tools that lawyers can use to make their jobs easier, saying:

Practice management software can help organize each client’s documents and data, and some even include client-facing portals to allow clients to access some of their documents and information on their own. It can also include timers to help with hourly billing and built-in reminders to help calculate deadlines and statutes of limitations.

But knowing your firm needs to employ practice management software is only the first step. Choosing the right platform or program can be a difficult and daunting decision, particularly with new vendors entering the marketplace.

Luckily, the folks at Lawyerist have done some of the work for you. They have put together a directory of 24 law practice management software programs at lawyerist.com.  And if you're really new to practice management software, scroll to the end of the page to see the definitions of the features discussed in the directory.

The directory not only provides information about each program, including Lawyerist's "best fit" judgment for each program, but there is also a downloadable comparison chart showing the key features of each of the programs included in the directory, which can help you to narrow down your choices to those within your budget that have the features you require. Then you can return to the directory for more detailed information by visiting the product page on Lawyerist for each of the programs on your list (by clicking on the name of the program in the alphabetical directory).

 

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LinkedIn's New Interface: A Brief Overview

You may not have seen it yet, but LinkedIn has revamped its user interface recently, in part to make desktop and mobile versions of LinkedIn more consistent. If the new interface hasn't come to your LinkedIn account yet, it will soon. Here's a brief overview of the changes, many of which users apparently don't find positive, based on feedback I've seen on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

Navigation

The navigation bar at the top of every page on LinkedIn has changed; instead of just using words for navigation, LinkedIn has added some icons and has moved some things around, which might make some of your favorite LikedIn features a bit hard to find. In addition, all of the icons now appear to the right of the search box, rather than some appearing below the search box, as in the old interface. 

 

The new basic navigation buttons/menu items are:

• Home
• My Network
• Jobs
• Messaging 
• Notifications
• Me
• There is a bit of a separation, and then a new item, More (Update: 5/17: this item is now "Work")

Only the Me and More menu (which actually says Business in my LinkedIn account, although others have advised that theirs is called Tools) Work menu items have dropdowns that contain sub-items.

Under Me, you'll find your Profile (there are no longer separate links to view and edit your Profile), your account and privacy settings, Manage links to manage your Company Pages and job postings on LinkedIn if you have them, and the sign-out link, as well as the link to the LinkedIn Help Center. 

The More  Work drop-down (which has an icon that looks like a square made up of nine squares) includes items that used to be found under the Interests tab in the old LinkedIn interface, including Groups, Learning (lynda.com courses), Slideshare, Groups, LinkedIn Profinder, Advertising, Post a Job, and LinkedIn Lookup. (More about some of these items in future posts).

Profile

In addition to the design changes noted below, LinkedIn has made several other changes to your Profile. Some of these changes are unwelcome in my opinion, including:

1. Now those viewing your Profile can only see the first few lines (approx. 200 characters) of your Profile Summary, rather than the entire Summary - that means it's even more important than ever to make sure that your Summary provides valuable information right up front so that visitors click on the See More link to see the rest of your Summary.
2. LinkedIn has implemented the "see more" concept on other aspects of your Profile as well; the descriptions under each of your positions other than your current position in the Experience section won't show unless the visitor clicks the view more link, and only three "featured" skills and endorsements show on your Profile without clicking on a similar link. Recommendations are treated similarly.
3. Several of the customized sections that help your Profile stand out, including Honors and Awards, Organizations, and Publications have now been grouped together under Accomplishments, and the new layout places less emphasis on these items.
4. LinkedIn has removed the ability to customize your Profile by rearranging the order of sections.

Home Page

LinkedIn's Home page has also gotten a makeover. A mini-snapshot of your Profile on the left, including your name, photo, professional headline and statistics for Who's Viewed Your Profile and Views of posts. The look of the network update (share an article, photo, or update) and Publisher (write an article) boxes has also been modified.

Design changes 

When you view your LinkedIn Profile now, you'll see that LinkedIn has made a number of design changes to the Profile. These include a change in the dimensions of your header image (if you were using one), and a switch from a square Profile photo to a round one. 

LinkedIn has added a header to some pages (such as Groups, for example), which appears under the black navigation bar. That header, which varies in size depending on the page, still incorporates LinkedIn blue, but appears to have an hombre effect, beginning with the dark blue toward the left of the screen, and moving to more of a teal color to the right of the screen.

Features eliminated

Along with these changes, LinkedIn has eliminated some features, including some features that I found extremely helpful. One of those features was tagging; you no longer have the ability to 'tag' your contacts in order to filter or to send targeted messages with a free account. Now the only options you have for your contacts are to send them a message or to remove them. The elimination of tagging also restricts your ability to easily sort through your contacts; the only remaining options are to sort by first name, last name or recently added.

The How You Rank feature is also no longer available, as is the View Profile As feature, which would allow you to see how your Profile looks to others on LinkedIn. You are also now unable to customize the web links you add to your Profile the way you did in the past - if you had customized them before, visitors to your Profile will now see long URLs with your customized name in parentheses.

Perhaps most disconcerting for power users of LinkedIn is the loss of Advanced Search features, and the Alumni search is no longer there (although you can still find alumni, just not quite as easily).

Temporarily unavailable

As of this writing, some LinkedIn features are listed as "temporarily unavailable," which seems to imply that they'll be returning. These include the ability to export your resume, sort updates in your feed on your Home page, and the Profile Strength feature. (Update, May 2017: Profile Strength is back, but somewhat different now - you can find it under the "top card" information on your Profile (below your Summary). It will walk you through the completion steps until LinkedIn deems your Profile complete, and then you'll receive an "All Star" rating).

Additional Changes
LinkedIn has also made changes to the My Network tab, the Inbox, Notifications, and Company Pages. Stay tuned for future posts that will go into more detail about these and other changes.

Related articles

New York County Issues Ethics Opinion Clarifying Rules on Lawyers' Use of LinkedIn

LinkedIn's Publishing Platform: A Marketing Opportunity

Productivity Tool Trello Being Acquired - Will It Become Even More Useful?

In my Simple Steps column in the January/February 2017 issue of Law Practice magazine, "Get Your To-Do Lists Under Control with These Productivity Tools," I talk about Trello. Launched five years ago, Trello has already acquired over 19 million users.

Trello is a basic online project management app which is more visual than a traditional to-do list. It uses Boards for projects or categories of information. Within Boards, Lists show the progress of tasks, represented by Cards, within the project. Labels, color-coding, images, checklists and notes can all be added to Cards to help organize information. Trello can be used as an individual productivity tool, but it can also be used by teams of people to easily collaborate, see the progress of projects, and assign tasks (Read my article for more information about how you might use Trello in your practice.)

Earlier this week, Trello announced that it is being acquired by Atlassian, a company who reportedly places a premium on research and development, and whose mission is to develop software to help teams get work done. As a result, additional improvements in the Trello platform are expected. Trello will continue to be operated as a stand-alone product, so existing Trello users will be able to maintain their accounts and Boards.

If you aren't already using Trello, you can learn about all of its features here, or check out the Trello blog for great articles to help boost your productivity in 2017.

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Can Mindfulness and Meditation Make You A Better Lawyer? [Book Review]

The Anxious Lawyer, An 8-Week Guide to a Joyful and Satisfying Law Practice Through Mindfulness and Meditation is a straightforward book which incorporates personal stories, basic introductory information and mindfulness and meditation exercises written specifically for lawyers. *(Full disclosure: I received a free copy of the book from author Jeena Cho in exchange for providing my honest review of the book.)

The authors, Jeena Cho and Karen Gifford, both lawyers themselves, share their experiences with meditation, the different reasons they were each separately drawn to the practice, and how it has helped them in their personal and professional lives, making their lives as lawyers – and as people – more rewarding. Cho is a bankruptcy practitioner in California while Gifford was a litigator and enforcement attorney for the Federal Reserve and is now an investor and advisor on policy and regulatory issues in the financial technology fields.

The legal profession is stressful, and more and more lawyers are suffering. It’s one of the reasons I started my consulting practice, Legal Ease Consulting, Inc., and its corresponding website, Lawyer Meltdown. The phrase, “lawyer meltdown,” resonates with far too many lawyers, who are stricken with the disease of “busyness,” whether it helps themselves, their clients or their firms, or not. (Although this problem is not limited to lawyers—our whole society suffers from busyness—and the lessons and concepts in this book could easily be applied to other professionals).

Meditation and mindfulness are not easy for many lawyers to wrap their heads around, and Cho and Gifford spend time talking about why that might be and how lawyers can challenge the assumptions that may lead to negative or uncomfortable feelings about the practice. I became interested in the book as a way to learn about another set of tools that might be helpful not only to my clients (the majority of whom are lawyers), but to gain a deeper understanding of lawyer meltdown and whether these techniques could help those who occasionally—or often—feel overwhelmed by the stresses of practicing law.

Even if you’ve never considered meditation or mindfulness before, this book is a helpful guide, introducing you to those concepts and taking you through a progression of meditation practices. The authors are adamant that the practice does not need to be long or complicated, particularly for beginners.

Over an eight-week period, the authors explain different meditation and mindfulness types and exercises, including a range of practices, from sitting quietly 10 minutes a day, focusing on the breath, to doing a body scan, or using mantra repetition to spend “less time unconsciously at the mercy of your thoughts and more time in a settled and quieter state.”

Using these practices can help you to connect to the deeper meaning or closely held values in the work you do every day and the reasons you chose the practice of law, rather than listening unconsciously to external forces and judgments which may not reflect your values. Guided meditations can be found on the book’s companion website, theanxiouslawyer.com. The book also provides tips on what the authors call “off the cushion” exercises that anyone can do while going about the business of their daily life and law practice. These tips and strategies may be particularly attractive to lawyers who seek to learn how to cope with everyday stressors of the practice as they arise.

The book is worth reading even if you’re skeptical about mindfulness and meditation in general, or are reasonably certain that you ‘can’t’ do it. The authors dispel some myths about meditation and what meditation really means. For example, it doesn’t mean clearing your mind of all thoughts. And the book cites several studies that show that regular meditation practice is good for your physical, as well as your mental, health. But the parts of the book that may be even more useful to many lawyers than those about “typical” mediation are those that discuss how to translate these practices into your daily life.

One example is recognizing the “moment of choice” – the moment when you become consciously aware of something and have a choice as to how you’re going to react to it. The moment of choice in meditation is the moment when you notice that your mind has wandered or that you’ve gotten caught up in your thoughts; at that moment, you have an opportunity to simply return to your meditation practice and to focus on your breathing. Alternatively, you could choose to beat yourself up for allowing your mind to wander in the first place. Which is more productive?

This concept of the moment of choice can be extended into other areas and other parts of your life outside of meditation. When you recognize that something isn’t going right in your practice, that you’ve taken on a bad client, or that something needs to change, rather than focusing on the negative of where you are, you can choose instead to celebrate the fact that you’ve recognized a problem. This can help free you to focus on finding a solution or determining how best to minimize the damage moving forward, rather than beating yourself up over getting into the situation in the first place. You can choose to dwell on the negative or you can choose to refocus and move forward.

A related concept from the book that sounds simple but is much more difficult in practice is the idea that there are limitations on what lawyers can fix. Accepting that there are aspects of what you do that are out of your control can free you to focus on what you can do to improve a situation, rather than dwelling on the fact that it isn’t how you might like to be. Instead of trying to fix everything, acknowledging that many clients are in crisis and many aspects of their crisis cannot be solved by their legal issue, but might not be so easily separated from it, may result in a better relationship with your clients. Simply allowing them to vent or to tell their story may free them to turn their attention to what is important for the legal case.

Mindfulness and meditation are a form of self-care, which may lawyers are sorely lacking because so much of their focus is on others’ problems and how to solve them. The idea of practicing compassion toward yourself as well as others may be a good solution for constant busyness which may actually reduce productivity. Self-care allows you to refuel your own tank so you are available to give to others.

You may think you don’t have time to meditate – or to read this book – but the authors have broken it down into bite-sized pieces; you only need to read one chapter a week and then follow a daily meditation practice using the techniques or concepts outlined in that chapter. As the holidays approach and another season of hectic, “busy,” activity approaches, it’s an ideal time to start a new habit that will not only help to reduce the stress and anxiety of the holidays, but stand you in good stead in the New Year, possibly offering a new perspective of yourself and your practice. Give meditation – and this book – a try.

 

Choosing Office Space for your Law Firm

Office space is one of the biggest expenses for any law firm. What do you need to know when choosing office space? I was recently interviewed by Law Firm Suites about this very issue. Here is an excerpt from the interview with some of the things I think you need to think about when choosing office space for your law practice:

Does your space need to attract walk-in business? Do you need a full-time office or only an on-demand office space? Is there conference space available? How much demand is there for that conference space? Do you need immediate availability (if a client calls and needs to meet with you right away, will there be meeting space available)?

Are you planning for growth? If so, will your office space be able to grow with you? Is the office look and feel in line with your brand identity? Do the fees and costs fit into your budget and financial goals? What kind of environment promotes your best work? Is it a busy, collaborative environment, or do you require more privacy, peace, and quiet? Consider how your workspace will affect your productivity and how you feel about your work.

Read the full interview here.

 

Choosing Ghostwriters, Blogging and Social Media Service Providers

In my last post,I talked about delegating or outsourcing some blogging and social media tasks to others to reduce the burden of managing these activities, while still gaining many of the benefits.

But using outside services to write or post for you does raise some potential issues, including loss of engagement, style that is inconsistent with the individual lawyer or firm, and potential ethical issues. (For more on blogs and ghostwriting, see my posts Should You Use a Ghostwriter for Your Blog and Ghostwriting and Legal Blogs or my post on the Lawyerist blog, Outsourcing Blogs and Social Media). 

My last post talked a bit about choosing a writer or service (or an employee or associate in your firm) that understands and can convey the correct style, but there's more to consider than that.

The safest (and most effective) course of action, rather than outsourcing the entire endeavor, is to delegate or outsource only part of the process, while maintaining control over your content, voice and interactions. Lawyers often use paralegals or younger associates to draft pleadings, motions or other court papers in the lawyer’s name, and a similar practice for blogging and social media posting is not inherently unethical if the lawyer is also providing input into the work, supervising, reviewing content for accuracy, ensuring that no ethics issues exist, and signing off on it before it is posted online.

Tips for choosing a ghostwriter, outside service or employee for blog or social media activities:

• Use a service that understands the difference between promotion and providing value to your audience
• Use someone who has worked with lawyers and understands that ethical rules may prohibit some activities, words, phrases or posts.
• Thoroughly investigate the company or individual, their philosophy, writing style, and approach to blogging and social media. Ask for examples that demonstrate how they use these tools themselves or on behalf of other clients.
• Require that all content be original, and provided only to you, rather than generic content provided to many other attorneys who practice in your area of law (even if those other attorneys are outside of your geographic area)
• Insist on a work for hire agreement stating that the work created for you and your blog or social media accounts belongs to you and not to the writer or their company
• Develop a written agreement that states that nothing may be posted on your behalf without your prior approval, whether the posts are made on your accounts or are comments on others’ accounts or sites
• Review all content – you are ultimately responsible for the accuracy of all content posted on your behalf and for ensuring that it complies with the ethical rules. You’ll also want to be familiar with what is being posted so that you can speak intelligently about it if you receive inquiries or comments about it, and to confirm that it presents you and your firm in the best light possible
• Check that the legal information is correct and that you agree with and support any opinions expressed, and that those opinions will not offend or otherwise upset or create conflicts with your clients and referral sources
• Establish a good mix of posts that provide value and link to other sources in addition to providing your own content and links to your own content, and make sure that promotional posts are kept to a minimum

Finally, remember that social media is meant to be social. To be the most effective, you should be the one engaging with your readers and followers. Respond to comments and communicate one on one. Take online relationships offline into the real world; set up meetings and phone calls. Make introductions and connections between people in your network. Share others’ content; it not only reduces the amount of original content you need to post, but it builds your networks and your relationships with those whose content you share.

Related articles

New York Social Media Ethics Guidelines

Delegation Tips for Lawyer Blogs and Social Media Accounts

Marketing experts recommend that to gain visibility and get traffic to your firm’s website, you should maintain a blog and participate in social media. But for attorneys in firms of all sizes, especially small firms and solo practices, it can be a challenge to find the time to properly manage these activities and develop professional quality content that provides value to readers and followers while at the same time managing your clients, your cases, and your practice.

Personally engaging in these activities is the gold standard; writing your own posts creates a greater connection with your audience because the audience feels as if you are speaking directly to them. But it requires a regular commitment of time. However, there are ways that you can delegate or outsource some of the work of creating an active and engaged blog and social media presence to reduce some of the burden on you, while still gaining the benefits of participation.

Ways to Delegate Blogging and Social Media Tasks

For example, you could hire a writer to do some repurposing for you – taking some of your existing materials or writing and developing blog posts and social media posts or campaigns around them. If you have written a legal brief, a writer may be able to turn the writing you’ve done for a legal audience (the court) into writing on the same topic for a different audience – potential clients or referral sources – by explaining the legal concepts to a lay audience and breaking down your brief into a series of blog posts.

Or you could also ask someone to interview you about a timely topic or a story in the news. That interview could become a podcast or audio posted to your website, and the transcript of the interview could be transcribed into text as a blog post. You could also have a writer expand a bit on some of what you discuss in the interview.

You can also ask others to write guest posts for your blog. They can be other lawyers, clients, experts, or other service providers. Guest posts are a win- win: they provide the guest poster with increased visibility and access to your audience, and give your audience a different perspective or new information that you might not be able to provide on your own, while reducing the frequency with which you have to create your own content. (You may want to include a disclaimer on these posts and make it clear they are written by third parties and represent their views, and not necessarily yours.)

Other Blogging and Social Media Tasks to Delegate or Outsource

Other tasks you can delegate or outsource include:

• Conducting basic research
• Identifying of story ideas or news items as the basis for posts
• Maintaining an editorial calendar
• Developing a first draft of a post based on some bullet points or a topic idea you provide
• Suggesting other blogs to follow or link to
• Setting up a blogs or social media accounts
• Proofreading and editing
• Reviewing analytics and post performance
• Posting links to articles, blog posts or to your website on social media

For those that don’t have the time or don’t want to actually write themselves, but still want to maintain a blog or social media accounts, using a ghostwriter or subscribing to a blogging service may solve the problem. But you’ll want to be sure that their writing fits with your firm’s style, voice, and the image you’re trying to project.

Checking on Style

If you decide to hire others to write for your blog or post to your social media accounts, do a trial run and check their writing style:

• Does the writer’s style match yours?
• Does it convey the impression you want to convey?
• Does their language reflect the language you use with clients?
• Does their writing reflect your philosophy and values as a lawyer?
• Does it reflect your personality? Is it more or less formal, conversational, lighthearted, humorous, etc. than you usually are?
• Are posts written specifically to connect with your target audience?

Using outside services to write or post for you may raise some additional issues you should be aware of, including potential ethical issues. For example, having someone else writing blog posts in the lawyer’s name could be potentially misleading. And posting about clients or cases could run afoul of confidentiality rules. In my next post, I'll give you some tips and things to think about when choosing a ghostwriter, outside service or employee to run your blog or social media activities. (Hint: you'll still need to be involved).

For more on blogs and ghostwriting, see my posts Should You Use a Ghostwriter for Your Blog and Ghostwriting and Legal Blogs or my post on the Lawyerist blog, Outsourcing Blogs and Social Media. 

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