Insights
The gap between law firm marketing spend and attorney behavior.
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Insights
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TL;DR
A law firm content strategy is not a blog schedule. It is a deliberate plan for creating content that reaches a specific audience, addresses the specific problems that audience faces, and is distributed through channels where that audience actually pays attention. Most law firm content programs skip the first and third elements and wonder why the second one does not produce business.
The phrase “content strategy” has become a shorthand in law firm marketing for a publication schedule. The firm decides to produce more content, assigns topics to attorneys, sets a cadence, and calls the result a strategy.
This is not a strategy. It is a production plan. A strategy answers why, not just what and when.
Before a law firm decides what to publish or how often to publish it, three prior decisions have to be made. Most firms skip them entirely, which is why most law firm content programs produce content that nobody in particular finds useful.
The first decision is audience definition. Not “our clients and prospects,” but a specific type of client or decision-maker with a specific kind of problem. A content strategy that is supposed to reach everyone in a firm’s addressable market is not a strategy. It is a hope. The firms that produce content with real business impact have decided who the primary reader is, what that reader cares about professionally, and what they are trying to figure out right now.
The second decision is purpose. What is the content supposed to make the reader do? Call the firm? Refer someone? Think differently about a problem they have not yet recognized? Each of these purposes produces different content. Content designed to generate a call is specific, timely, and includes a clear next step. Content designed to build credibility over time is broader, more analytical, and less urgent. Most law firm content is written without a clear answer to this question, which means it is written without the design choices that would make it achieve any particular goal.
The third decision is channel. Where will this content reach the defined audience? Not where can we publish it, but where will they actually see it? The answer to this question rarely includes the firm website. It typically includes individual attorney LinkedIn presence, direct outreach to defined contact lists, and distribution through referral relationships. A content strategy that does not include a specific distribution plan is a publishing strategy, not a business development strategy.
The instinct to produce more content is understandable. More content means more chances for something to resonate, more signals to search engines, more presence in the market. The logic holds in contexts where audience, purpose, and channel are already defined. It does not hold in contexts where those fundamentals are missing.
A firm that publishes 20 undifferentiated articles per month and distributes them through a mass newsletter is producing a lot of content. It is not running a content strategy. The content reaches a broad audience with low relevance, produces low engagement, and creates no particular reason for anyone to contact the firm rather than any other.
A firm that publishes four deeply specific articles per month on one practice area for one client type, distributed directly by attorneys to their defined contact lists, will generate more business activity with a quarter of the output. The investment is in clarity and distribution, not volume.
Distinctive law firm content is not content that covers topics nobody else has written about. Most topics worth covering have been covered by many firms. Distinctive content is content that takes a clear position, reflects a specific point of view, and gives the reader something they cannot get from reading the next firm’s version of the same topic.
That point of view comes from the attorney, not the marketing department. An article that summarizes a regulatory development can be produced by any firm and will be produced by many. An article that argues a specific position on how a regulatory development should change how a particular type of company operates, written by an attorney who has worked with many such companies, cannot be replicated without the experience behind it.
The marketing department’s job in a content strategy is not to produce this content. It is to create the conditions where attorneys can produce it: by coaching on how to develop a point of view, by reducing the friction of the drafting process, and by handling distribution so that the attorney’s focus can stay on the substance.
A law firm content strategy should be measured against business outcomes, not content production metrics. The questions worth asking are: which pieces of content produced conversations with target clients or prospects? Which content is being referenced in pitches or in client conversations without prompting? Which attorney LinkedIn posts generated direct outreach from relevant contacts? These measures are harder to collect than page views and shares, but they are the ones that tell a firm whether its content program is doing what a content program is supposed to do: advance business relationships with people who have not yet hired the firm.
Common Questions
A law firm content strategy starts with three decisions that most firms skip: who the content is for (a specific client type), what problem the content is helping them solve, and what action the content is designed to produce. Once those decisions are made, the format, channel, and cadence follow. Most law firms approach this in the wrong order, deciding to produce blog posts before defining audience and purpose.
A law firm content strategy is a deliberate plan for creating and distributing content that advances specific business development goals for a defined audience. It is not a publishing calendar or a blog program. It answers: who are we writing for, what do they need to know that we can tell them, what will this content move them to do, and how will we distribute it to the right people?
A law firm should produce content that directly addresses the questions its target clients are asking, written in the language those clients use. The most effective law firm content is specific enough to be genuinely useful to a defined reader and distinctive enough to reflect a real point of view. Generic content that summarizes legal developments rarely produces business because it gives the reader no reason to contact this particular firm rather than any other.
Volume is not a content strategy. A firm that publishes one genuinely useful, distinctive piece per month, well distributed to the right audience, will outperform a firm that publishes 20 generic pieces per month that reach nobody who matters. The right volume is determined by capacity to produce quality content and capacity to distribute it effectively, not by a desire to appear active.
Law firm content should be distributed through channels where target clients actually pay attention. For most law firms, the highest-ROI channels are direct attorney outreach to existing clients and referral sources with personalized context, individual attorney LinkedIn presence, and targeted alerts to defined prospect segments. Firm websites and mass email newsletters are low-ROI channels because they do not reach people who do not already know the firm exists.
Related Reading
Next Step
If your firm produces content regularly but cannot point to business conversations it has generated, the strategy behind the content is almost certainly the issue, not the content itself.
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