Blog

One of the biggest challenges a new legal blogger faces is generating enough content to attract search engines and start reaching prospective clients. The key to a successful blog is filling it with enough articles to satisfy google, without becoming dull and repetitive. It’s more difficult than it sounds. I remember setting up my first blog and thinking about how much I knew about my field. I assumed it would be easy to knock out a couple dozen posts. No problem I thought.

I was wrong.

Writing about your legal niche is easy. Writing something someone else might care about, now that’s harder. Writing it in a way the average client might want to read, that adds some difficulty. And getting over the anxiety about putting your legal knowledge on display for the world – that really makes it tough.

It took a while, but I finally came to a realization: I shouldn’t write for other lawyers. In fact, even considering them in my writing was a mistake. Because the things other lawyers find interesting are not the things that clients find interesting. Lawyers discuss constitutional issues related to search and seizure. Clients want to know what happens if they get arrested. Attorneys use terms like res judicata and collateral estoppel. Clients talk about divorce, bail, and fees. My goal at the time was to attract clients, writing for my peers wasn’t going to get me there.

Then one day I was meeting with a prospective client, and it wasn’t going well. She was unimpressed with my age, and that beautifully framed diploma on the wall wasn’t helping nearly enough. She was skeptical about my knowledge, and thought I was using legalese to hide my ignorance. So I went back to the basics. She was considering filing for divorce, so I started at the top: terminology. My home state of Montana uses the term dissolution instead of divorce to make the process sound less adversarial. We went over all the different terms, and why I used them instead of the words she was familiar with. Then we talked about the physical process of filing the Petition for Dissolution, taking the Petition to the Clerk of Court.

And somewhere in there things changed. Where I was losing her with abstract legal concepts, the most basic facts about divorce convinced her I was a good lawyer. And that’s when I realized just how much I had learned since starting law school. And how much I took that knowledge for granted. As lawyers, we’re trained to think abstractly and at high levels. But our blogs should be focused on the concrete and practical. Clients are hungry for knowledge about what is going to happen to them. Provide that and you’ll have a fan for life.

Sit down and think about how much you’ve learned since law school. Think about the most basic things you took for granted before studying for the bar, and you’ll have blog posts for months. Break it down into separate subjects with long enough articles, and you’ll make the search engines happy at the same time. Do it with language that anyone can understand, and you’ll find clients beating down your door.

You will have trouble thinking like a beginner because you have so much legal knowledge you’ve started to forget what you didn’t know before. But that’s exactly where you have to get your head to think like a client. Stephen King talks about an ideal reader, the person he imagines writing for while crafting his novels. Well, you need one too. Except your ideal reader is someone with no special knowledge about the law. Imagine what he finds interesting, what questions he would have when confronting the legal system. Start at the bottom, and you’ll discover you know more than you thought. Now start sharing that knowledge.