Legal Content Writing: 10 Tips for Winning Prospects

With so many lawyers, and so many prospective clients looking for lawyers online, you must do what you can to market your firm in the digital age. These days, clients tend to make decisions based on who they know, like, and trust. One way to build relationships with prospects is by publishing legal content.

In this blog, we’ll go over what legal content writing is, why it’s important, and our top tips for high-quality law firm content writing that engages your clients and sets you apart as an authority in your field.

Understanding legal content writing

For this article, we’ll use legal content writing to refer to marketing writing–the writing you do to establish thought leadership, build relationships with potential clients, and market your firm.

Legal content writing provides many benefits for you and your law firm. It helps you to build trust with your ideal clients by establishing you as a thought leader in your field. It also

• Gives you something to talk about on your social media.
• Offers the opportunity to give your clients more value.
• Provides search engine optimization (SEO) for your firm’s website content, helping you rank higher in search results.
• Establishes your niche, so clients know what services you provide or who you help.
• Sets a great first impression with potential clients.

Law firm content writing is often your potential clients’ first impression of you. They read your blog posts or view your website and use your content to determine whether they want to work with you. Additionally, referring attorneys may use your content to decide whether to send clients to you.

Our top tips for legal content writing

Although it takes some skill to effectively write engaging content, there are some tips you can follow that will make the process easier.

Here are our top 10 tips for effective content writing for law firms.

1. Know your target audience

Your target audience is the people who you want to read your content and act on it. In most legal marketing, the target audience is the people who you would like to become clients. However, this isn’t always the case. Some lawyers may produce content for other lawyers in the hope of getting referrals.

That’s why, before you create content it’s important to ask who the content is for. If you market yourself both to potential clients and to referring lawyers you can create different content for each.

It’s likely you’ll use different terminology, tone, and topics when writing for referring lawyers compared with prospective clients. For example, if your law firm doesn’t practice employment law, you probably won’t benefit from publishing opinions about recent employment lawsuits. If you practice corporate law, you’ll likely use more formal language than someone who practices family law.

Keep your audience in mind at every stage of the legal content writing process. They are the people you want to read and act on your content, so it’s important they understand your content and find it meaningful and relevant.

2. Optimize your legal content for SEO

When you take the time to write articles that are meaningful for your audience, you want that content to be found. That’s where SEO comes in. Following SEO best practices helps your peers and clients find the content you’ve worked hard to produce.

Some best practices include:

• Using keywords that enable search engines to find your content.
• Creating content that answers your audience’s questions or satisfies their search inquiry.
• Encouraging backlinks from other sites.
• Implementing technical SEO.

Although SEO can seem complicated, we’ve made it easier to understand with our article (including tips and examples) “SEO for Lawyers: The Basics.”

3. Create informative and engaging legal content

When you’re establishing your thought leadership or building trust with an audience, you need content that’s both informative and engaging. While much legal content tends to be informative, it also often falls a little flat, with a lot of legal terminology and little personality.

The thing is, law firm content writing should be engaging, which often requires an injection of personality. Think of your ideal client and make the topic relevant to them by providing a useful example. Rather than simply recounting the facts of a case, offer your insights based on your experiences with the law.

For example, let’s say you want to write about non-disclosure agreements for your clients, who are business owners looking for investors.

A sentence like, “Non-disclosure agreements protect confidential information disclosed during a business relationship,” is accurate, but it doesn’t tell your readers why they should care, or how an NDA might affect them. It’s also not particularly engaging.

Instead, provide a relevant example. “Imagine you’ve created a new product that will revolutionize your industry. You need to discuss this product with a potential investor, but you also want to keep the product secret until you’ve unveiled it. An NDA ensures the investor can’t steal your idea or tell anyone else about it after the meeting. You can then discuss your product with the investor knowing your hard work is protected.”

This second example is more relevant, understandable, and engaging to your audience.

Even if your audience is somewhat informal, it’s still important to keep your content sharp. Check your spelling and grammar to ensure there aren’t errors, and make sure the finished content is polished and professional. Read it out loud once to uncover any errors that might be hard to find.

4. Tie the content back to your firm and its services

The goal of legal content writing is to promote your services, either to your clients directly or to people who might refer you. Include your firm’s contact information on your posts. Make sure you explain what your law firm does and how you help. Finally, include a call to action at the end of your content. This call to action tells your readers what you would like them to do when they’re done reading your content.

If you’re writing about a recent family law case, mention at the end of the article that your firm helps family law clients. Include a link to book a consultation, or a link to your “About” page so the reader can learn more about your firm. You could also guide them to other relevant content with links to additional posts you’ve written.

5. Publish regularly

Often, lawyers start publishing with an optimistic plan to post frequently but they quickly realize they don’t have the time or resources to do so. Regular publishing shows you’re engaged and interested in helping your readers.

Develop a publishing strategy that ensures you can publish regularly and consistently, whether that’s once a week or once every two weeks. Be realistic about what you have the capacity to handle. Consider outsourcing some of the writing by having other law firm members take on some posts.

6. Stay up to date on legal news

If you’re publishing regularly, you might find it difficult to consistently come up with new topics, especially when you have a legal practice to run. The good news is that with so much news online, you can find plenty of inspiration by:

• Subscribing to newsletters from law firms, bar associations, legal news outlets, and legal research platforms such as LexisNexis.
• Following industry blogs and podcasts to keep on top of current legal topics and opinions about those topics.
• Engaging with legal influencers and associations on social media such as LinkedIn, which can give you access to breaking legal news.
• Subscribing to respected journals, newsletters, and local news outlets to see what’s happening in your industry and area.

By staying current with legal news, trends, and events you’ll find topics to write about.

7. Track your efforts

If you want to know how well your content is doing, use analytics. Analytics help you understand which content is performing better than others. For example, you might find that you get a lot of traffic from personal injury blog posts, but little when you write about real estate law.

Some methods of tracking analytics include

• Google Analytics, which shows visits, pageviews, and source of traffic.
• Content Management System (CMS) analytics, which gives data on what blog posts are viewed the most or how long users stay on specific pages.
• Social Media Insights, such as reach, engagement, and clicks on links in posts.
• Client feedback, which can tell you what posts attracted new clients to you.

Analytics will help you refine your content strategy so you can focus on high-performing topics and channels, enabling you to reach a larger audience.

8. Experiment with your posts

Once you find a formula that works, you might be tempted to stick with it, but don’t be afraid to experiment. Try different types of posts, such as FAQs and case summaries. Change up your post length and even writing styles to determine what resonates the most with your audience. You may be surprised by which posts drive the most engagement.

9. Don’t be afraid to hire a legal content writer

If you want regular content but simply don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to take it on yourself, that’s totally understandable. These days, there are legal SEO writers who offer legal content writing services. They can do everything from brainstorming topics and ideas, writing your content, to editing content you’ve produced.

They’re also experts at writing and creating meaningful, audience-centric content, so they can take your topics and produce law firm content that’s engaging for your audience.

10. Have fun!

Legal content writing is a fantastic way to promote your business and establish your thought leadership in your industry. It’s also a great opportunity to research legal topics you enjoy and educate your future clients, and it gives you a chance to work your brain differently. Enjoy the process.

Final thoughts on legal content writing

Legal content writing is a great way to engage your audience, provide value for your clients, and encourage peer referrals. It can take some time to build up your audience, so don’t give up if the engagement isn’t high immediately. With consistent effort and a focus on best practices, you can create a library of content that your audience loves.

If you want to take your online marketing one step further, Clio Grow enables you to

• Build a professional website where you can host your legal content marketing efforts
• Show up in Google Search results
• Book initial consultations
• Manage client intake

Learn more about how Clio Grow helps you manage your law firm.

We published this blog post in March 2024. Last updated: March 22, 2024.

Categorized in: Marketing