How Effective Is A General Law Blog For The Entire Law Firm?

Go with individual blogs. You’ll discover what blogging is all about and build word of mouth and relationships in niche areas serving you for the long haul.

A professional who heads up all things digital for a Florida law firm recently asked over on my LinkedIn Legal Blogging Group if it was more effective for a firm of 33 lawyers to have individual blogs for lawyers or one blog for the entire firm. He was wondering for both SEO and readers.

A “general law firm blog” with a large number of lawyers covering various areas of the law tends to be a non-starter. In this individual’s case, it’d be one blog covering various types of plaintiffs’ claims — and not a blog for each lawyer. Not a good idea.

You should think of a blog as a niche magazine. Who would subscribe to a blog that’s a blend of “Modern Bride,” “Field & Stream,” and “Runners World”?

Busy members of your audience will not want email updates or RSS feeds from your blog when some of the areas covered are of no interest to them.

Influencers and amplifiers (bloggers, social media users, traditional media, associations) will not subscribe to your blog as these folks tend to be niche-focused as to the publications to which they subscribe. Think probate litigation, Connecticut employment, estate planning, infrastructure, Ninth Circuit appellate, M&A, and food safety law.

If the influencers and amplifiers do not subscribe to your blog, it will be difficult for your blog to gain traction and subscribers. Your blog will not be cited by other bloggers or reporters. Those liberally sharing third-party content on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook will not be sharing your posts. It’ll be like blogging in the middle of a cornfield, no one will see you.

Law firm blogs can be tough to get off the ground and sustain. Law bloggers need love and success to stay motivated.

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Getting cited by other bloggers, having posts shared on social media, being called by reporters, invited to speak at a conference, receiving client kudos and a compliment from a judge are the things that keep lawyers blogging. They’ll keep lawyers motivated to blog until they reach the ultimate goal of landing high-quality work via word of mouth and relationships built through blogging.

A general law firm blog requires a lot of push on the part of individual lawyers. If blog posts are not getting cited and shared, lawyers need to strategically share individual posts by email with specific clients and prospective clients. Lawyers would be advised to do this some anyway, but it can be awfully tough to have to push your blog posts out of the cornfield.

Blogs not getting cited and shared will do worse on search. Google is looking at influence and authority as determined by third-party recognition.

General law firm blogs forfeit the mantle of expertise law blogs can claim. What’s the name of the blog? Smith Jones Law Firm Blog? This says little more than we are a law firm and we have a blog.

Compare that to California Water Law published by Frank Trelease. It shouts integrity and niche expertise.

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That’s a blogger I am going to cite as a blogger on California environmental law. That’s a blogger who I am going to call as a reporter when working on a story on the water rights of adjoining vineyards. That’s a blogger whose posts I am going to share on social media in my role as a university professor and consultant.

Law blogs are not the same as articles on a website and email alerts. They don’t belong in a website in any form. They are a different animal.

And, do not worry about SEO first. Search performance comes from blogging well. Google will see the niche subject you blog on and your growing influence in the area. Your posts will rank high. In time, your posts may be included in Google News, something a general law firm blog could never accomplish.

I understand the motivation to just get a blog done, to have it on the firm’s website for search engine optimization, to satisfy the competing interests of all the lawyers who say they want to blog, and to satisfy your fear that without a lot of lawyers there will not be enough content.

Don’t bend. You’ll likely learn to regret it.

Your blog won’t gain traction. Lawyers will become disgruntled. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, based on the lawyers’ time, will be lost. You won’t build word of mouth, trust, and relationships. You won’t gain business.

Now, individual lawyers may have their own blog — but not having a general law firm blog does not mean every lawyer needs their own blog. Not every lawyer is born to blog. Group law blogs jointly authored by a number of lawyers are prevalent.

The key in group blogs is empowering individual lawyers to cover those areas of the niche they most enjoy following. Lawyers should also be encouraged to write in their own voice and style. Readers are attracted to personalities, just as they are in the case of a newspaper or magazine columnist.

New to blogging as a law firm? Get started with two to four blogs focused on niches. Maybe it’s one.

Ideally, the areas in which you blog are aligned with your firm’s overall business strategy. The goal should be to maintain clients in some areas, while growing the client base in others. You may identify a niche opportunity not being addressed by anyone.

If you grow to ten or more blogs in the years ahead, that’s great. You’ll have developed new business. You’ll have some “blog champions” who can advise and coach future bloggers. You’ll be ready to curate and aggregate your blog content.

But go with individual blogs. You’ll discover what blogging is all about and build word of mouth and relationships in niche areas serving you for the long haul.


Kevin O’Keefe (@kevinokeefe) is the CEO and founder of LexBlog, which empowers lawyers to increase their visibility and accelerate business relationships online. With LexBlog’s help, legal professionals use their subject matter expertise to drive powerful business development through blogging and social media. Visit LexBlog.com.

LexBlog also hosts LXBN, the world’s largest network of professional blogs. With more than 8,000 authors, LXBN is the only media source featuring the latest lawyer-generated commentary on news and issues from around the globe. Visit lxbn.com now.