What Do In-House Lawyers Read?

If you're trying to reach in-house readers, here are some tips to consider, courtesy of in-house columnist Mark Herrmann.

I know what I read during the 25 years when I practiced at law firms.

I know the advance sheets that mattered to me, the periodicals that I had routed across my desk, and the essential online materials. But I didn’t have much of a sense of what in-house lawyers read.

This matters, of course. First, if you want to talk intelligently to in-house lawyers, you should have a sense of what’s on their mind. Second, if you ever write articles with an eye on developing business, it would be nice to know that the target audience is seeing the stuff that you write.

For example, I published several articles over the years in the National Law Journal, thinking that in-house lawyers might follow their profession, read something I’d written, and be tempted to pick up the phone and call me. (Or, if they didn’t pick up the phone, they might at least notice my name in the byline, which meant that I would remain at the top of the mind of someone who could retain me.) Were those valuable placements or not? What do in-house lawyers read?

I can’t answer that question, of course. I’m just me; who knows what others read?

In-house employment lawyers probably follow stuff related to employment law. In-house regulatory folks surely follow the relevant regulatory materials. In-house generalists probably don’t have time to stay abreast of particular fields, so they watch their industries more broadly. There’s no one publication that all in-house lawyers read.

But I have a sense that the reading habits of in-house lawyers share a few things in common.

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First, most corporations don’t subscribe to The American Lawyer or the National Law Journal. Most corporations are not in the legal business, so they don’t follow the legal business. I, at least, haven’t seen a copy of Am Law or the NLJ since I went in-house. Thus, I was foolish to hope that in-house lawyers would see the assorted ditties that I published in the NLJ.

That doesn’t mean that those articles served no purpose. I obviously had reprints of those articles, and I (or my colleagues) would include reprints of relevant articles when we gave client pitches. The existence of those reprints (whether or not anyone actually read them) helped to establish that I (and my firm) had expertise in the fields about which I’d written. And some of my articles were later cited in other publications, or ricocheted around the web, or otherwise caused my name to be seen in unpredictable places. But if I was hoping for a direct hit — an in-house lawyer read my stuff, prompting him to pick up the phone and call me — then I know I never scored. For good reason: I chose poorly when I placed articles in publications aimed at the legal profession.

(This holds true, too, for the ABA Litigation Section’s journal, Litigation. I really like that publication. In the days before the web, it was a powerful way to communicate, reaching tens of thousands of lawyers quarterly. And the format — articles that are actually readable, unencumbered by footnotes or legalese — was a joy. I published a dozen or more articles in Litigation over the years; I doubt that any in-house lawyer ever read one. On the other hand, folks who moved from law firms (where they read Litigation) to in-house jobs occasionally told me that they knew my name because they had seen my stuff in Litigation. And, once again, we’d often include reprints of those articles in materials for client pitches.)

So that’s point one: If you want to write articles that in-house lawyers will read, don’t place your stuff in legal journals.

Second, as newspapers and magazines are learning the hard way, very few people subscribe to hard-copy versions of anything anymore. When I worked at a law firm, we had a “routing list”; a journal would come across your desk and you’d read it, cross your initials off the routing list, and then send the thing on to the person whose initials followed yours. For most readers of this column, I suspect that sounds a bit like describing the gold standard or the sundial. Hard copies of publications are now essentially irrelevant.

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That’s point two: Consider publishing in online places. And that thought has an added benefit: It’s quite easy (and will be perceived as being useful, not bragging) if you send emails with links to your online articles to potential clients. But your cover email should not say, “Here’s a link to an article I wrote.” (That’s useless bragging.) Rather, the cover email should say, “I don’t know if you’ve ever considered improving your business by doing X, Y, and Z. If any of those thoughts are new to you, you might click through here to take a look at an article I just published on those topics.” (That’s offering a helpful idea, inviting the recipient to look more closely if she’s interested.)

Third, one aspect of the conventional wisdom is right: In-house lawyers do monitor trade “publications” in the field in which they work. I (and I suspect most other in-house lawyers) receive every morning several industry-specific emails linking to articles in the industries in which I (and they) labor. I regularly click through to read more when a title catches my eye, because I’m curious about (and duty-bound to follow) developments in my industry. (I confess that I rarely click through to articles that were obviously written by lawyers. As a group, you’ve made a terribly bad name for yourself. Lawyers’ articles are typically either impenetrable or brazenly self-promotional; neither style entices me.)

Finally, one last thought about how to get noticed by in-house lawyers. I was searching online last week to learn a little more about an area of law with which I was unfamiliar but plainly duty-bound to learn more. I did a few word searches through Google. How did I pick what to read?

I’ll confess publicly that, for these purposes, a firm’s reputation matters (at least to me; perhaps I’m a snob). If I had two choices — one article written by a person at a firm I’d never heard of, and a second written by a person at a firm whose name I knew and respected — I’d naturally lean toward the better-known quantity. I also noticed as I flipped through online sources how quickly I was judging and eliminating available articles. Google offered many, many publications to educate me in my area of weakness. If your article cited the relevant statute and then said that a new case interpreted the “aforesaid” statute, I was outta there. If you put “aforesaid” in the second sentence, I’m not going to battle through whatever the rest of your article may say. And if your opening paragraph was self-promotional — “the most important thing to know about this field of law is that it’s terribly complicated, and you should speak to one of our specialists in the field; just click here” — you also promptly lost me. The internet gives me a ton of sources of information; if you want to stand out, you’ll have to be smart and helpful (or, alternatively, so prolific as to be unmissable), not just self-promotional.

What do in-house lawyers read? Heck if I know. But I’m afraid that the National Law Journal isn’t the key to business development success.


Mark Herrmann is the Chief Counsel – Litigation and Global Chief Compliance Officer at Aon, the world’s leading provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital and management consulting. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.