In-House Counsel

3 Thoughts On Thought Leadership

What makes someone a thought leader, and what doesn't? Mark Herrmann explains.

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Years ago, you just wrote articles.

That was all.

You and your colleagues mailed reprints to clients and prospects, handed reprints out at beauty contests, and otherwise deployed the reprints for business development purposes.

That was enough.

No longer.

Now, you have to be a “thought leader.”

So everyone who, in the past, was a mere author, has suddenly become a “thought leader.”  It’s remarkable.

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I have a few thoughts on thought leadership.

First, corporations reward this type of activity more effectively than law firms do.  Corporations want to be perceived as thought leaders, and some corporations base compensation partly on whether employees are perceived as leaders in their fields.

Law firms (generally) are not as good at this.  You land clients or you don’t; whether you’ve written influential articles in a field is largely irrelevant (unless it pays off).

Second, you are not a thought leader just because you say so.

I understand that you wrote a firm brochure (or published independently an article) that re-hashed the conventional wisdom about some field.  That doesn’t make you a thought leader.  And you probably shouldn’t say on your firm bio or your LinkedIn page that you’re a “thought leader” based on having written one or two things.

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You’re a thought leader only when people follow you.  When your articles are cited by others, when your proposals become federal regulations, when what you’ve written has had impact, then you’re a thought leader.  Until then, you’re just another guy who has occasionally gotten his name in print.  The difference between publishing something and being a thought leader is the difference between trying (which is better than nothing) and succeeding. 

If the top of your bio says that you’re a thought leader, and the bottom lists just two articles that you’ve published in insignificant places, readers will notice the inconsistency.  Readers might even think:  “I wonder if he’s similarly overstating his trial experience.”

Finally, unless your 140 280 characters are truly exceptional, thought leaders don’t exist on Twitter.

Funny people exist on Twitter.

People who spy interesting news articles exist on Twitter.

People who react immediately to current events exist on Twitter.

But thought leaders rarely exist on Twitter.

To be a thought leader, you must develop an original thought sufficiently for your idea to catch the imagination and have someone run with it.  That doesn’t happen in 280 characters.  (Some law professors insist that it doesn’t happen in 1000 words — a long blog post — and requires a full-blown law review article before an idea can be developed.  I disagree with those folks. I’ve seen ideas first developed in blog posts become enacted as law.  And I’ve seen many law review articles that spend two sections “reviewing the history” of some topic that is hardly worth repeating.  But I digress.)

People who were already famous before Twitter can remain interesting on Twitter.  When Larry Tribe and Alan Dershowitz do battle on Twitter, that can be interesting — but only because Tribe and Dershowitz were independently prominent long before Twitter existed.

People with ideas to offer can indeed be thought leaders.  And it’s fair for them to describe themselves that way.

But if all you are is a re-stater of the obvious or a commenter on current events, that doesn’t make you a thought leader.

Don’t think of yourself as one; it can be dangerous.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. 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 [email protected].

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