Associate Announcement: What you can do to build your personal brand and win business for your firm

If you are a lawyer, you are a thought leader. You may not like the sound of this new business-jargon badge, but the fact remains. You're a thought leader. And, once you move past the hyperbole, that's a good thing. People pay you for your thoughts, by the minute increment. They recognise the value of your experience and training and expect your thoughts and opinions to lead them through the challenging legal landscape.

However, informing an increasingly geographically-diverse and online client base of your expertise can be a challenge, particularly if your business development process is centred on a golf course. So, putting the clubs to the side, how can you, as an individual, project your expertise whilst satisfying the demands of legal practice?

The conventional answer to this is to blog. Some good examples of how best to do this are Adam Wagner with his human rights blog and Jeremy Hopkins' Clerkingwell blog, both of which do a great job of demonstrating expertise online. But, for many in practice, particularly at partner level, the time required to do this is simply not available.

To analyse this problem, we recently conducted some research looking at how the UK's top-50 law firms showcased their expertise online. We found that Irwin Mitchell is the most successful top-50 UK law firm, with Eversheds, DWF, Taylor Wessing and Bird & Bird making up the top five.

We reached our results by ranking each firm against seven criteria and coming to an overall 'Passle Score', namely: the number of 'knowledge pieces' published, defined as an insight, blog, article or any other piece that demonstrates knowledge and expertise by someone at the firm (excluding news); the number of knowledge pieces per lawyer; the number of Twitter followers; the number of tweets; the number of Twitter followers per lawyer; the number of tweets per lawyer; and finally each firm's Klout score.

Irwin Mitchell came top of every category except for the number of tweets, which was led by Taylor Wessing. To find out how your firm did in the top 200, have a look at www.rankmyfirm.com

To put these results in perspective, though, last year the top-50 law firms produced approximately 15,000 'knowledge pieces', which amounts to just one piece per lawyer every three years. It's probably safe to say this does not do justice to all the knowledge and expertise held by these professionals. This void offers a huge opportunity for proactive partners to reach out to their target market, to broaden their reach and to command the lion's share of the new business available to them.

By way of contrast, lawyers in legal practices who use Passle produce, on average, 54 knowledge pieces each year, which is more than one per week and an increase of over 150 times or 15,000%. Unsurprisingly this has driven some truly extraordinary results; for a case study, have a look at https://home.passle.net/case-study
 

Adam Elgar is co-founder of Passle. Passle is a content marketing platform for professional services firms. It has created a website, www.rankmyfirm.com, which allows firms of any size to see how they benchmark against their competitors on each of the seven criteria, and their overall score and ranking.