I Am Not a Lawyer

Jordan Furlong of the blog Law21 caught my eye with a post from Friday about law firm newsletters. Entitled “Burn your newsletters,” the post says law firm newsletters (and blogs) aren’t that useful or interesting:

The necessity and effectiveness of law firm newsletters have been long overrated. Partly this is because the content is written by lawyers, and is therefore a reliably tortuous read. Partly it’s because a general legal update is of limited interest and use to clients, who don’t really have time for FYI documents that don’t deal directly with an immediately relevant matter.
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Law firms sometimes seem to think their newsletters, print or e-mail, are competing only against other law firm newsletters for clients’ attention. They’re not. They’re competing against every business and industry publication their clients read, usually produced by large publishing companies with decades of experience. Unlike law firms, these companies don’t regard their periodicals as a sideline, a nice marketing tool – they treat them the same way law firms treat their work product, as the lifeline of their businesses. So it’s not surprising that in this competition, law firms are outgunned from the start.

Furlong isn’t down on newsletters entirely, but he suggests that firms that want to keep their newsletters make them look a lot more like dominant trade publications, with trade-magazine-level writing and presentation. Most importantly, I think, he suggested that firms make sure their newsletters are about the clients’ needs, not advertising the firm. UK blog Binary Law (”Legal Information in the Digital Age”) agrees and goes into more detail, recommending focused blogging with some personality as a cost-effective alternative to newsletters for small and mid-sized firms.

From the writer’s perspective, I think these things struggle in part because it’s rare to find a law firm with the sort of in-house resources to compete with a trade publication. Lawyers have more lucrative things to do with their time, and the in-house PR and marketing people (many of whom are, like me, former legal trade publication reporters) often wear so many hats that they can’t give every practice area newsletter their full attention. There are firms with 20 newsletters that each cover a specialized practice area — who could be competent and up-to-date about every single one? That means the newsletters aren’t competitive with trade publications, and I don’t just mean American Lawyer Media and similar pubs; I’m also thinking of industry-specific stuff like Advertising Age. That’s who your newsletter’s competing with, as Furlong pointed out.

As a freelance writer, it immediately occurred to me that freelance writers are one answer, especially for firms that can’t afford a whole publishing department. I’m not suggesting that every firm in the English-speaking world hire me (although they’re more than welcome to contact me), but this is the sort of situation where freelancers make a lot of sense. If you’re writing a newsletter for, say, apparel and fashion clients, it helps to hire someone who’s already up on the developments in that world. You don’t need that expertise full-time, you just need it for long enough to write a newsletter that tells clients something they didn’t read last week in Women’s Wear Daily. This is probably even more important for a blog, where timing is everything.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that legal expertise is less important than subject-matter expertise, as long as you get someone with enough intelligence to make sense of an appellate decision. (And partners who are willing to talk to the writer once or twice about need-to-know developments in their fields.) Good professional writers put the reader first because that’s what they do for a living. And because they haven’t been writing briefs for 20 years, they aren’t afflicted by some of the unfortunate legal writing habits that lawyers can develop.