Toward a Daubert Standard for Law Firm Marketing

If you have worked on personal injury cases or in criminal court, you are used to making sure that the evidence you present is admissible under the Daubert standard. Since 1993 when the United States Supreme Court ruled on the Daubert case, states have adopted this standard for expert witness testimony related to medicine and related scientific fields, and today almost every state follows the Daubert standard. It requires witnesses who cite published research to cite studies that are transparent about their methodology, and it requires judges to evaluate the quality of the research before allowing witnesses to present it to the jury. It is the Supreme Court’s way of protecting people from jury verdicts and court decisions based on junk science or fake science.

While the people who read your law firm’s blog are not going to vote to convict a defendant or award damages equivalent to a plaintiff’s six-figure medical bills, professionalism dictates that you, as a lawyer, do your due diligence to fact-check your information and to show your work in a level of detail that would make math teachers everywhere smile. If you do this, your legal blog content will win over readers and prospective clients with its credibility and will endear itself to Google with its search engine optimization (SEO).

Cite Statutes and Court Decisions Directly

Lawsuits, trials, court decisions, and new legislation that are newsworthy enough to be the subject of articles on general interest websites make for great blog post topics. If a new development related to your practice area makes the news, simply summarizing the news article on your blog is not enough, even if you include a link to the news article. You should also link to the text of the statute, court decision, and/or criminal complaint, if you can find them. Statutes are readily accessible through Google searches; you can find the other types of documents, if they have been published, by searching Google Scholar and the Department of Justice website, respectively.

Corroborate Your Sources

If you have come far enough in your legal career that you are responsible for the blog on a law firm’s website, you are well versed in corroborating pieces of evidence. Corroborating the information in your blog posts serves several purposes. First, it gives you a chance to show prospective clients what you are made of; well researched blog posts that link to credible sources will show your target audience that you are knowledgeable and diligent. Second, linking to authoritative content makes your content more authoritative in the eyes of Google’s search result ranking bots.

And Where Do Lawyers Find the Time to Do All of This?

Writing law firm blog content that you would be proud to read in front of a judge is as time-consuming as it sounds. The good news is that you don’t have to write it yourself. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create factually accurate, readable blog content that links to authoritative sources.

Three Content Marketing Rookie Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

They say that content is king, but the borders of its kingdom are not exactly secure. If your law firm website has a blog and you regularly update it with grammatically correct content that stays on topics related to your law firm’s practice areas and tells audiences something they do not already know, then you are already off to a good start. If you are creating content for multiple marketing channels, such as email newsletters, podcasts, or YouTube, you are doing even better. Even the creators of well-written content are vulnerable to mistakes that can sabotage your law firm’s content marketing strategy. These are some mistakes that small law firms often make regarding their legal blog content and how and where they publish it.

Trying to Be All Things to All People

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, email newsletters, podcasts, and blogs all have different audiences, so you should not post the same content verbatim on all of those marketing channels. Many companies go too far in trying to too hard to pander to the audience of the channel they are advertising on, or at least what they think that audience wants to see. In other words, half of their characters are emojis of ambiguous meaning on Twitter, while on their podcasts, they speak in an NPR monotone. This comes across as disingenuous to anyone who has encountered your content on both platforms; those voices can’t both be the real you. You can avoid the “multiple personalities” problem by prioritizing substance over style; present yourself in all your content marketing the same way you present yourself to clients in person or by phone or email.

Failure to Fact Check

If you are Internet savvy enough to read a blog, you know that misinformation spreads quickly online. Linking to other websites in your blog posts is great for SEO, but before you cite a piece of information you read online, you should check the source from which it cited its information. Law firm blogs are misinformation-proof as long as you stick to citing statutes and court decisions. If you comment on the legal aspects of things that current events commentators have speculated, be clear about which events have happened and where you are simply citing someone else’s opinion, and link back to your sources.

Making Your Content Too Hard to Access

Gated content can be a boon to your content marketing strategy, but making your content too accessible is better than making it not accessible enough. Yes, you should have a newsletter that people who have filled out a content form on your site receive. You should also have a blog that anyone who uses a search engine can navigate to. You should also aim for snippet-worthy blog content, so users can find your answers to some of their questions without navigating to any websites.

Do You Need a Professionally Designed Content Strategy?

Professional law firm marketing experts can help you avoid rookie mistakes in your content marketing. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create legal blog content that your audience will find valuable.

Successful Law Firm Marketing Begins With Your Business Name

Successful marketing begins with successful branding, for law firms or any other industry. Branding is the message you send about your law firm, and marketing is how

you communicate it. Choosing a name for your business is an important early step in building a brand identity. Even though law firms are, by nature, fairly limited in their choices of business names, an identifiable, memorable, but not too unwieldy business name can make your website stand out from an SEO perspective and get name recognition. Once you have chosen a business name for your law firm and a domain for its website, you can start directing traffic to the site and spreading the message about your law firm by regularly updating the site with engaging, informative legal blog content.

Business Names and Domain Names

Your business name is the legal name of your business, the one you listed when you

applied for an employer identification number (EIN) for the law firm. It appears on your business cards and numerous times in the content on your website. A domain name is the name that appears after www. and before “.com” in the website’s URL. Business names and domain names are sometimes the same, but not always. For example, the business name might be Bloggins and Associates, while the domain name could be anything from www.blogginslaw.com to www.toledoestateplanninglawyers.com.

The Pros and Cons of On-the-Nose Law Firm Names

There is a line of thinking that goes that the name of a business should let people know what the business does. The first time you heard of Burger King or Dunkin’ Donuts, you had some idea of what they do. Conversely, literalism is not everything. Apple has never been in the fruit business and the literal meaning of “googol” only indirectly relates to what Google does. If you name your business Bloggins Estate Planning Law, the good news is that people will immediately know what your law firm does. The same goes for the domain name www.toledoestateplanninglawyers.com . The bad news is that those names will become less descriptive if, for example, you also start handling divorce cases or if your law firm opens up satellite offices in Columbus and Cincinnati.

When Are Gimmicks Appropriate?

Is it ever appropriate to give a law firm a catchy name? Perhaps, but a little goes a long way. Most people will not take seriously a law firm whose domain name is www.dontgobrokebeforeyoucroak.com. If humor is one of your selling points, the place to show it is in your fun-to-read blog posts and in your consultations with clients. Not every lawyer has to build a reputation on being the most aggressive or the most stubborn, but when it comes to law firm names, strive for professionalism, not gimmicks.

Business Names Are Just the Beginning

Your business only needs one business name and one domain name, but it needs plenty of content pages and a new blog post at least once per month. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create blog content that communicates your brand identity to your audience.