We’ve worked with lots of companies across different industries and business models, and only a few law firms.
But we’ve seen firsthand just how brutal and competitive the industry is, and how much money is flowing through the system.
How to Get Your Law Firm on National, Regional and Local News
Local news is going to be the best bet for the hundreds of thousands of local law firms.
There are a few different ways to get your law firm on local news.
- Expert commentary on video & via email: from time to time, reporters are looking to interview lawyers about a recent legal news story. Great example are the hundreds of injury news stories going out every day, looking for law experts to add commentary and color. Journalists need this expert commentary via email (90% of the time) and on video (10% of the time). This truly showcases your expertise and your firm and helps the reporter. Most should do some form of this and have a system in place.
- Downsides: every resporter gets pitched by at least 20 people when seeking commentary, so the conversion rate depends on their story need and how your response fits in or not.
- Solution: find the appropriate sized system for your company and implement it to continously have you name in the news – not too little, but not too often either, just the right size.
- Data studies: if you can build data studies that resonate with reporters for a storyline, you
- Downsides: It takes more effort to produce the story, and not every story is a hit. Often need 3-4 stories always running in parallel to stay in the news, or a mix in with company news.
- Solution: Build a blend of data studies of different sizes and topics and pitch continuously for your firm.
- Best for: more established firms looking for scale and less time needed to dedicate by their firm. Continuous, always-on data studies for PR purposes are best suited for firms with stronger needs and volume to support.
- Founder story for regional business + trade news. One of the best ways to get your firm’s name and partner names out there are by promoting the founders and partners of the firm and have them give interviews about how they have built the firm up. These “how I built this” types of stories are perennial favorites across many different media types, from your college alumni magazine up to CNBC Made It, and similar press.
- Downsides: Not all will hit, takes time to warm up. The volume may be lower.
- Solution: Build your company story, and take leadership on promoting your firm and partners to the media. At a certail level as a firm, you should be doing this anyways in some way, shape or form – whether it’s referral partner dinners or law firm and lawyer summits.
- Best for: any firm size that has at least one partner that can dedicate about 8-10 hrs a month to building their personal + firm brand by making themselves available to media, events, and partnership intros.
Bottom line: Adding expert commentary is the #1 highest-quality and best approach for most people to start with. But if a law firm is busy doing the work, it may not be worth the experts time to respond to media, therefore producing and pitching data stories is the most scalable option to get an interesting data study out, at scale.
Alternatives to news: many lawyers who carve out dedicated writing time will hold a column at a law publication or a friendly news media source that is welcoming columns, insights, and guest articles and interviews with partners. This is a good route as well, but less correlated with the broader news and news cycles, although there’s certainly some overlap.
