Skip to main content

Legal Tech Companies Should Contribute to Legal Journalism

Legal Tech Journalism

Bob Ambrogi made clear in his talk last week that the future of legal journalism is founded on law blogs. 

Law blogs whose content is aggregated and curated by LexBlog into a meaningful network of content and contributors segregated by channel, industries and topics. And which content is distributed via the Web, email and social media. 

Rather than these lawyers and law firms hiring public relations and marketing agencies to get them in the news, these law firms and lawyers are creating the news with their niche blog publications.

No gate keepers. No relying on reporters whose publications are often behind behind pay walls.

If there is any group spending a lot of money PR and marketing while at the same time producing so little journalism in the form of blogging, it’s legal tech companies. The same legal tech companies heavily represented at Ambrogi’s talk on the power of citizen joiyrnalists – just like them.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard from legal tech companies, “We’re going to hire someone to handle our blogging and social media, then we’ll be covered.

” Like having a 25 year old employee with no domain expertise on your technology and its role in the industry is going to help because they know how to type and use the Internet.

A credible alternative would be to look at doing six to twelves pieces a year and have those pieces flow into LexBlog.

You’ll pick up each a company profile page, a personal profile page and a page for your independent publication – a publication indexed on your domain, not LexBlog’s domain.

Need a platform and an independent publication site, LexBlog can do it for you. But we’ll do all of the above, including circulating your commentary, for free.

If this is too hard, then you should revisit why you have a company to start with – or at a minimum question whether you understand news and marketing today.

  • Six to twelve posts a year. That’s six to twenty hours a year.
  • Posts of 400 to 750 words, no one is looking for 1,000 words, unless it’s necessary to get your point across. And this is true journalism, not some lengthy word count that marketers are singing for SEO. 
  • Share what you’ve been reading and what it means; answer common questions; share what transpired at a recent conference. We’re not talking seminal brilliance here, it’s what you already know and are observing.

We’d all be the richer for having legal tech entrepreneurs as legal journalists. Lawyers, law firms, other tech companies, conference/show coordinators and investors. All of us.

Straight talk from the people in the know with no intermediaries, whether they be those packagaing the message for legal tech companies or third party publishers. 

Legal tech companies would be light years ahead. Trust, relationships, and spending much, much less and getting much more when it comes to brand awareness and business. 

Heck a legal tech company could have their own publication for $600 to $1000 a year and have their insight and commentary further reported and syndicated by a publication headed by the dean of journalism and legal tech reporting, Bob Ambrogi.

There’s an awful lot of PR and marketing professionals chasing Ambrogi – and guys like me – around to try and get coverage on behalf of legal tech companies. Often with shallow messages that do more to hurt the company than help it. 

Seems so simple, but legal tech companies, their founders and their marketing agencies are  always reluctant to enter the world of citizen journalism. What am I missing? 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

LexBlog Con Can Provide Legal Companies and Law Firms an Opportunity to Connect With Influencers

Imagine a “LexBlog Con” where leading legal brands from startups to traditional larger players to law firms are offered the opportunity to connect with legal bloggers. After all, legal bloggers are quickly supplanting reporters and traditional media as the influencers of our legal community. From a blogger attendee, today, at BlogHer19 in Brooklyn. Day 1 of @BlogHer was wonderful. So many amazing brands to connect with #blogher19 #blogherpro #blogherlife #blogherstyle #blogherhealth19 #womenslifestyle #lifestyleblogger #lifestyleblog pic.twitter.com/IIcVrg9apz — Mademoiselle Skinner (@guestlistblog) September 18, 2019 There may not be a better way for legal industry companies to connect with the biggest influencers in legal than a conference of legal bloggers, ala LexBlog Con. LexBlog Con could start as simple as BlogHer did years ago and, as we had discussed for this last year, as a larger meetup of legal bloggers for a day of blogger education and networking. But ...

Erine Levine, CEO of Hello Divorce, On Navigating Millennials (and older) Through Divorce

Kevin speaking with Erin Levine, CEO and Founder of Hello Divorce , on making the divorce process both easier and more affordable through her company’s web-based application. Erine was also a guest presenter at this year’s Clio Cloud Conference, speaking on “The Win-Win Legal Services Model”.

Connecting Lawyers With People, For Good, Since 2003

“Connecting lawyers with people, for good, since 2003,” feels like a much nicer – or least more mature – mantra than “We build blogs for the lawyers.” The latter from when we kicked things off at LexBlog in November, 2003. The Internet is about connecting with people in a real and intimate way. Always has been, always will be. There’s no such thing as differentiating between a “virtual world” and a “face-to-face” world.” One world, different mediums of engagement. Engagement leading to intimate relationships of trust. The last two weeks I heard again about the latent legal market in the United States. First at Clio Con and this week at LMA Annual. Depending on the survey, seventy-five to eighty-five percent of people with a legal issue – and who may be able to afford a lawyer – do not use a lawyer. The big reasons are that they don’t trust lawyers, they don’t know what lawyers do and, even if they did, they don’t know how to find a good lawyer. Shows you that despite lawyers, co...