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

Job security is a myth for lawyers without a personal brand

I talked with a highly respected legal professional last Friday who was recently let go by his law firm. He had been employed by the firm for four or five years and employed by similar large law firms for a couple decades before. A couple weeks ago I heard of veteran lawyer who joined a large firm with a major client, but whose employment status was now at risk with the general counsel’s leaving his client. These stories pale in comparison to all of the lawyers who have been the victim of downsizing caused by the collapse or merger of their law firms. With the changes in the legal services market, very few lawyers have job (or stable income) security  writes Dan Lear, Director of Industry Relations at Avvo. Lawyers need to build a strong brand or a business, and to do so now, Per Lear, the job security once held by law firm partners and in-house counsel who had reached the the ranks of Assistant General Counsel or Deputy General Counsel is gone. There’s the former general counse

The economics of a legal blogging network as a virtual community

Over twenty years ago I read of the power of virtual communities in Net Gain, Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities by John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong (now executive director of Debevoise &Plimpton). I read  Net Gain  then while creating Prairielaw.com, a virtual law community of lawyers and lay people alike, later sold to LexisNexis. I am reading Net Gain again as LexBlog’s worldwide legal blogging network begins to pick up steam. This legal blogging network is every bit a virtual community of: Blogging legal professionals Those supporting these legal bloggers – LexBlog and its partners Those whom benefit from the legal information and commentary of legal bloggers, including legal professionals, consumers of legal services empowered by legal blogs to select a lawyer in a more informed fashion, and other publishers who receive blog commentary by syndication. No question there is a business model in organizing a legal blogging community, so long as the focus rema

Blogging Makes You a Better Lawyer

LexBlog’s associate editor, Melissa Lin , shared on Twitter this week a blog post of mine on some of the reasons that lawyers blog – to learn, to join a conversation and to build a community. To which Josh King , the former general counsel of Avvo and the current general counsel of realself  added, “Also makes you a better lawyer. Also makes you a better lawyer. — Josh King (@joshuamking) September 27, 2019 I have been following King’s blog for years. He has a keen interest in the professional speech regulation of lawyers, and how that regulation may not serve the public interest. I’ve watched him pick up relevant news stories, whether from traditional media or legal bloggers, dissect the issue, analyze the law and share his commentary. Good stuff. I engaged him and others on many of his posts. King was doing exactly one of the things we were told in law school, and which the consumer of legal services would like to see in their lawyer, he was staying up to speed in relevant