Constant Content : Legal Ghostwriting & Content : Janet Raasch : Copy for Lawyers & Attorneys, Law Firm Business Development

This time of year, many of us resolve to buff up our physical appearance – but what about our personal and professional appearance online?

Attorney biographies are the most-frequently visited pages on law firm websites and can make a strong first impression -- or no impression at all.  Referrals are important but, in the Internet age, potential clients, reporters and conference planners will almost always use online attorney bios to validate a referral before actually making contact.

In spite of their popularity with users, most attorney bio pages are “flabby” and make a non-descript first impression.

Here are some easy steps you can take to get your attorney bios in shape.

Think like a reporter.  Make the first sentence of each bio not a generic statement – but a news lead.  What makes this lawyer unique among his or her peers?  What kinds of problems are clients facing – newsworthy problems that this lawyer can solve?  Don’t start with the kind of law practiced, but with the kinds of business or personal problems solved.  There is no place for generic material like licensure, schools or practice areas in your narrative; generic material should be pulled from a database and run alongside.

Tell stories.  Research shows that people remember and repeat stories much more often than abstract qualities.  Instead of simply citing a category of work or a representative case or matter, tell a “case story.”  This is also a great place to indicate some of your values as a practitioner and demonstrate your level of client service.

Case stories can be told in four simple sentences (with a link to a more detailed case study, if necessary).  Define the client (with permission) and industry.  State the problem faced by the client.  State the smart and cost-effective solution you provided.  State the positive business or personal outcome for the client.  Once written, good case stores can also be used in practice/industry areas and pulled from the database to use in proposals.

Demonstrate values.  At a certain level, legal skill is a given and clients decide which lawyer (or law firm) to hire on the basis of values – all things being equal, they retain lawyers they know, trust and like.  A good way to demonstrate values is to include short quotes from the lawyer – usually as break-out quotes rather than within the narrative.  What does the lawyer love about his area of practice or industry?  What was the lawyer’s favorite case, and why?  What was the best piece of advice the lawyer received from a mentor?  What does the lawyer do outside the office – in the community or with family?

Multiply your media.  Most traditional lawyer biographies limit their “multi-media” capacity to a photo and perhaps a few links to the full text of articles and other written content.  The best modern bios are like personal home pages -- with links to audio, video and the lawyer’s social media sites.  Robert Algeri of Great Jakes gives the cutting-edge advice to think of each lawyer bio as an independent, free-standing, multiple-paged professional micro-site.

Lawyer bios are the most-valuable and least-leveraged real estate on any law firm’s website.  In 2011, resolve to buff up your firm’s flabby bios.

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Usually, I provide writing and ghostwriting services for lawyers, law firms, legal organizations and consultants to the legal industry.  But I can write just about anything for anybody.  Recently, for example, I was retained by a mining construction (Harrison Western Construction) and water process technology (HW Process Technologies) company to write a short profile of a Denver-based businessman and mining engineer -- Allan Gordon Provost.  Here's the first section:

Al Provost was just a teenager when he first worked on an oil rig.  One day -- as he was laboring away on a drill, cold and covered in mud -- he looked up to see a well-groomed man in a nice suit walking through the site.  “Who’s that?” he asked a pal.  It was the project’s engineer.  “Well, that’s the job for me,” he decided.

That decision was just the first step in a half-century journey that included the creation and growth of a successful company -- as well as many significant contributions to the mining and natural resources industries.

In June of 2010, Al fell ill while bear-hunting with his grandson in Canada.  An initial diagnosis of dehydration and exhaustion turned out to be an aggressive form of leukemia.  He died only two weeks later, on June 20, 2010.  He was 74 years of age.

While he was still in the hospital, the head and pelt of a record-setting black bear he’d shot in Canada on a previous trip arrived.  “If you meet up with that bear again in heaven,” said son Don Provost at Al’s memorial service, “my money’s still on you, dad.”

For the complete profile:  A helluva engineer:  A brief biography of Allan Gordon Provost

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Attorney bios are the most frequently visited pages on law firm websites.  Some of these visits are due to the simple fact that clients and potential clients are heading to bios for a particular attorney's contact information -- phone number or email address.    But many of these visits are the result of potential clients, reporters and conference planners flocking to bios in order to "cross check" a reference before making contact.  Either way -- each visit is a marketing opportunity.

Bio 1.0 is the traditional list of dull credentials -- a list that indicates what a lawyer does but not the unique value that a lawyer brings to the relationship.

Bio 2.0 is the persuasive profile that includes personal quotes, "case stories" that demonstrate how a lawyer solves problems for clients in a particular industry, a section on personal interests and a friendly photo.

Bio 3.0 is the customizable attorney microsite.  Instead of a bio "page," each attorney has his or her own mini-site within the larger website.  I wish that I could take credit for this idea (and I certainly intend to "pitch" it to my clients), but I read about it in the excellent Great Jakes blog.

Here's what Great Jakes has to say:

Imagine that one of the attorneys in your firm has written numerous articles and has made many presentations.  For this person's expanded bio, you'd include an "articles" page and a "presentations" page on his or her microsite.

Other attorneys might be frequent social media users.  In this case, a feed from LinkedIn, Twitter or a blog can easily be incorporated into his or her microsite.

Other attorneys may have special needs and make unique requests.  This is not a problem, as the microsite pages can be configured to accommodate practically any content (e.g., a photo gallery, video or interactive diagrams).

Most attorneys currently take very little interest in their website bios.  Think how this would change (at least for an ambitious few) if they could take "ownership" of these pages and use them to demonstrate value and actually interact with clients.

What an opportunity to own and build your online reputation!

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As my regular readers know, I believe that most attorney biographies are a waste of valuable online real estate that only hit on one persuasive cylinder -- and not very well at that.

Marketing tools (and I include bios in this category) work best when they demonstrate three qualities (first outlined by Aristotle in his Rhetoric)  -- intelligence, good character (shared values) and friendliness (concern for the client).

Most attorney bios attempt to demonstrate intelligence through a boring list of credentials, and totally ignore shared values and client-centricity.  Intelligence can be further enhanced and client-centricity demonstrated by the use of good "case stories" (more than simple case citations) that show how you solve problems for clients.  Shared values can be demonstrated by personal quotes that demonstrate your personal and professional character.

Lawyer and consultant Larry Bodine elaborates on this subject in an excellent recent article, "Turning your bio into a magnet for business."

Smart lawyers turns their bios into a marketing magnet that generates leads, as opposed to a mere resume or a CV, which recites only your education and epxerience.  The trick is to turn a feature of yourself into a benefit to the client.

Bodine continues:

You may have a great resume, but it will just list all the place that you worked.  But when you go into practice, your bio should answer these questions:  What have you done for people?  What have you accomplished?  How have you helped people?  Can you give me some examples?  Writing a bio is completely different from a resume.  it really requires a mental shift.

I agree completely.  Invest in the re-writing of your attorney bio as a persuasive marketing document -- and then post this "profile" not only on your firm Web site, but also on the full range of relevant social networking and content sites.  By doing this, you can easily and inexpensively "own" the first page of search results for your name.

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Once you have created a bio/profile that works as a persuasive marketing piece on your Web site, be sure to add that content to the full range of social networking and media sites.  I am constantly amazed at the results these sites -- with their robust RSS -- generate in search engines.  I write and blog constantly, and post my articles to a wide variety of online content sites, but my social media profiles still show up higher in search engine results than any other catetory of content.

When I Googled my name earlier this week, the top two results were my JDSupra and LinkedIn profiles -- which consistently rank even higher than this well-tended blog.  Making a surprising showing at Number Ten was my Facebook profile -- which has long been a secondary effort.  Even so -- it shows up in the first page of Google results for "Janet Ellen Raasch."

According to an article in Sunday's The New York Times business section, Facebook expects to register its 200 millionth user this week:  "This saggering growth rate -- doubling in size in just eight months -- suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web's dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world."

Anecdotally, I would have to agree.  I have received more requests to "friend" old acquaintances on Facebook in the past month than in the past two years.  Something is happening here.  I am going to pay much closer attention to "working" that profile.  So should you.

Lawyers should Google their names to see what shows up on the first page of results and make every effort to "own" that first page of results.  Post high-qualify, professional profiles on LinkedIn, JDSupra, LegalOnRamp -- and even Facebook.  If you focus on personal injury, estate or family law, you should probably be on MySpace. 

Look in your search engine results for directories like AVVO that have created pages for all of the lawyers in quite a few states -- entries that often include nothing more than your name and address.  There is a lot of debate over the propriety of AVVO's tactics (especially its ranking feature), but an empty entry looks bad -- plain and simple.  It looks like you are inactive.  Complete AVVO and any other blank directory pages to include the profile that appears on your Web site and other sites.

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