LinkedIn For Lawyers 2021: Here’s How To Get Started

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

LinkedIn is now an indispensable social media platform for lawyers. You can be seen organically by your target audience, and making friends with other lawyers is a great referral source and a necessity our profession. This article consists of LinkedIn tips for lawyers of any seniority. I am qualified to write on this topic, having presented a CPD for the Law Society of Western Australia. I bring a unique perspective simply because I am lawyer, marketer and consumer all at once. My expertise as a true hardcore digital marketer ensures you receive a cutting edge through my advice that will see you obtaining more potential clients. LinkedIn is like a town hall. The organic reach that is possible coupled with the ability connecting with a maximum of 30,000 contacts make it a very good platform for personal branding. You can reach out to strangers much easier on this platform, in fact, it is designed for it. Regardless of your seniority, there are opportunities to exploit on this platform for all lawyers.

Why Should Lawyers Use LinkedIn?

Active use of LinkedIn is a must for every lawyer. We have alluded to some major reasons in our introduction, but let us list some more reasons properly and compel you to use this social network:

• An online résumé for you to be found by future employers
• Making connections with direct clients and referral partners
• Stay top of mind with your key connections
• Displaying your personality to your audience so the right prospects gravitate to you
• Build relationships with potential mentors and mentees
• Build a truly global network
• Search for nearly any kind of professional internationally
• Advertise based on job demographics for targeting

How Do Law Firms Use LinkedIn Marketing?

There are quite a few ways law firms use LinkedIn marketing, we will go through it below.

LinkedIn Ads for Law Firms

LinkedIn Ads are a great way to grow a legal brand, especially if they are a commercial practice. Bowd (or Bowd Lawyers) is a law firm in Melbourne, Victoria that is a “law firm for law firms”. They actively use LinkedIn to get email opt-in and grow their email list of law firms who need specialist lawyers, perhaps to draft precedents, perhaps to alleviate the workload. Because their niche requires them to engage with law firm owners, LinkedIn’s job demographic targeting is excellent for their uses. The uses of LinkedIn Ads are not restricted to this narrow case use. There is much transactional work that can be sold to a specific market segment through LinkedIn by targeting job demographics.

Have a look at Bowd’s Ads:

LinkedIn Content Marketing For Law Firms

LinkedIn is also an excellent content marketing platform. By personally connecting with your community of lawyers or your clients, you can educate them about who your firm is through valuable content, with the relevant hashtags, of course. There are many lawyers who do this well, but Matthew Karakoulakis of AMK Law is an excellent example of how you do not need an overly complex setup to be successful in content marketing on this platform.

This post is very easy to produce. All it takes is hiring a graphic designer on Fiverr or using your in-house marketing staff to produce great looking social posts.

In this case, this is a professionally produced video, but most of Matthew’s videos are candid mobile recordings of himself in a park speaking on legal issues. Content marketing on LinkedIn need not be overly complex.

This is just an amateur mobile video recording of Matthew and his friend. You can always add a personal touch to your content marketing on LinkedIn!

LinkedIn Networking For Law Firms

LinkedIn Networking is effectively the same thing as LinkedIn Outreach. Most of the time, your networking on this platform is done through your personal profile and you are personally connecting with people that can benefit your business or you, personally as a professional. Outreach is a very fine art, and law firms hoping to communicate with key persons for the purpose of making them clients need to employ caution, because there is a certain approach you must take in order to form successful relationships reliably. Here is how you find out more about our Outreach strategy.

The secret sauce of LinkedIn Networking is not the Premium accounts, or rather, not most of these accounts, but the highest level account being Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator gives you the tools for cold outreach and making those meaningful connections. Using Sales Navigator is an easy way to expand your network and covert a minority of contacts into clients. The data available allows for purposeful networking and done right, results in money in the bank.

How To Set Up Your Law Firm LinkedIn Profile

Although this is about Law Firm LinkedIn Profiles, we are primarily focused on the personal profile. I will use my profile as a reference point to explain what you need to do.

The first element of any profile is the headline. In order to formulate the headline you need to understand your Audience, Message and Offer (AMO) first, before deciding on what this might be. We will not explain how to get your AMO, as this is subject of consultation, but here are some formulas for headlines:

• Service + Rewards
• Rewards + Service
• Service + Stakes
• Time Sensitive Announcement + Call To Action
• Expertise + Awards/Certifications
• Ask Me About…

The next is the banner, see below:

The banner is often misused or neglected. You should always use it to showcase what you do for your clients as a rule, with client centric imagery. In this case, we explain we are “data driven marketing specialists for lawyers”. This is indeed our service and our target market. The banner is a visual way to showcase your service.

The next is the “About” section. Interested parties will read this carefully, and the most important part is the first two lines, as the preview cuts off everything after. Here’s my about section:

Notice how strong I lead in the first paragraph. “Steady stream of ideal clients”, “not time wasters”, and “legal background”. This is all professionally written and took quite some time to conceptualise. Do not rush through this section. This could be the sales letter that gets you the opt-in.

The next section is the Featured Section:

You can see the truncation we were describing for the About section in the image above. In the Featured section, surprisingly, a lot can go wrong. The safest, absolute full proof way to fill out this section is use images and images only, but I have come to be a bit flexible and added online publications I know will be present for a long time. You can still fill out a description in the image feature card.

Filling out your experience is also important. See below my section:

In this case, you want to make sure you use the official accounts of the company you worked for. However, there are circumstances where the official LinkedIn company page does not exist, or is not properly set up. Unfortunately for me, in this case, it is the law firm where I received my primary experience, the unfortunately named, Hoe Lawyers. Under this circumstance, there is not much you can do than to display a placeholder profile image. The other thing is, where possible, focus on the results you brought in, rather than the duties or responsibilities.

The Education and Licenses & Certifications section is similar to the Job Experience section, see:

If any Certification has an expiry, be sure to record that fact and update that certification if needed:

The Endorsements and Recommendations section is somewhere you need to invest in. Being recognised by colleagues and clients is a really important thing. Whilst difficult for some lawyers because of client confidentiality, the way to overcome it is through peer recommendations.

Although having as many of these on your profile as possible is ideal, they need to be genuine, otherwise if you get caught out, it becomes a permanent black mark on your profile.

The Accomplishments and Interests sections are perhaps the least important, but they are there if you want to give details.

The last thing you want to do is go into “Settings & Privacy” like so:

In here, go to “Site Preferences” and switch off “People also viewed”.

This will switch off this section here:

By doing so, there is more focus and less distraction from you when people view your profile.

Should my LinkedIn Company Page be under “law practice” or “legal services”?

In most cases, when you establish your LinkedIn Company Page, it should be published under “law practice”. Law practice is more in line with the status of a traditional law firm. “Legal services” could imply legal related services like LEAP Legal Software, FilePro, etc. Nevertheless, many law firms confuse the both and you will see practices with both descriptions of industry on LinkedIn.

Best LinkedIn Headlines For Lawyers

As discussed earlier, using these formulas are going to help you devise a good headline:

• Service + Rewards
• Rewards + Service
• Service + Stakes
• Time Sensitive Announcement + Call To Action
• Expertise + Awards/Certifications
• Ask Me About..

Headlines for lawyers are generally boring. However, there are a few that are, at the very least, unconventional:

As much as this headline and implementation may have mixed feelings from lawyers themselves, from a marketing perspective, it is pretty good. Now, this does not follow any model we have espoused, but this just shows how creative you can get.

Best LinkedIn Summary For Lawyers

Using Catherine Leach again as an example (because she is very active on LinkedIn and must have a good summary), here is a sample lawyer LinkedIn summary:

Now, this is not a perfect summary, but it is very hard to find extremely good summaries in lawyer profiles. You will notice the first two lines are not optimised. But read the content of this summary. It identifies known client needs, outlines her experience and a little about her approach, even if she is not prescribing solutions (most lawyers will never prescribe solutions flippantly).

Best LinkedIn Profile Photo For Lawyers

Most lawyers have excellent profile photos. It is extremely rare to find a lawyer’s headshot that is in poor taste. However, some lawyers have an overly strict look about them, a more relaxed, calm even slightly happy composure can warm their presence and be an asset. Using Catherine Leach as an example, it shows good photos need not be complex.

How to publish content on LinkedIn

We will not explain this too much, because the manual way of publishing on LinkedIn is really quite self-explanatory. However, we will explain that generally you should avoid placing links in your content if avoidable because LinkedIn does not like users taking other users outside of LinkedIn. However, for your sanity, we will outline the best social post scheduling tools we know:

• Buffer is relatively cheap and does the job
• Hootsuite is a very popular option
• Sendible is very powerful and has really advanced features

LinkedIn Networking Tips For Lawyers

This is the best advice I have for networking LinkedIn. Our etiquette is tainted. What this means is that the standards we set for ourselves are influenced by many things like our career as lawyers. To connect with strangers and create rapport on this platform, you need to go further. Further than the golden rule, go the Golden Rule+. The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one wants to be treated. This is already very good and will get you far. However, the step further is Golden Rule+, which is to treat others as they would like to be treated. Not only adhering to your own standards, but go beyond, place yourselves in their shoes and do what they would like you to do.

This can include not messaging everyday initially, never messaging outside business hours. You must imagine the recipients’ mindset and think like that person, then interact accordingly. This is easier said than done. Just with one maxim, your networking will now be a lot more effective!

How Can I Market On LinkedIn For Free?

Organic reach on LinkedIn is still very wide. Therefore, the most obvious way to market on LinkedIn for free is content marketing combined with LinkedIn Networking, which includes LinkedIn Outreach. By having engaging, valuable content and expanding your network quickly through outreach, you are able to start relationships with clients and or referral partners.

How Do I Advertise On LinkedIn 2021?

Advertising on LinkedIn beyond brand awareness for law firms is not easy. Even if you have a marketing team, you do not have the capabilities to produce landing pages, track conversions, hook up your email system to LinkedIn, etc. What about the skills to create a working strategy to get leads? That is the opportunity that awaits when you engage Marketlytics. Engage a targeted audience and their decision makers and go beyond plain engagement. We understand the legal industry because Clarence Ling worked as a lawyer.

Conclusion

LinkedIn presents many opportunities organically and on their paid channel. Marketlytics is a long term partner for law firms to end the feast and famine cycles and have a steady stream of qualified leads, resulting in more ideal clients in less time. We are able to train you on organic LinkedIn Outreach or advertise on the platform effectively and efficiently. Go on a discovery call with Clarence Ling today and see how we can help you today!

All discovery calls are confidential

FAQ

Is LinkedIn Effective For Lawyers?

LinkedIn is now an indispensable social media platform for lawyers. You can be seen organically by your target audience, and making friends with other lawyers is a great referral source and a necessity our profession.

How Do I Get Started With LinkedIn As A Lawyer?

By optimising your personal profile and About Summary. Think of your Audience, Message and Offer (AMO) as you do this.

How Do I Network On LinkedIn?

To network effectively on LinkedIn, you must effectively do some LinkedIn Outreach. LinkedIn Outreach is not cold selling to people, but an empathetic understanding out the recipient’s mind and giving them what they want, in order to achieve your ends.

Is Advertising On LinkedIn Effective?

Yes it is effective. There are a few law firms who do it, and do it well.