Jurisprudence of Marketing, Part Two: What a Law Firm Can Actually Publish

Every conversation I have had with a lawyer about marketing reaches the same sentence inside ten minutes. “We’re not allowed to do that.” Sometimes that is true. More often it is a firm using Rule 36 as cover for never having decided what it wants to be known for.

So this one is deliberately narrow. Not the philosophy, part one did that. Just a list of things that can go out, and a shorter list of the things that get firms into trouble.

1. The permission is narrower than the internet thinks

The 2008 amendment to Rule 36 did not open the door to advertising. It permitted a specific set of facts on a website: the advocate’s name, contact details, enrolment and professional qualifications, and areas of practice, with a disclaimer that what is stated is true. That is an information page. It is not a campaign.

Which is useful to know, because it means the facts of a practice were never the contested part. Almost every argument about legal marketing turns out to be an argument about the adjectives.

2. Expertise, published, is not advertising

A lawyer explaining the law is not soliciting work. It is the oldest respectable behaviour in the profession, the lecture and the commentary and the note in a journal, with a faster distribution channel attached.

Roughly in order of how uncontroversial they are:

• The law, explained. A statutory amendment, a new set of rules, a notification that moves a filing deadline. Nobody has ever been disciplined for being useful about a gazette notification.
• Case notes on public judgments. What the court held, what changed, who should care. The judgment is public. The analysis is the value.
• Sector briefings. What the last quarter of regulatory activity means if you make paint, or run a fund, or import components.
• Process explainers. What actually happens on a first date of hearing, what a summons looks like, which documents a client should keep. Deeply unfashionable, enormously read, and the best answer I know to “our clients don’t understand what we do”.
• The information page. The one the amendment expressly contemplates. Get it accurate, keep the disclaimer, stop there.

Notice what these have in common. The subject is the law. The firm appears in the byline. That is the whole trick, and it isn’t a loophole, it is the distinction the Rule is drawing in the first place.

3. Where firms get into trouble

The pattern is fairly consistent. Publishing is rarely the problem. Claiming is.

• Superlatives. “Leading”, “best”, “top-tier”, “premier”. An adjective the firm awarded itself is the most avoidable risk in legal marketing.
• Success rates and outcome promises. A number attached to results invites a regulatory question and a client expectation you cannot control, which is quite a lot of downside for one statistic.
• Testimonials. Standard practice in most industries, and the fastest way for a legal website to stop being an information page.
• Comparison. Anything that positions the firm against a named competitor.
• Intermediaries. Paying somebody to generate leads is the conduct the touting prohibition was written about. The online version of it (paid placement, lead-gen platforms, referral commissions) is not a new question with a friendlier answer.

If you want one editing rule, try this. Strike every sentence a competitor could also truthfully write about themselves, unless it is a verifiable fact. “We appeared in the matter reported at X” is a fact. “We are the go-to firm for Y” is an advertisement in a jacket.

4. The channel question

The website is the firm. LinkedIn is a person. That distinction does more work than most content calendars.

An individual advocate writing under their own name, about the law, in the first person, reads as a professional thinking out loud, which is what the platform is for and what the profession has always allowed in print. The same paragraph posted by the firm, with a call to action under it, reads as marketing collateral, because that is what it has become.

So let the people publish and let the firm host. The firm’s site is the archive that makes the writing findable. The individuals are where it circulates.

5. Measuring it without lying to yourself

Legal marketing has a long feedback loop and vanity metrics rush in to fill the silence. Impressions on a case note tell you nothing. Three things do:

• Inbound quality. Not the number of enquiries. How many arrived already knowing what the firm does and why they picked it.
• Search for the thing, not the name. People searching your firm’s name are already yours. People landing on a briefing about a section you write about often are the audience you are building.
• Peer circulation. In a referral profession, the note another lawyer forwards is worth more than a thousand strangers reading it.

6. The part nobody likes

This is slow. A body of writing compounds, and compounding is boring at the start. Eight months of briefings nobody mentions, then a year in which three good matters arrive saying “I read your note on X”.

Read generously, the restriction pushes the profession towards the only kind of marketing that survives a sceptical audience anyway. Demonstrated competence, published patiently, under a real name.

Shilpi Chakravorty