9 Takeaways From Loio Webinar on Legal Content Creation

On October 13, 2021, we at Loio hosted a webinar dedicated to legal content creation. Sarah Ouis, a former in-house lawyer with a strong passion for legal design and content creation, was the star of the event. She is a founder of Law But How?, a company that helps legal teams create innovative legal materials.

The webinar was extremely insightful for legal pros who seek to expand their social media presence and build a powerful personal brand. During the 45-minute session, we talked about how to craft perfect texts and visuals that will help you as a lawyer grow your audience and attract more clients. But if you didn’t manage to attend the event, don’t get discouraged: we have packed the key insights from the webinar into this article for you. 

Enjoy!

1. What Is Legal Content and Who Is Its Main Audience?

As our speaker Sarah Ouis defined it, legal content is the information that goes in the medium. It can be broken down into two categories. The first one is technical information about something specific in a certain practice area, such as trademarks for intellectual property, whereas the second one is the information that can be useful and relevant for legal professionals in general. 

The audience of the legal content is defined by its type (whether it is technical or general legal information) and medium. But the distinguishing factor is, of course, your intent: whether you are a lawyer who wants to target lawyers, a paralegal who wants to attract paralegals, or an IP lawyer who wants to target companies, you can tailor your content to be valuable for your intended audience. This can be done by choosing the right topics of your content, its style, and format. For instance, podcasts, infographics, or webinars may attract people from different industries, professions, and interests. 

2. How Can Legal Content Help You Build a Personal Brand on Social Media?

To build a sound personal brand on social media, you need to find a niche where your expertise matches the needs of your potential audience, and consistently produce high-quality content that brings value to people. 

Drawing on our speaker Sarah Ouis’s story, the driver at the beginning of her journey was a strong willingness to debunk the stigma of portraying lawyers as unreachable and non-empathetic people. To achieve this, Sarah started to showcase her creativity by crafting different pieces and formats of content, proving that it is possible to be a legal professional and express legal information creatively at once. 

Thus, in Sarah’s case, the initial frustration multiplied by the desire to inspire other legal professionals to think out of the box has expanded into a powerful social media visibility, not only on LinkedIn but on TikTok and Instagram as well. Sarah’s passion for content creation has even culminated in her own company Law But How? which provides legal design and content creation services for legal teams. 

Being active online also helped her to get a job proposal for a legal design manager’s role in a legaltech company — Sarah caught the attention of the company’s hiring manager with her social media posts. So, legal content opens up a lot of doors with new opportunities, and, when created smartly, can even be a leveler for your career.

3. How Can You Craft Legal Content That Makes Clients Go Back To You Again and Again?

Our speaker Sarah shared a golden rule of content creation: 

“If you want to grow visibility or if you want to build a personal brand, whatever your end objective is, — you have to provide value.”

Sarah Ouis, Legal Design Manager, founder of Law But How?

It equally works for attracting and retaining potential clients: nobody is going to waste their time on consuming content that isn’t relevant to them, or content that doesn’t solve any problem. So, the key answer is value. You can bring value in different ways by educating, entertaining, helping to solve a problem, and many more. 

It is also important to ensure that your content is easy to digest, straight to the point, and practical. If your content meets all of these criteria, your clients or potential clients will go back for more. 

4. How Can You Keep the Balance of Quality Above Quantity in Creating Legal Content?

The wider you go in terms of content production, the better, but if you don’t have enough resources to maintain the quality of each channel you create content for, it is better to narrow your focus to one or two mediums, such as creating texts and visuals for LinkedIn and Instagram. 

Sarah shared a great tip on how to maintain quality above quantity at the utmost efficiency — it is to repurpose the content in different ways. Let’s say, you’ve hosted a webinar. Then, besides posting the recording of the webinar on YouTube, you can extract unique content pieces out of it in several ways. First of all, you can transform it into text and post it on your blog. You can also visualize the key takeaways from the webinar and post them as a carousel on Instagram. Another possible way would be to cut the key moments of the webinar into short videos and post them as separate content pieces on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram once again. In this way, you will be able to create a big quantity of content pieces out of one high-quality masterpiece. 

5. What Makes a Well-Crafted Piece of Legal Content?

First of all, that will depend on whether you are a legal professional growing your personal brand or an organization. 

For the organization, the content is less personal. A well-crafted piece of content for the organization should be informative, educative, and valuable for its audience. For organizations, content is also a great way to establish their positioning and prove their expertise in the field.  

If you are a legal professional growing your brand, then it is much more important to show your personality. A well-crafted piece of content in this case would be authentic, personable, and practical. Again, it is important to post only the content that brings value to your audience. 

A well-crafted piece of content also should be short. We live in the era of short attention spans, constantly scrolling through our feeds and not spending more than 2 seconds on an average post. So, the more information you can convey succinctly, the better your content is going to be for your audience. 

6. What Should You Do To Make Sure Your Legal Content Is User-Friendly?

As Sarah sees it, user-friendly content is easy to consume and brings value to its consumer. It can be inspiring, entertaining, educational, or useful in any other way. 

One of the ways to make your content easy to consume is to visualize it. Visuals are much easier to perceive than a long-winded article, so if you can design an infographic instead of writing a text — go for it. Or try to make your content concise in any other way.

In terms of user-friendliness, we also talked about using legalese in the legal content. Sarah concluded that it is better not to use complex legal terminology in your posts for the sake of simplicity, but there is no general rule on this. It all boils down to your audience: if you are a law firm targeting in-house departments, you might want to write more about your legal services and, consequently, use legalese, but if you are a legal professional creating content for your clients, you wouldn’t want to use language they don’t understand.

7. What Tools Should You Use To Create Legal Content That Works?

Sarah recommended several tools that can be useful for different purposes:   

• Podcasts. If you are into podcasts, then you might want to use Anchor for creating podcasts. You can record and edit audio files with its help, and share them on different platforms; 
• Visuals. If you and your target audience are more into visuals and infographics, Canva is a great simple tool for graphic design. Sarah also recommended using PowerPoint to make presentations, and FlatIcon to browse and use various icons for your visuals;
• Videos. If you’d like to produce short-form videos, TikTok is your best instrument. It has an embedded toolset for video editing apart from being a platform for sharing content; 
• Content management. For this matter, Sarah recommended Buffer — it is a great scheduling tool that also allows you to better organize your content.

8. How Should You Promote Your Legal Content?

Sarah is a strong advocate for using social media to promote your business. Despite offering paid promotion services such as in-app ads, social media platforms are great free channels for content promotion by default. 

It is better to choose one or two social media platforms to focus on based on your target audience. For instance, if you’re targeting businesses or more seasoned professionals, you might want to use LinkedIn. If you are more B2C-oriented — Instagram or Facebook would be a better choice. Then, you might want to conduct short research on the types of content that are best for your chosen channels and focus on producing the content that fits them best.

9. What Learning Resources Should You Check Out To Create and Promote Legal Content Better?

Sarah recommended checking out Gary Vaynerchuk, also known as GaryVee on social media. He has a ton of experience in digital content creation, and he shares a lot of practical tips on content creation via his social media blogs. 

He also has two books that can help you frame the benefits of content creation. The first one is called “Crush It!”, and it is dedicated to using the Internet for content creation in general, and the second one is called “Crushing It”, and it is more focused on social media content. 

That’s it! To get even more practical tips on content creation, you might want to check out the recording of the webinar for the Q&A session.