How Can You Stand Out With Your Profile in the Legal Marketplace?
The modern legal marketplace is crowded and noisy, and it operates across multiple channels.
While you might be a great lawyer who is a true expert in your field, the hyper-competitive nature of the modern legal market means that it is naturally difficult to make yourself stand out from other lawyers who offer similar services.
That said, it’s not impossible. You just need to make sure your lawyer profile conveys your true value to potential clients to stand out.
What Is a Lawyer Profile?
A lawyer profile (also known as a legal profile) is a professional online profile that showcases a legal practitioner or a firm’s achievements and experience.
To establish an effective marketing plan, it’s important that firms and practitioners, especially, create a professional profile they can upload to places like LinkedIn and key legal directories like Chambers & Partners and Lawrina.
This is because a lawyer profile in an established legal directory can bring many benefits, including:
- Increased exposure to potential clients
- More brand reputation and credibility
- More traffic to your website
- Higher visibility in search engine results pages
Research has shown that consumers increasingly turn to online reviews before picking a lawyer. A comprehensive and high-quality lawyer profile is critical for ensuring you stand out against the competition.
5 Ways to Make Your Lawyer Profile Stand Out
However, building a strong legal profile involves more than just publishing on relevant directories. There are many components to your profile that, piece by piece, contribute to the overall view that potential clients have of you.
Here are five key tips to make your legal profile and presence on the Internet stand out:
1. Add a professional photo
The very first thing you should add to your lawyer profile is a professional photo. And we don’t mean a stock image, a cartoon drawing, or a selfie taken in less-than-ideal lighting with a questionable background. We mean a clear, head-on photograph that shows you and you only, ideally in business dress and against a plain or muted backdrop.
Your profile photo humanizes you. It is the first thing that your potential client is going to see, and it helps to build a connection between you even before they get in touch. It’s therefore important to ensure that this picture paints you in the best and most professional light.
Saying that you need a professional photo might sound like we are teaching you how to suck eggs, but all too often we see examples of lawyer profiles without pictures (or worse, unprofessional pictures). The absence of a professional photo only does one thing: it sends your potential clients looking for other options.
2. Highlight your experience
Your experience matters. The legal industry is one where prestige is a critical factor, and research has shown that clients will gravitate toward lawyers that shout about how many years of success they have in their respective industries and highlight all the exciting cases they have been a part of.
Clients are still willing to work with lawyers who don’t have decades of experience; all that matters is that they feel confident their lawyer is competent and capable of delivering the results they desire.
You can easily demonstrate this on your own lawyer profile by highlighting your education, professional experience, academic credentials, and other relevant achievements.
Make sure you write your lawyer profile in a way that tells your clients:
- Where you received your degree and where you went to law school
- The firms you’ve worked for and your role
- Your case history, especially any notable cases and big wins
- Any experience that goes beyond black and white legal, e.g., real estate clients are likely to appreciate the perspective of lawyers who previously worked as realtors
3. Share your values
Many clients view the legal sector (and, by extension, lawyers) as soulless, dull, and generally uncaring. While this obviously couldn’t be further from the truth, lawyers in certain industries such as personal injury and criminal defense may find that they must work harder to build trust with their clients.
A great way to do this and therefore stand out is to use your lawyer profile to highlight your values so that potential clients can see whether they align with theirs.
When deciding how to convey your values, think about your primary goals as a practitioner. For example, do you work hard to deliver justice for clients harmed by the negligence of others? You need to convey this core mission and the values that underpin it to prospective clients as soon as they read through your profile.
4. Build a Twitter presence
Twitter is one of the main social platforms that the media uses for information on the latest trends, breaking news, and stories. Everyone knows this, and you need to be on it if you want to begin building personal brand awareness and strengthen your professional influence.
Think of the leading journalist covering your practice area. Now go and take a look at who they are following on Twitter: the key authority figures within your practice area. These are the people who set the agenda, hold the most influence, and who others take notice of when they speak (or, in this case, tweet).
The only way that you can join their ranks is to establish your own Twitter profile and begin putting out content that also establishes your own voice as an authoritative one. You can get started with this by sharing blog posts (even better if they are your own — see below), commenting on the latest happenings in your practice area, and linking them to your professional legal profiles.
5. Write regular blog posts and articles
Creating a strong lawyer profile is one thing; maintaining your image as the go-to person in your field once a prospect has clicked through your profile to your website is another. You need to show your prospects that you truly do know your stuff, and one of the best ways to do this is by regularly publishing blog posts and articles on your website.
Publishing articles relevant to your practice area helps you ramp up your professional credibility, and a well-maintained blog provides you with your own platform to demonstrate your expertise, provide unique perspectives, and influence opinions on trends and issues within your industry.
When done properly, a blog will help you to build a huge amount of personal visibility within the legal marketplace and establish an authoritative voice that both prospects and people within your industry want to listen to. While it can take a while to get your blog going, it’s an ongoing effort that is a no-brainer for the modern lawyer.
The client is king. Whether a seasoned attorney or harbinger of justice in your freshman year, one question is at the heart of your pr...
What the Best Lawyer Profiles Do
The main purpose of your lawyer profile should be to drive prospective clients toward your website and compel them to contact you. To help you achieve this goal, your lawyer profile needs to make you stand out from the competition and portray you as the go-to expert in your field.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all to lawyer profiles, you’ll be well on your way to capturing more leads by including a clear photograph, a breakdown of your experience, and telling potential clients about your values. Furthermore, you will slowly build a voice that’s hard to ignore by supplementing your profile with a presence on Twitter and publishing content that demonstrates your expertise (e.g., through a blog).
Lawrina’s mission is to provide valuable legal content and connect users with their attorneys by making it easier for lawyers to create impactful profiles. Register on Lawrina Lawyers and try it yourself!
An interesting & very useful legal newsletter
