Likes are not instructions

Scroll through some law firms’ LinkedIn pages and you will find a cheerful record of office life. The team in matching shirts at the charity run. Birthday cake in the boardroom. A new associate welcomed with a row of balloons.

It is warm, it is human, and it gets plenty of likes, mostly from the people in the photographs and their followers.

There is nothing wrong with any of it. A page like that shows a firm people enjoy working at, and that matters when you are hiring. But be clear about what it does. It is a recruitment tool. It will not bring in work, because no business owner has ever chosen a lawyer on the strength of a cupcake.

What a client is asking

Someone looking for a lawyer has a problem and a single question: do these people understand it? A fun page cannot answer that. A helpful one can.

Compare two posts. The first says the firm is delighted to have attended an awards dinner. The second explains, in six plain sentences, what a landlord may and may not do when a commercial tenant falls behind on rent. The first is about the firm. The second is about the reader, and the reader with a tenant in arrears will remember who wrote it.

Give before you get

Lawyers hesitate here. Advice is what they sell, so why hand it out for nothing? Because a post is not advice. It tells the reader that a problem exists, what the risks are and what questions to ask. It cannot apply the law to their facts, and that is the part they pay for. General knowledge given freely is how a stranger discovers that your specific knowledge is worth buying.

Generosity also does something a list of credentials cannot. It lets people test your thinking before they commit to it. By the time they phone, they have already decided you know what you are talking about.

What helpful looks like

It need not be long or clever. Explain a change in the law and what it means on Monday morning. Answer the question clients ask you every week. Point out the mistake you keep being called in to fix.

Write it the way you would say it across a table.

Then do it again next week. Usefulness works by repetition.

Keep the cake photographs. Just do not mistake them for marketing. People like a firm that has fun. They instruct the one that helped them before they asked.