Toward a Daubert Standard for Law Firm Marketing

If you have worked on personal injury cases or in criminal court, you are used to making sure that the evidence you present is admissible under the Daubert standard. Since 1993 when the United States Supreme Court ruled on the Daubert case, states have adopted this standard for expert witness testimony related to medicine and related scientific fields, and today almost every state follows the Daubert standard. It requires witnesses who cite published research to cite studies that are transparent about their methodology, and it requires judges to evaluate the quality of the research before allowing witnesses to present it to the jury. It is the Supreme Court’s way of protecting people from jury verdicts and court decisions based on junk science or fake science.

While the people who read your law firm’s blog are not going to vote to convict a defendant or award damages equivalent to a plaintiff’s six-figure medical bills, professionalism dictates that you, as a lawyer, do your due diligence to fact-check your information and to show your work in a level of detail that would make math teachers everywhere smile. If you do this, your legal blog content will win over readers and prospective clients with its credibility and will endear itself to Google with its search engine optimization (SEO).

Cite Statutes and Court Decisions Directly

Lawsuits, trials, court decisions, and new legislation that are newsworthy enough to be the subject of articles on general interest websites make for great blog post topics. If a new development related to your practice area makes the news, simply summarizing the news article on your blog is not enough, even if you include a link to the news article. You should also link to the text of the statute, court decision, and/or criminal complaint, if you can find them. Statutes are readily accessible through Google searches; you can find the other types of documents, if they have been published, by searching Google Scholar and the Department of Justice website, respectively.

Corroborate Your Sources

If you have come far enough in your legal career that you are responsible for the blog on a law firm’s website, you are well versed in corroborating pieces of evidence. Corroborating the information in your blog posts serves several purposes. First, it gives you a chance to show prospective clients what you are made of; well researched blog posts that link to credible sources will show your target audience that you are knowledgeable and diligent. Second, linking to authoritative content makes your content more authoritative in the eyes of Google’s search result ranking bots.

And Where Do Lawyers Find the Time to Do All of This?

Writing law firm blog content that you would be proud to read in front of a judge is as time-consuming as it sounds. The good news is that you don’t have to write it yourself. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to create factually accurate, readable blog content that links to authoritative sources.