Who Is Better at Writing Legal Blog Content: Lawyers or Professional Content Writers?

You can probably think of examples of terrible writing by lawyers. Perhaps there is a colleague whose emails consist of interminable sentences so cluttered with Latin jargon, words that have not been part of spoken English since the 18th century, and overblown literary ambitions that you are tempted to print them and post them on you’re the wall of your office as an example of how not to write. If you are old enough, you may remember “greatest hits” lists of examples of awful lawyer writing circulating by email in the 1990s or by fax in the 1980s. Suffice it to say that writing blog content does not come naturally to most lawyers. Likewise, every conversation you have with anyone outside the legal profession serves as a reminder of how little most people who are not lawyers know about the law. Meanwhile, every law firm needs a blog, so who is best to write your legal blog content?

Teaching Lawyers to Blog or Teaching Bloggers About the Law?

According to Robert Rose of Content Marketing Institute, the CEO of UPS once allegedly contributed his company’s success to the strategy of hiring drivers based on their customer service skills and not on their driving ability; according to this possibly apocryphal story, the CEO allegedly believed that it is easier to build the driving skills of people who are already good at customer service than the other way around. Rose goes on to show how the quest for subject matter experts, known as SMEs in the content marketing profession, has become an obsession for some marketing companies.

Of course, in the legal profession, anyone with the letters “J.D.” behind their name is the ultimate SME, but how good are they at writing blog posts? Is it better to risk having a blog characterized by the lawyerly writing style that ranges from wooden to incomprehensible or to post readable blog content that is short on substance? One solution is to have legal professionals and professional content writers work together to produce content that is factually accurate and teaches audiences something they do not already know, while following the best practices for search engine optimization (SEO). This way, the lawyer can bring their professional experience without having to rely on second-hand accounts of what happens in a courtroom, and the content marketing expert can bring their professional experience about what gets the best response from Google users. This means that your content marketing strategy will require more planning and more collaboration, but it also means that your content will perform better on the first try.

The Best of Both Worlds

The best solution, of course, is to hire writers who have professional experience both in the legal field and in content marketing. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers are experienced in both fields. The result is that you get readable content that reflects an understanding of the law beyond what you would get from generic content marketing firms.

Sources

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/content-skills-subject-matter-expertise