Legal Tech Companies Should Contribute to Legal Journalism

Bob Ambrogi made clear in his talk last week that the future of legal journalism is founded on law blogs. 

Law blogs whose content is aggregated and curated by LexBlog into a meaningful network of content and contributors segregated by channel, industries and topics. And which content is distributed via the Web, email and social media. 

Rather than these lawyers and law firms hiring public relations and marketing agencies to get them in the news, these law firms and lawyers are creating the news with their niche blog publications.

No gate keepers. No relying on reporters whose publications are often behind behind pay walls.

If there is any group spending a lot of money PR and marketing while at the same time producing so little journalism in the form of blogging, it’s legal tech companies. The same legal tech companies heavily represented at Ambrogi’s talk on the power of citizen joiyrnalists – just like them.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard from legal tech companies, “We’re going to hire someone to handle our blogging and social media, then we’ll be covered.

” Like having a 25 year old employee with no domain expertise on your technology and its role in the industry is going to help because they know how to type and use the Internet.

A credible alternative would be to look at doing six to twelves pieces a year and have those pieces flow into LexBlog.

You’ll pick up each a company profile page, a personal profile page and a page for your independent publication – a publication indexed on your domain, not LexBlog’s domain.

Need a platform and an independent publication site, LexBlog can do it for you. But we’ll do all of the above, including circulating your commentary, for free.

If this is too hard, then you should revisit why you have a company to start with – or at a minimum question whether you understand news and marketing today.

• Six to twelve posts a year. That’s six to twenty hours a year.
• Posts of 400 to 750 words, no one is looking for 1,000 words, unless it’s necessary to get your point across. And this is true journalism, not some lengthy word count that marketers are singing for SEO. 
• Share what you’ve been reading and what it means; answer common questions; share what transpired at a recent conference. We’re not talking seminal brilliance here, it’s what you already know and are observing.

We’d all be the richer for having legal tech entrepreneurs as legal journalists. Lawyers, law firms, other tech companies, conference/show coordinators and investors. All of us.

Straight talk from the people in the know with no intermediaries, whether they be those packagaing the message for legal tech companies or third party publishers. 

Legal tech companies would be light years ahead. Trust, relationships, and spending much, much less and getting much more when it comes to brand awareness and business. 

Heck a legal tech company could have their own publication for $600 to $1000 a year and have their insight and commentary further reported and syndicated by a publication headed by the dean of journalism and legal tech reporting, Bob Ambrogi.

There’s an awful lot of PR and marketing professionals chasing Ambrogi – and guys like me – around to try and get coverage on behalf of legal tech companies. Often with shallow messages that do more to hurt the company than help it. 

Seems so simple, but legal tech companies, their founders and their marketing agencies are  always reluctant to enter the world of citizen journalism. What am I missing? 

Legal Tech Companies Should Contribute to Legal Journalism posted first on https://fergusonlawatty.wordpress.com