Law Firm Public Relations: A Simple Guide

What is a PR in a Law Firm?

Public Relations (PR) for a law firm involves best practices and strategies to maintain a firm’s brand and reputation with the public. This is done by creating a story that highlights a firm’s achievements and advocacies and using media outlets as a platform to let the people know about them. 

Role of PR For Law Firms And The Legal Industry

Law firm public relations can be beneficial in many ways, which includes:

• Building brand awareness
• Becoming a thought leader
• Getting new clients
• Dealing with negative publicity
• Keeping a positive relationship with industry partners

With a thoughtful legal PR strategy, a law firm can achieve all these over time.

Should Law Firms Hire a Professional PR Firm or DIY?

Before you can implement your firm’s PR strategy, you’ll need to decide whether you want to do it in-house or hire a PR firm. 

Hiring a PR agency for your law firm ensures that you’re hiring experts in their field who bring a fresh perspective to the table. You also gain access to many resources and tools that you wouldn’t have otherwise had, such as media connections and creative teams. They are, however, costly and smaller firms may not be able to afford their rates.

On the other hand, doing your PR campaigns within your firm is great because people already have a deep understanding of your firm and because of the in-house nature of the work, things are likely to get done quicker. 

It’s also cost-efficient, although your resources will be limited. Fortunately, many PR-focused software and tools can help compensate for the lack of resources that a PR agency can provide.

In the end, choosing to do PR internally or with a PR firm depends on the law firm’s size, niche, budget, and PR goals.

Best Public Relations Strategies and Tactics for Law Firms

If you want to launch PR campaigns on the right foot, you’ll need to learn the best practices and strategies that are proven to work for all organizations including law firms.

Have a Consistent Brand Message

Your firm needs to have a solid brand identity that is based on a compelling story. Here are some steps to ensure your firm communicates a consistent brand message every time:

• Have a clear target audience: Who are you talking to? What are their pain points and how can you help them?
• Define your brand personality: If your firm was a person, how would it sound? Would it be authoritative, playful, empathic?
• Document your brand assets: Clearly define your logo and other branding assets like fonts, color schemes, and any other branding elements.
• Train your team: Everyone in your firm should have an intimate knowledge of your brand and your story and understand where they fit in this narrative.

Nail Down Your Target Audience

A strong PR campaign works because it resonates with the right people. When creating your branding strategy, focus on clearly defining your target audience.

If you have existing customers, study their demographics, and why they came to you for help. Look at their common complaints and what solution you offered.

You can also create a customer persona or ideal customer profile to help you visualize your target audience and how you would create content that resonates with them.

Researching your market and practice area is also essential to understanding your audience. Look at your competitors and see who their target audience is. It’s likely that they would be the same target audience for you.

Nurture a Positive Relationship With The Media

To attract journalists and media publications, you need to demonstrate your in-depth knowledge in your field. 

Just like marketing, you can build media connections online and offline. Doing both can do wonders for your public relations efforts.

You can do this using your law firm’s blog, where you can publish compelling articles that are relevant to the current legal events, which highlights your expertise as an experienced lawyer in your practice area.

Be active in social media and look out for opportunities to share your knowledge about a trending topic.

Sign up for HARO (Help A Reporter Out) as a source and get notified when a journalist reaches out to you for queries.

Participate and Speak at Industry Events

In addition to modern, digital ways to build media connections, you can do it the traditional route.

Just like Cravath law firm, your partners can participate and speak in events or charities related to your firm’s practice area to be visible to the media. Community involvement like sponsoring local events or charities remains a solid PR practice that brings immediate and often long-term connections not just with the media but with industry peers and leaders.

Measure the Impact of Your PR Campaign and Iterate Your Strategy

When it comes to analyzing the results of your PR efforts, you can look at these following metrics:

Number of media placements: The number of press releases, interviews, articles, and social media mentions as a result of your PR campaign.

Media value: The estimated cost you paid for your media placements.

Reach: The number of people who saw your media coverage.

Website traffic: Website visits coming from your media coverage.

Engagement: These include metrics like time spent on your website, page views, and bounce rate.

Lead generation: The number of leads generated from your PR campaign.

There are many tools that can help you gather and analyze the data from your PR campaigns. You can use these to ensure accurate data and a more streamlined analysis process.

How to Create a Digital PR Campaign

When you’re ready for the content creation process, you can start with the basic pieces of content that you want to use for your campaigns.

Elevate Your Content With Video

A recent survey showed that people watched videos an average of 17 hours per week globally. This and many other statistics prove that more people prefer watching and streaming video content more than any other type of content.

Videos are great for PR campaigns because they have the ability to connect with a target audience more effectively.

• Leverage User-Generated Content: User-Generated Content (UGC) appear to be organic and trust-worthy to audiences and generally receive better engagement.
• Experiment with Social Media And Influencer Marketing: People who watch videos often have certain celebrities and personalities that they look up to. You can tap into these influencers to reach out to your audience.

Use Digital PR Tools To Boost Media Relations

In addition to traditional media, you can take the digital approach to boost your PR initiatives. Here are some tools you can use to carry out a digital PR campaign for your firm:

• SEMrush

SEMrush is a comprehensive digital marketing software that offers keyword research, website audits, search engine optimization (SEO), social media tracking, and content optimization. 

For digital PR, SEMrush has brand monitoring features that tracks brand mentions which can help law firms discover opportunities for media coverage. It also has link-building features that allow users to conduct outreach to relevant websites.

• Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool that shows trending topics around the world. Its “Related searches” and “Rising searches” features can help you discover publications and online communities covering the same topics that you are.

• Business Wire

Business Wire is an online platform where you can submit a press release and have a chance at getting published in online media. 

• HARO (Help A Reporter Out)

HARO is another online platform where you can sign up as a source for journalists and news organizations. Upon signing up, you get queries from journalists along with a deadline for a response and their contact number. If you respond and get selected, you’ll be contacted for a quote or an interview.

Leverage PR Services

PR agencies can provide expertise and experience in legal PR that is likely to bring you better results. Having worked with many law firms in the past, PR agencies have built relationships with the media which is invaluable for any PR campaign.

On The Map Marketing offers digital law firm PR to boost traditional methods and build a positive online presence and reputation for your firm.

Manage Your Online Reputation

While you can certainly tell people about your firm, another strategy is to let other people talk about your firm (hopefully in a positive light). 

This is where testimonials and customer reviews play a vital role in managing your online reputation and getting more clients as a result. 

Managing your online reputation starts with getting more positive reviews from past clients and encouraging them to leave a review in review platforms like Google and Yelp. 

There is no exact science to getting positive reviews each time, but as long as you consistently provide excellent customer service, you should expect mostly positive reviews. 

Best Examples of Attorney PR Campaigns

If you’re not sure how your law firm and practice area can be featured in the news and online magazines, take a few examples of strong PR tactics to help you come up with an angle that works for your firm.

Example #1: Provide Expert Insight

In this campaign, entertainment lawyer Donald M. Woodard of Carter and Woodard gave his opinion about musicians violating copyright laws when sampling music from other artists.

Example #2: Provide Updates On High-Profile Cases

Another successful PR campaign is for media publications to feature a prominent case that involves strong community issues, such as the case handled by the Law Firm of Cerri, Boskovich & Allard:

Example # 3: Announce Achievements

For solo lawyers or firms based in smaller towns, here’s an example of reaching out to local websites and publications to publish a press release about an achievement or award:

Example #4: Provide Timely, Relevant Advice

This next example shows how you can make your legal services accessible in times of challenges. Personal injury lawyer Twillie of LA Law took the opportunity to talk about personal injury law services during a semi-shutdown caused by COVID:

Example #5: Give To The Community

Sometimes, you just have to let your good deeds speak for themselves. Giving back to the community has its perks, which includes more exposure in social media (like the one below):

Hire a Digital Marketing Agency For a Tailored Digital PR Strategy

While traditional and digital PR may sound like a great way to build your brand and get more clients, it involves constant work. If your law firm does not have the resources nor the time to implement PR, then hiring a PR agency is the best option.

On The Map Marketing provides a tailored strategy for legal public relations for digital platforms. We’ve worked with hundreds of law firms in the past with amazing results. 
Get in touch with us today to get started with your custom digital PR strategy.