If you’re a lawyer or a legal marketer looking at how to use LinkedIn to grow your legal practice, you’re already one step ahead of the competition.

New research highlights LinkedIn's value for law firms, with the top 10 legal influencers from the UK’s 200 largest firms generating engagement worth £1.21 million in LinkedIn ad spend, according to Legal Cheek.

Irwin Mitchell’s Jen Shipley was spotlighted as the top ‘Superinfluencer’ with annual engagement in excess of £300,000, highlighting the potential value of a single lawyer having a strong LinkedIn presence.

It might seem like a long shot for your team to match Jen’s numbers but even if they can generate a percentage of her revenue then making the effort with LinkedIn is more than worthwhile.

However, effectively doing so requires initial planning and a thorough LinkedIn content strategy.

With that in mind, here are our top tips for getting the best out of LinkedIn for your law firm.

Optimising your profile.

Whether you're new to LinkedIn or not, avoid rushing into sharing content when building a law firm LinkedIn strategy.

Effectively using LinkedIn to grow your legal practice first requires you to ensure your personal profile is up to scratch.

Include a high-quality, professional profile picture to set a good first impression.

This can be supported by a clean, minimalist banner image featuring your firm’s name, logo, and colours to help reinforce your branding and keep your organisation front of mind.

With your profile’s visuals sorted, you can move on to providing information about yourself.

This starts with a short headline where you have the option to briefly state who you are and what you do, or opt for a different approach by using an impactful and unique statement relevant to the services you specialise in.

Again, your headline is one of the first opportunities to show your audience who you are and why they should connect with you.

While still keeping it relatively succinct, you can then provide further detail of what you do and how you help your clients.

Your summary should showcase your experience, as well as any accreditations or training you’ve received.

These act as important trust signals, highlighting your expertise and knowledge to your audience, and emphasising why they should pay attention to the content you share.

Include a custom profile URL so users can first find and identify you, then provide your key contact details, including links to other social accounts, ensuring they can easily reach out if they appreciate your content.

You should also implement a link to your firm’s website and take advantage of the Featured section where you can showcase key pieces of content that further highlight your services and expertise.

Both the website link and the Featured content can make your lawyers’ LinkedIn profiles a powerful tool for driving traffic to the site and potentially generating new clients.

Paul Jenkins, a leading thought leader on LinkedIn, provides a good example of how to use LinkedIn for lawyers, utilising all the main elements of a complete profile, which can result in you receiving 21 times more profile views.

His profile looks professional and features his firm’s branding, showcases his experience, and provides everything his users need to contact both him and his organisation.

This includes a link to the firm’s business page, which brings us nicely on to our next point.

Paul Jenkins, Ashurst, LinkedIn profile.

Building your business page.

A LinkedIn business page is created via your personal profile, so it’s essential you have that set up first.

With your personal profile optimised, you can focus on doing the same for your business page.

Building your business page is a key part of using LinkedIn to grow your legal practice and involves many of the same aspects as enhancing your own profile.

You need to ensure it looks professional with a profile picture featuring your logo and a banner image with your firm’s branding.

It should include all your important information, such as your firm’s contact details, office location, and custom website URL to limit any difficulties when users try reaching out to you.

Whether your law firm offers hundreds of services or specialises in a few, your LinkedIn business page should outline your key practice areas and your experience within them.

Don’t be afraid to focus on your firm’s unique selling points when pushing your services, such as its history or impressive track record.

There’s a wealth of law firms establishing their presence on LinkedIn so you need to offer something that makes you stand out from the crowd.

Moore Barlow brings this all together nicely with a sleeky-designed page featuring all their key information, including contact details, what they do, and their credentials.

Moore Barlow LinkedIn business profile.

Once you’ve added all this to your business page, you can optimise it further by encouraging your team to engage with it and display it in their personal profiles.

This helps to increase your brand's exposure, encouraging people to visit your website and potentially contributing to additional new leads.

In fact, LinkedIn vastly outshines other social platforms in this respect, generating 277% more leads than Facebook and Twitter combined, so you should take advantage as much as possible.

Ilana Kattan’s LinkedIn posts generate £153,703 per year. If a user sees one and accesses her profile, one of the first things they see is a link to Hogan Lovells which leads to Ilana’s experience and directly to the business page from there.

Ilana Katan, Hogan Lovells, LinkedIn profile banner and key information.

If you ever have new lawyers join your team, you can prompt them to be active on LinkedIn by sharing an introductory post about them from either the business page or your personal profile, or both, making sure to tag their account.

This immediately associates them with your firm and highlights how you actively want to use LinkedIn, making them more likely to share content themselves going forward.

Paul Jenkins, Ashurst, LinkedIn post welcoming Ricardo Rossi as a new partner.

Passle shows how lawyers can extend the reach of a LinkedIn business page by using DLA Piper as an example.

At the time of writing the article, DLA Piper had 195,290 followers and 11,388 people listed as working for them.

On average, each employee had 930 LinkedIn connections, giving a combined total reach of 10,590,840 which is 50 times greater than the business page’s total following.

So, if you’re not getting your lawyers to engage with the business page, you’re significantly restricting the number of people you can reach, potentially limiting the leads you generate later down the line.

Making valuable connections.

Clearly, LinkedIn has the capacity to connect you with a huge number of people, but you want to ensure those connections will prove valuable to your firm.

When growing your legal practice on LinkedIn, it’s important to consider your target audience, rather than trying to engage with absolutely everyone.

This will largely depend on your key services and will impact the main purpose LinkedIn serves for your firm.

LinkedIn is a great networking tool which can be used by any type of law firm, presenting the opportunity to engage with other professionals in your industry. However, it’s perhaps more beneficial to firms specialising in professional services and business law.

There are 65 million decision-makers on LinkedIn meaning the platform gives specialist firms direct access to senior employees who have the authority to decide whether their company requires legal support.

Therefore, if your firm prioritises or even just offers business law services, LinkedIn is a potentially fruitful market you should be focusing on.

65 million might be just a few more than you’ll need, however, so you should try to be more specific with who you target, which can be done in several ways.

Making use of LinkedIn groups.

Every LinkedIn user can join up to 100 groups, which bring together people interested in a particular topic or sector.

With that in mind, you should consider your firm’s key services and join groups most relevant to your target audience, while thinking about how many users are in them.

As long as you follow the rules of each specific group, they give you the chance to share content directly with an audience you know is interested in your services and practice area as part of your law firm LinkedIn strategy.

And this works both ways as other members of the group can share their own posts, the majority of which will be of interest to you.

Their posts can help you stay informed about industry news or legal updates, as well as providing inspiration for your own future posts.

If you manage to establish a large LinkedIn network, you could even create your own group and invite your connections to join.

Of course, you’ll want to centre your group around your key service areas, ensuring you attract highly focused, potentially valuable LinkedIn users.

As your group becomes more popular, it might be recommended to users who are conducting searches related to its subject area, meaning additional prospective clients and networking opportunities will come directly to you, rather than requiring you to actively seek them out.

The groups a user is in can be seen via the Interest section in their profile. As you can see, Mark Stephens CBE is a member of several groups related to his industry and interests.

Mark is amongst the LinkedIn top ten UK legal ‘Superinfluencers’, with his posts generating £164,338 annually. It’s difficult to tell just how frequently he posts in groups, or how much this has contributed to the revenue he’s generated.

However, we can assume that being in these groups has helped him expand his audience, connect with people likely to be interested in his content, and potentially provided inspiration for his own posts.

Mark Stephens, Howard Kennedy LLP, LinkedIn groups he is a member of.

Sharing engaging content.

Sharing appropriate, informative content is a vital aspect of using LinkedIn to grow your legal practice.

If you want your audience to read and engage with your LinkedIn posts, you need to consistently provide them with some sort of value.

One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by offering advice or tips, whether they’re for other legal professionals to make use of in their roles, or if they’re aimed at prospective clients who might require the services of a law firm.

LinkedIn advice post by Sam Walkley, XVO Legal.

Ultimately, you are the expert on the subject you’re posting about, so don’t be afraid to share tips and opinions based on your personal experiences.

Your knowledge and credentials can be backed up by sharing posts about your achievements and accreditations.

If you’ve received an award or gained a qualification, then shout about it.

Accreditations act as strong trust markers for your audience and prospective clients, showing how you’re highly qualified to offer advice and carry out complex legal services.

LinkedIn award post by Trevor D Sterling, Moore Barlow.

You don’t need to include all your information you wish to share directly in the LinkedIn post.

Instead, you can encourage people to read your law firm’s blog, but you should be careful about linking to external content.

LinkedIn can penalise content linking to an external site because they want to keep users on their platform for as long as possible.

That being said, there are several examples of LinkedIn posts featuring external links that have still generated strong engagement.

The best solution is to link in the comments section rather than directly in the post.

LinkedIn post linking to an article by Paul Sams, Dutton Gregory Solicitors.

As much as offering insightful legal advice is key, not every post needs to be deeply informative.

There are several other ways to engage your audience, such as sharing humorous and relatable stories about work life.

This helps to make your content feel more real, giving it some personality and authenticity.

Humorous LinkedIn post by Paul Sams, Dutton Gregory Solicitors.

And don’t be afraid to share content completely unrelated to work if you think there’s something your audience will be interested in and engage with.

Jen Shipley’s most recent posts are almost exclusively updates about life with her new baby. Who doesn’t love a cute baby picture?

Ultimately, it's about humanising yourself. People want to work with people, building relationships and trust which are especially important when handling someone’s legal matters.

LinkedIn post about life with a dog and a new baby by Jen Shipley, Irwin Mitchell Solicitors.

Additionally, you can further boost post engagement by focusing on topics that are trending at that particular moment in time.

This is where your law firm LinkedIn groups and simply paying attention to your own feed can prove beneficial.

If a particular subject is trending (check out Google Trends) it will have almost certainly been covered by one of your connections or by a user you’re in a group with.

Use these posts as inspiration to create your own content, taking advantage of that particular topic before it dies down in popularity.

LinkedIn post about Lauryn Goodman and Kyle Walker by Ellie Davies, Leathes Prior Solicitors.

And be sure to include hashtags related to the trending topic and your services.

LinkedIn users search for posts about a particular subject via hashtags, so adding them to your post can help to boost discoverability.

LinkedIn post about the UK Black Business Week Conference by Trevor D Sterling, Moore Barlow.

Whatever type of content you most like to share, the key is to stay consistent and post regularly, with companies that post weekly seeing a two times lift in engagement.

Regularly posting helps to maintain your firm’s visibility and keeps you front of mind amongst your target audience, which can indirectly impact the amount of web traffic and leads you generate.

Users are more likely to engage with your posts if something about it is particularly relevant to them, such as it focusing on their geographical location.

Naturally, prospective clients looking for a law firm are likely to begin their search within close proximity to where they live, purely for ease and convenience.

Therefore, engaging with local people and showing them there’s no need to expand their search further afield could result in a significant uplift in clients.

LinkedIn can help with this, allowing you to share local news or case studies from your area, helping to drive engagement and enhance your reputation amongst your local audience.

This can be improved further by tagging prominent organisations or individuals involved in the story.

Tagging users makes them more likely to see and engage with your post, increasing the chances of it appearing on their connections’ feeds which can significantly boost its reach.

LinkedIn post about BBC coverage on the far right marches in Bristol by Aziz Deen, Foot Anstey LLP.

As well as focusing on the content of your posts themselves, it’s also important to consider their style and format if you want to grow your legal practice on LinkedIn.

Unlike some other social media platforms, LinkedIn seems to favour longer-style posts, encouraging users to share more in-depth content.

This is beneficial for lawyers conducting LinkedIn marketing because explaining complex legal matters and processes typically requires a substantial amount of copy.

However, you’ll still want to format your posts with sections separated by headers to improve readability and the overall experience of users viewing your posts.

This makes listicles and similarly formatted content particularly effective for generating engagement.

In fact, listicles, particularly how-to’s, perform 31.5% better in terms of LinkedIn analytics than all other types of posts, as reported by Sprout Social.

Listicle style LinkedIn post by Jason Feng.

Need a legal marketing agency?

Contra has a wealth of experience providing legal marketing services for several successful law firms specialising in various practice areas, including Hudgell Solicitors, Magrath Sheldrick, and IDR Law.

Enhancing your firm’s LinkedIn presence is just one of the many digital marketing strategies we can help you implement, with the purpose of driving traffic to your website, generating valuable leads, and optimising your ROI.

Request a free consultation

Charlie Leighton, Digital Marketing Executive I help law firms, charities, and consultancies drive traffic, conversions, and revenue through data-driven SEO and paid marketing strategies. View my profile