Law is likely not the first field that comes to mind when you think of personal branding. When you hear the term personal brand, entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk, or young professionals might come to mind.
But just like with most professions, a strong personal brand is an asset that can benefit lawyers in multiple ways. In this blog post we will explore the benefits of personal branding for lawyers, offer tips for lawyers looking to grow their personal brands, and analyze examples of lawyers with prominent personal brands.
Overview of what we’ll cover in this blog:
So, what is personal branding for lawyers? Essentially, it is the process of creating and promoting a positive image of yourself as a legal professional.
This includes making a strategic and concerted effort to manage and grow your reputation, communicate your values, demonstrate your skills, expand your network, and to do all of those things in a way that matches your personality and natural communication style.
Personal branding offers lawyers a range of benefits. For example, lawyers who build personal brands enjoy larger networks, more client acquisition opportunities, and stronger reputations among their peers. Let’s discuss a few of these benefits in more detail.
Personal branding helps lawyers stand out among their peers. By building a strong personal brand, you can differentiate yourself and be more easily recognized by potential clients.
This increased exposure can lead to client acquisition opportunities, help with hiring by growing your practice’s reputation, and ultimately offer you more career opportunities.
Related: Personal Branding Tips: 5 Things Every Professional Should Have to Build Their Brand
Your clients trust you because you deliver them value and consistency. Building a personal brand can help you expand that trust to a wider audience as you consistently people value on channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, a newsletter, or your personal website.
By consistently promoting your brand and sharing knowledge and experience with people for free, you can establish yourself as a credible, trustworthy, and selfless expert in your field — all personal brand attributes that will make people want to become clients of yours.
Personal branding can also help you advance your legal career. A strong personal brand for lawyers can open doors to new job opportunities, including promotions if you work in a practice, or exposure that gets you on the radar of another firm looking for a new hire.
If you have your own practice, a strong personal brand can help you to attract partners should you ever want to expand your business. Additionally, a well-established personal brand can increase a lawyer's earning potential and command higher fees.
Related: Tools for Personal Branding: Best Marketing Tools to Add to Your Personal Branding Toolkit
Now that we’ve walked through why you’d want a personal brand as a lawyer in the first place, let’s discuss tips you can use to build a strong personal brand as a lawyer.
Taking the time to determine what you want your personal brand to be is a great place to start. Defining your personal brand goals, the attributes you’d like to be associated with, and the niche subject matter you’d like to discuss are great starting points for planning your personal brand presence.
By identifying these things, you can start to craft a clear and consistent personal brand message, and develop a content plan to start building an audience.
Related: Personal Brand Framework: 5 Steps to Defining Your Personal Brand [plus a free template]
Content plan is another good aspect of your personal brand to iron out. As a legal professional starting to build your personal brand you should think about the channels your target audience uses, and your content creation strengths.
For example, if your target clients use LinkedIn and you are a good writer, then posting on LinkedIn frequently with written posts can be your starting point for a content strategy. Social media is a powerful tool for personal branding. On the other hand, if video content creation is something you are interested in or have experience in, recording videos where you deliver legal tips, discuss the law, and highlight aspects of your practice could be a strategy you apply on channels like TikTok and YouTube.
Related: Personal Branding Action Plan - Checklist + Complete Guide for Starting Your Personal Brand
Building a personal brand isn’t just about content creation. You should be striving to build a community and to engage in two way communication with your new connections.
Responding to every comment and direct message you receive from people when you post content is one way to do this. This will show your followers that you care about them, and enable you to establish real relationships with them.
Commenting on posts from other lawyers is another way to engage online beyond creating your own content. This will create exposure for your personal brand channels, enable you to establish relationships with peers in your industry, and increase the likelihood that people return the favor and engage with your content.
Related: The Importance of Personal Branding
Inconsistency is one of the top personal branding mistakes that people make. Creators with prominent personal brands like Dulma and Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi regularly urge their audiences to create content consistently, as results will only come after long periods of time consistently creating content and engaging with your audience. Legal professionals can emulate the content creation practices and discipline of these popular content creators in their own personal brand development.
For example, Dulma does 100 day challenges where she challenges herself to create content everyday on her target personal brand channel. That type of consistency helped her build a following of over 100K people on TikTok. Apply this type of consistency and tenacity in your own personal brand content creation in order to see results.
Let’s look at some examples of lawyers who are using their personal brands to fuel career growth, expand their networks, and support their business endeavors.
Mike Mandell is an example of an attorney who has grown a massive personal brand, amassing millions of followers on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. Mandell uses his personal brand channels to share legal advice with his audience, answering common legal questions like whether or not DUI checkpoints are legal, and when cops don’t need a search warrant.
Business value Mandell’s personal brand is delivering:
Mandell’s personal brand serves as a lead gen tool for clients for his network of legal partners, and has opened up new lines of business and exposure opportunities for him.
Erika Kullberg is an attorney, personal finance influencer, and entrepreneur. The former corporate M&A attorney now has her own company called Plug and Law where she provides business owners with templates for commonly required legal documents like privacy policies, terms and conditions, and disclaimers.
Kullberg’s TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn channels are great examples of personal branding for lawyers. She uses these channels to share content like financial advice and video skits where she acts out entertaining scenarios to demonstrate the legal protections and rights people have in situations like receiving medical bills. Thanks to Kullberg’s focus on answering common legal questions and her ability to make legal and financial advice entertaining, she’s been able to build huge followings and personal brand recognition across channels.
Business value Kullberg’s personal brand is delivering:
Kullberg’s social media channels and content lineup perfectly with her business to monetize her personal brand. Her content sharing tips and advice on finance and legal situations are natural lead generation tools for her legal templates that address common legal document needs.
A strong personal brand can be an invaluable, and sometimes overlooked career asset for lawyers. By taking the time to define and promote your personal brand, you can position yourself as an expert in your field and stand out in a crowded market. Use the tips and examples in this blog post about personal branding for lawyers to start your own personal brand to advance your career as a legal professional.
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Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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