What Is Legal Content Writing? A Practical Guide for Law Firms
Founder, Lexlinc
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Legal content writing is not the same as legal writing
Lawyers write every day. They draft opinions, pleadings, contracts, submissions, research notes and advice for clients. That writing usually serves a specific legal purpose and is written for people who already understand its context.
Legal content writing serves a completely different purpose. It takes legal knowledge and presents it in a form that can be understood and used by a wider audience, even those who may not have a legal background.
That audience may include existing clients, prospective clients, in-house counsel, other lawyers, referral sources or people simply trying to understand an area of law.
The legal substance is what remains important. What changes is the way it is presented.
What does legal content writing include?
For a law firm, legal content can have many forms.
It may include:
practice and service area pages on the firm's website;
lawyer and partner profiles;
legal articles and insights;
client alerts;
newsletters;
LinkedIn posts;
judgment summaries and regulatory updates;
thought leadership articles;
FAQs and explanatory website content; and
content prepared around important developments in a particular practice area.
Each format serves a different purpose here-
A practice area page helps someone understand what the firm does.
A client alert explains why a legal development matters.
A LinkedIn post may draw attention to an issue or observation.
A longer article allows a lawyer to demonstrate a deeper understanding of a subject.
Good legal content strategy considers not only what to write, but also where that content should appear and what it is meant to achieve.
Good legal content does more than summarise the law
A common approach to legal content is to take a judgment or regulatory development and summarise what happened.
That can be useful, but it is often only the starting point. A client or an audience rarely needs every procedural detail of a case.
They are more likely to want to understand:
What changed?
Who does it affect?
Why does it matter?
Does anything need to be done differently?
What should businesses or individuals watch next?
This is how legal content is represented as something valuable. Instead of simply repeating the law, it gives the reader context.
Legal content should reflect the firm's actual expertise
A law firm's content should not feel disconnected from the work its lawyers actually do.
The strongest content is mostly found in matters the firm regularly handles, questions clients repeatedly ask, developments partners are already discussing internally and issues lawyers are seeing across their practice.
For example, an intellectual property team may repeatedly advise businesses about trademark search and clearance before launching a new brand.
That experience could become:
a practical website guide;
a short LinkedIn post;
a client newsletter;
a checklist for businesses; or
a longer article explaining common trademark clearance mistakes.
The knowledge and expertise are already vested in the firm.
Legal content writing uses that expertise to create something that can be found, read and understood outside the immediate client relationship.
Clear writing does not mean oversimplifying the law
There can sometimes be a concern that making legal writing easier to understand means removing nuance. It does not.
Clear legal content should preserve the legal point while removing unnecessary complexity from the way it is communicated. That may mean replacing long sentences, unexplained terminology and excessive background with a clearer structure.
The aim is not to make the law sound simple when it is not, but to make the explanation easier to follow.
Why legal content matters for a law firm's website
A law firm website cannot rely only on statements such as:
“commercially focused”, “innovative”, “strategic” ,or, “client-centric”.
Those descriptions say relatively little about what the firm's lawyers actually know, and in fact useful legal content gives prospective clients much more information.
A person researching a lawyer or law firm may read a practice area page, an article written by a partner or a recent analysis of a legal development before deciding whether to make contact. Content therefore becomes part of how the firm's expertise is presented online.
It also gives search engines more information about the subjects, industries and areas of law with which the firm is associated.
Legal content also supports lawyers' professional visibility
Not every piece of legal content needs to begin and end on the law firm's website. One article can often become several useful pieces of communication.
A detailed website article might lead to:
two or three LinkedIn posts;
a short client update;
a newsletter section;
commentary from an individual partner; and
a future follow-up article when the law develops.
This is how content creation can be made more sustainable.
Instead of constantly asking lawyers to produce something new, firms can make better use of the knowledge that already exists within the practice.
What makes legal content effective?
Good legal content usually has three qualities.
It is accurate- The legal position must be researched and presented carefully.
It is relevant- The subject should matter to the audience the firm wants to reach.
It is readable- A technically correct article is of limited value if the intended reader cannot easily understand what it is saying.
Where should a law firm start?
A law firm does not need to publish every day or create content on every legal development.
A better starting point is to identify:
the practice areas the firm wants to be known for;
the questions clients ask most often;
developments that genuinely affect those clients;
lawyers with useful perspectives to share; and
the formats most appropriate for each subject.
From there, the firm can build a consistent body of useful content rather than publishing individual pieces without a wider strategy.
Legal content is ultimately about making expertise visible
Law firms already contain enormous amounts of knowledge.
Partners discuss complex issues with clients, associates research difficult questions, teams track judgments, regulatory developments and industry changes every day.
Much of that knowledge, however, remains inside emails, calls, meetings and matter files.
Legal content writing gives some of that expertise a public form.
Done well, it helps people understand not only what a law firm does, but also how its lawyers think about the issues their clients face.
