Lawyers Use LinkedIn To Manage Their Brand, Attract Customers And More

LinkedIn is a powerful social media platform for business professionals. It is the networking hub for everyone who values their career, from entrepreneurs, owners, executives, managers to new job market entrants.

Are you keen to know how lawyers benefit from using LinkedIn? This article looks at interesting user statistics and why LinkedIn is the preferred social channel for lawyers.

Have you got a LinkedIn profile?

If not, you are among only 10% of all US lawyers who don’t have one. Sometimes it’s nice to be unique. However, this is not one of those times when your exclusiveness brings you benefits.

The United States has 175,000 law firms and 1.33 million individual lawyers who actively use LinkedIn. It is not just a professional’s Facebook; it is a digital sales and networking funnel in an increasingly digital world. If you’re not at the party, you cannot avail yourself of the following extraordinary benefits:

1. Reputational Management

LinkedIn for lawyers is like Instagram for influencers. It’s the place where you get to dictate how the professional world sees you. It’s also the first thing that pops up if a prospective client or a law firm googles your name. Why? For your searching, your name LinkedIn has a domain reputation of 98 out of 100, which is higher than Facebook’s 96 and Twitter’s 94! Therefore your LinkedIn profile will most likely show in search results before other sites, including your own!

Most users are lurkers.

You might think that it’s an empty void because not everyone posts regularly. However, 90% of social media users are lurkers – people who scroll through without commenting, liking, posting, or sharing. This is especially true for LinkedIn.

Trusted authority

LinkedIn is a platform where you can build a personal brand and establish yourself as an authority. Sharing and authoring strong leadership articles can position you as a trustworthy professional. It allows you to be visible to clients and law firms looking for the exact things you post about.

At the bare minimum, it plugs a hole in your self-marketing because, without a profile, some clients would refuse to hire you.

2. Networking

Your skillset is not the only thing responsible for the achievements in your career. In truth, it might not even be the majority of your successes.

Networking is what primarily opens doors to new opportunities for you. Who you know is vital.

According to the American Bar Association, 75% of corporate counsels have recruited a 3rd party counsel using LinkedIn. Lawyers use LinkedIn frequently because it provides quickly accessible information on who you are, what you specialize in, and what connections you have. Shared connections make you more trustworthy and more likely to be a solid choice.

You are not only a potential co-counsel, but also you can become a potential referral. Many attorneys use LinkedIn to connect with a pool of lawyers who specialize in different areas. Whenever they request advice in the area they don’t work, they offer up the opportunity to their community.

If you are not on LinkedIn, you could be missing out on regular referrals from your peers.

3. Research

Tools like LexisNexis, Westlaw, and ROSS Intelligence are not the only research sources for forward-thinking lawyers. In fact, social media research has become a piece of evidence sourcing in many legal cases. Companies and individuals announce important matters on social media regularly, and you can miss them.

Beyond announcements, LinkedIn can be used for researching opposing counsel, clients, companies, and more. LinkedIn gives you access to professionals in almost every field you are likely to interact with throughout a case.

4. Client Acquisition

LinkedIn has 722 million active users, with 176 million of those in the US (84% of the adult population). That is 176 million people who will likely need legal services at some point in their lifetimes. Well, what do you think? How many people are likely to use LinkedIn to find their attorneys?

Statistically, 94% of people will use LinkedIn during their attorney acquisition process. People use LinkedIn to directly find a lawyer to help them or research a lawyer referred to them. This is primarily because users trust LinkedIn as a source of information. If they can review your profile and career, they can build trust.

Importantly, it provides one more piece of additional insight that people don’t fully trust word-of-mouth referrals. If 94% of people research a referral on LinkedIn, it means that they need further validation. If you rely solely on word-of-mouth, clients can be passing you by without your knowledge.

5. Finding Your Next Role

Even though the primary intention of LinkedIn is to connect job seekers with hiring companies, the roles of this platform have been greatly extended.

Today, LinkedIn is the most widely used platform by law firms. 78% of firms have a profile.

By managing your reputation, showcasing your talents, and leveraging SEO metrics with some carefully used keywords, you become extremely visible.

Having an impressive, optimized profile creates a strong first impression. Furthermore, if you have connections with a reputable firm or recruiter, you have an automatic reference.

Final Thoughts

The whole world continues to embed technologies and social media into everyday practices. People use the internet for everything, starting from online shopping and reading the news and ending with finding jobs and signing different contracts.

If you want to be visible to clients, recruiters, or potential firms, having a LinkedIn profile is essential. It has become the directory of professionals, and, thus, a stand-out profile on the platform is a new efficient business card.