The Right Way to Write Content

“Content is king,” they say. So you’d better get the words churning, right?

I’ve known many solo and small firm lawyers who are convinced that their website should be built on content. They aren’t quite sure what that means, but they know they need words. So they hire someone who promises more words, because that’s content.

And then the rubber meets the road. The lawyer has to write a job description or hand out an initial assignment and the whole plan comes apart. They begin to ask hard questions: What are the words even for? What words do we need? I’ve been there.

To help you frame your content efforts, let me share with you how I’ve seen it done poorly, how I’ve seen it done well, and what I’ve learned from both. These simple principles will give you the foundation of an effective content machine.

First, What NOT to do

A buddy in a lawyer practice group recently hired an English major to create content for his site. Who better to write words than someone who reads words for a living, right?

He’d established a few rules for his new hire and he wanted advice for getting the word machine started. See if this experience sounds familiar, because it might reflect your misunderstanding of the purpose of content.

He are the rules he shared for the firm’s newbie:

  1. His writer must produce finished assignments within 24 hours;
  2. His writer must write two pages of content per hour;
  3. He must work as an “intern,” not an “employee;” and
  4. He must research and write content relevant to a DWI/criminal practice.

When this lawyer posted his requirements, several other content-happy attorneys gave advice. “Get a journalism major instead,” one lawyer suggested. “Why not pay an SEO company to create generic blogs?” another said. “Maybe you could find an English major who’s also in a fraternity so you can get a line on DWI clients!”

From the practical to the generic, the other lawyers in the practice group reinforced my buddy’s assumptions about content. The common error was seeing words as a commodity, not an art. An English major, the chorus echoed, wouldn’t understand that practical reality.

I pointed out how impractical this list in fact was: two pages of content per hour is a slow reading speed, but a really fast writing speed, especially for an unfamiliar subject; hiring a creator as a contractor reflects the lawyer’s understanding of content as a necessary evil, rather than an important strategic asset; and I’d worry about any lawyer website filled with words about a substantive legal area totally new to the writer.

If you see words as a commodity used to satisfy Google’s tiny robots, you’ll follow in my buddy’s footsteps. Doing so brings significant risk of harm without significant returns. Instead, let me offer an alternative.

A Modest Counterproposal

At the risk of undermining my frequent argument that lawyers should create content, let me propose that you not buy into the word machine logic. Please, either create content that matters, or don’t create any at all.

The content your firm creates is part of a user’s experience with your business. They do not separate the words on your website from your words in court. They are all part of the buyer’s journey with your firm, what we in logistics often called the “value chain.”

Rather than see your communication strategy as a frustrating distraction, then, create a system that will capture your voice and insights in a way that serves your community, while also not demanding so much of your time as to be impractical.

Here’s what I suggested to my lawyer buddy (wisdom you’re free to borrow): don’t have the English major write generic words about an unfamiliar subject at record speed. Instead, have the English major interview you and turn your responses into print-worthy explanations.

The process is simple:

  1. Gather questions your clients often ask;
  2. Have the English major ask you one or two of those questions each morning and record the answer;
  3. Feed the recorded answer into a transcription service like Rev.com or Trint;
  4. Have the English major clean up the transcription, turning the conversational language into a style appropriate for a blog, then use the question as the title and the answer as the post content;
  5. Group relevant question-and-answer posts together around broad subjects that you organize on your site in a way that’s mindful of your buyer’s journey;
  6. Have your content helper promote the new post through automated management systems adapted to each social platform.

We’ll talk more about these steps in coming posts, but note that this process captures your voice without taking too much of your time. It gives you lawyer-generated answers at scale.

Using Casetext in Your Content Process

By design, the process above uses your brain as the source of authoritative content. However, as your clients’ questions become more complex, your content process will require more in-depth analysis. When you get to that point, Casetext can help.

In addition to its intuitive natural language search, Casetext’s artificial intelligence tool, CARA, can lead you to lots of useful materials: briefs filed in court, articles written by attorneys, summaries of cases written by judges, and relevant primary materials like cases and statutes. These resources can be cited with ease as you work with any word processing tool. The same legal research skills that Casetext enables for litigators will serve you as a content creator.

To learn more about how CARA can help you in your writing and case work, schedule a demo with one of our helpful team members (and even test it with a free trial).

Featured posts

© 2024 Casetext Inc., a part of Thomson Reuters
Casetext, part of Thomson Reuters are not a law firm and do not provide legal advice.
Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information/Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information

Draft Correspondence

Rapidly draft common legal letters and emails.

How this skill works

  • Specify the recipient, topic, and tone of the correspondence you want.

  • CoCounsel will produce a draft.

  • Chat back and forth with CoCounsel to edit the draft.

Review Documents

Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.

How this skill works

  • Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.

  • CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.

  • Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.

Legal Research Memo

Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.

How this skill works

  • Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.

  • CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.

  • Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.

Prepare for a Deposition

Get a thorough deposition outline in no time, just by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.

How this skill works

  • Describe the deponent and what’s at issue in the case, and CoCounsel identifies multiple highly relevant topics to address in the deposition and drafts questions for each topic.

  • Refine topics by including specific areas of interest and get a thorough deposition outline.

Extract Contract Data

Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review

How this skill works

  • Allows the user to upload a set of contracts and a set of questions

  • This skill will provide an answer to those questions for each contract, or, if the question is not relevant to the contract, provide that information as well

  • Upload up to 10 contracts at once

  • Ask up to 10 questions of each contract

  • Relevant results will hyperlink to identified passages in the corresponding contract

Contract Policy Compliance

Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.

How this skill works

  • Upload a set of contracts and then describe a policy or set of policies that the contracts should comply with, e.g. "contracts must contain a right to injunctive relief, not merely the right to seek injunctive relief."

  • CoCounsel will review your contracts and identify any contractual clauses relevant to the policy or policies you specified.

  • If there is any conflict between a contractual clause and a policy you described, CoCounsel will recommend a revised clause that complies with the relevant policy. It will also identify the risks presented by a clause that does not conform to the policy you described.

Summarize

Get an overview of any document in straightforward, everyday language.

How this skill works

  • Upload a document–e.g. a legal memorandum, judicial opinion, or contract.

  • CoCounsel will summarize the document using everyday terminology.

Search a Database

Find all instances of relevant information in a database of documents.

How this skill works

  • Select a database and describe what you're looking for in detail, such as templates and precedents to use as a starting point for drafting documents, or specific clauses and provisions you'd like to include in new documents you're working on.

  • CoCounsel identifies and delivers every instance of what you're searching for, citing sources in the database for each instance.

  • Behind the scenes, CoCounsel generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identifiy the on-point passages from every document in the database, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), citing applicable excerpts in specific documents.

Skills

UNIVERSAL
Search a Database

Find all instances of relevant information in a database of documents.

Summarize

Get an overview of any document in straightforward, everyday language.

Draft Correspondence

Rapidly draft common legal letters and emails.

TRANSACTIONAL
Contract Policy Compliance

Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.

Extract Contract Data

Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review

Prepare for a Deposition

Get a thorough deposition outline by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.

LITIGATION
Legal Research Memo

Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.

Review Documents

Get comprehensive answers to your questions about a set of documents.