How to Get Featured in Lawyers Weekly

Lawyers Weekly is trade press for the legal profession, which makes it a very different proposition from consumer or business media.

Here is what it covers and how coverage works.

What Lawyers Weekly is

Lawyers Weekly is a legal-profession trade publication covering the business and practice of law. It reports on firms, practice management, careers, regulation, technology and the direction the profession is heading.

Its readership is lawyers, firm leaders, in-house counsel and people who work in and around legal services. That is a specialist audience, and it is the reason the publication is worth anything to you.

Who it reaches

Trade press does one thing very well: it puts you in front of your own profession rather than the general public.

For a firm, that matters for referrals, lateral hiring, panel appointments and reputation among peers. For a legal technology or services business, it puts you in front of the exact buyers you are trying to reach. For an individual practitioner, it is a way of being known for something specific rather than being one name among many.

What it will not do is generate consumer demand. If you want the public to find you, a legal trade title is not the tool.

It is also durable. Legal buyers, recruiters and referral sources research individuals carefully before they act, and a substantive article about your expertise keeps working quietly long after the week it published.

What it publishes

News about the profession, analysis of regulatory and market changes, practice-management and career content, commentary from practitioners, and interviews with people running firms and legal businesses.

What lands is expertise, not promotion. A piece explaining how a regulatory change will affect small firms is publishable. A piece announcing that your firm is excellent is not.

Specificity is what separates a commissioned piece from a rejected one. Name the change, the group it affects and the practical consequence, and an editor has something to work with. Speak in generalities and they have nothing.

The routes in

• Editorial coverage. A journalist covers a development you are part of, or quotes you as an expert on a story they are writing. Free, and their decision.
• Contributed commentary. Trade titles commonly run practitioner opinion and analysis. It has to be genuinely useful to other lawyers, and it is still an editor's decision whether to run it.
• Sponsored content and partnerships. Trade publishers typically offer labelled commercial content and event partnerships. Paid, legitimate, and not the same as earned editorial.

Be clear which one you are buying, and be sceptical of any guarantee attached to the first two.

Awards, directories and events sit alongside all of this. They are usually commercial products with their own entry criteria, and they should be assessed as such rather than treated as editorial recognition.

Regulatory rules you still have to respect

This is the part that makes legal PR different from every other kind.

Lawyers are subject to their own bar association or regulator's rules on advertising, publicity, claims about outcomes, client confidentiality and how services may be described. Those rules vary by jurisdiction and they apply to media coverage and contributed articles just as they apply to your own marketing.

We are not your regulator and nothing here is legal advice. Before you approve any piece, check the current rules that apply to you and, where relevant, clear it internally. In practice that usually means avoiding outcome claims, superlatives about your own practice, and anything involving a client that has not been properly authorised.

What we do

DNA develops the angle, drafts to the publication's standard and manages the placement. You review and approve everything before it goes anywhere, which matters more in a regulated profession than in most.

We will also tell you when trade press is the wrong target and something else would serve you better.

Drafts go to you, and where required through your firm's own approval process, before anything is submitted anywhere.

Frequently asked questions

Can I write for it myself?

Trade publications generally welcome practitioner commentary, but publication remains an editorial decision and the piece has to be useful to other lawyers.

Will it bring me clients?

It reaches the profession, so it is strongest for referrals, hiring and reputation among peers. It is not a consumer acquisition channel.

Do advertising rules apply to editorial coverage?

Your regulator's rules can apply to how you are described publicly. Check the requirements in your jurisdiction before approving anything; we cannot advise you on them.