6 Pro Tips for Building a Personal Brand as an Attorney

Building a personal brand will differentiate you from your competitors, establish your authority in the market, and give you a competitive edge. Lawyers need a strong brand to remain competitive in their practice areas and leverage their expertise and reputation to help them succeed. As a lawyer, your brand is how you present yourself to the public. Your legal practice aims to set yourself apart from the competition, establish credibility, and establish a sense of trust among potential clients. However, the question arises, being a lawyer, what can you do to establish a personal brand?  Well, fret not; we are here to assist you. Below are some tips for developing an effective personal brand that will attract clients and earn you respect in your field.

6 Professional Tips for Developing Your Attorney Brand

You must be dedicated, creative, and hardworking to build your brand. The process does not happen overnight. It can take years for a lawyer to build a reputation and establish credibility in the legal profession. 

For starters, here are six ways to build your brand as an attorney. 

Discover What You Can Truly Offer

Authenticity and personalization are essential components of your legal brand. Therefore, you should determine who you are, what you stand for, and what you can offer and stick to it. To ensure authenticity, you must decide what you want to portray outside the company. Getting to know yourself involves understanding what you do. It is important to ask yourself the following questions: 

• What type of lawyer do I wish to become? 
• How do I differentiate myself from other legal professionals? 
• In what manner do I wish to serve my clients?

Choosing the right practice area for you is crucial (more on that in the next section), but you also need to determine what your legal brand will do to build your reputation and service your clients.

Find Your Right Practice Area/ Niche

Law is a very diverse field; you can offer plenty of services, but focusing on a particular area or small audience is recommended in the beginning. Later, when you have established yourself in the market, you can offer more services.  Attaching a large audience will stretch your brand too thin. Instead, determine your target audience and find a way to attract them. The following factors will normally determine who your target audience is:

• Your area of expertise
• Who Pays the highest wages
• What is in high demand

If you specialize in a particular field, potential clients will likely remember you more when they need a lawyer. You might build a personal brand around finding an audience that is responsive to your message. For example, you can specialize in family law and your passion could be negotiating child-centered divorce agreements. Ideally, this would involve focusing on parents who understand their children’s well-being comes first.

Start the Branding Process 

After you have decided on your area of expertise and what services you will offer, the next phase involves developing your brand. The first step in branding is to create a logo for your law brand based on the identity and niche you wish to represent. You will need to invest considerable time in hiring a professional designer to design your attorney brand logo.  Developing a distinctive logo is a crucial component of your branding strategy. Logotypes aren’t just used to represent a firm’s name; they should represent everything that makes up your brand, such as its mission, values, and goals. To create the perfect logo design, consider hiring a professional designer, preferably one who has already worked on similar logos. For the designing part, choosing a simple wordmark can be a safe and timeless decision, but it might also seem impersonal. A tagline stating your practice or brand promise could work well with an abstract and visual element. Monograms are so popular in the legal profession as their simplicity, elegance, and ease of use make them an ideal option for letterheads, merchandise, and more. Furthermore, this logotype is suitable for various visual experiments.

Here are a couple of examples you can take a look at. (https://rankings.io/law-firm-logos/)

• The Ticket Clinic 

With this logo, the firm’s clients understand that fighting a traffic ticket can be a difficult, winding process without the assistance of a lawyer. Bright and bold colors make it visually appealing.

• The Lincoln Law Firm

An excellent choice for a family law firm would be to create a calming blue-green logo that shows the family tree like this logo. Regardless of the initials or tree, the typography is straightforward and works well in various sizes.

• Garfinkel Immigration Law Firm

As is evident from this logo, complementary colors are used, and the globe symbol indicates that the law firm is equipped to handle immigration matters arising in the United States, no matter where the client may be.

• Ben Crump Law Firm

It’s an excellent combination of gold and purple, and the text surrounding the lawyer’s name and tagline conveys what the lawyer does. Both personality and professionalism are evident in the logo.

Build Your Attorney Website 

Starting a website is an effective way to sell your services and promote your brand. You can write blog posts and articles relevant to the law industry and discuss various issues and solutions to legal problems. Besides demonstrating your expertise, your articles should provide unique and original content.You can also write blog posts on other relevant websites as a guest blogger to promote your brand and services.  Remember, the website for your law brand must be search engine optimized (SEO) like any other website. To achieve this, a responsive and user-friendly website and using the appropriate keywords are essential. Fresh Legal, a US website, is a great website for inspiration. Throughout the website’s design, you will find classy typography, a color palette, and subtle movements designed to enhance the user experience.

The most interesting aspect of this web design is the variety of content and information. They provided a list of specific client services for each practice area. Moreover, their law firm branding has a separate web page devoted to each team member under “Our Team.”

As an additional bonus, they also have a blog section on topics pertinent to fellow lawyers and potential clients under the “Resources” tab.

Start Publishing Your Content

Publish content on your website relevant to your practice area. The articles you publish must demonstrate mastery of the subject you are writing about and provide information not available anywhere else online. Take Advantage of Social Listening and publish your content around people’s problems. Listen to their issues and provide a solution in your writing. Share your articles on social media platforms to get more engagement. By creating content around people’s legal issues and using specific keywords that people use for finding solutions, your site can also rank better in search engines.

Start Marketing on Social Media 

It is time to market your legal brand after all the hard work you have put into establishing it. An effective marketing platform is social media sites. Increasing your following and amplifying your personal branding efforts through social media is possible. Use social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to grow your following. Platforms like these allow you to connect with a larger audience and engage with them more easily. Develop high-engagement social media posts that build followers and extend your reach to take full advantage of social media. You will invariably have a wide range of people in your network. You may end up with clients, while others will become advocates who spread your posts online, increasing your visibility. Other law firms may take notice of you.

Conclusion

Social media and content marketing are closely intertwined with a lawyer’s brand in today’s digital world. Developing a successful business requires hard work, patience, persistence, and innovation. Use the following practices to cultivate a strong personal brand that demonstrates your expertise and sets you apart from the competition. Publish your content along with curated content and insightful comments. Your audience can also be reached instantly by streaming live videos