Creating legal guides that truly serve the reader

Lawyers and legal marketers need to be more deliberate and thoughtful about how they communicate legal information. We tend to default to certain patterns that we’re comfortable with. A lawyer’s writing style is trained first in law school, writing academic essays to impress lecturers. Then once they’re working in law practice, writing professional legal opinions or court pleadings and the like which attempt to build up a case with all relevant information eventually building up to a watertight legal argument. Legal marketers often are trained in general digital marketing and may try carry over general content marketing tactics into law, where they may not necessarily serve the audience.

Creating a legal map

I’m not suggesting that there is one right way to for firms to share legal information. But I do believe that it’s important to break the shackles of what we we are comfortable with. When we create legal content our role is to put ourselves in the shoes of the readers, and work out how to serve them.

Our legal information is primarily a map to help the reader navigate through legal, business and life obstacles. Usually these are technical and complex for the readers, otherwise they wouldn’t be looking for a lawyer. And our job is to find a way to make it simpler and each to digest, to demystify and provide readers with a sense of comfort and hope that they can traverse this landscape.

Explaining the law visually

I’ve been increasingly exploring ways to represent the law in visual ways from mindmaps, to flowcharts. I’m finding the results to be pleasing and effective and I see this being an increasing emphasis of our content producing at Onyo Mark.

Visual legal aids are an excellent distinguishing feature. They make a complex legal topic infinitely more digestible. And it demonstrates a real effort by the lawyers to try and empathise with the reader and help them through a topic.

In future posts I’ll provide some depth and guidance on how to go about this. But some good starting points for those who want to experiment are