5 Reasons to Curate Thought Leadership Content When You’re Too Busy to Produce It Yourself

You can build your authority and thought leadership through content you curate
for your clients and referral sources, not just content you create yourself.

As you could have guessed by the company I founded and the content I publish, I’m a big believer in content marketing and thought leadership marketing for lawyers and law firms. It is undoubtedly the key way for law firms and their lawyers to build their practices and their prominence, and to fuel their marketing and business development efforts.

But oftentimes, client work or other firm obligations get in the way of lawyers writing or recording the kinds of thought leadership content that help them demonstrate their knowledge and wisdom that reinforces their authority and prominence in their legal practices. When that is the case, lawyers and their firms should consider curating content instead of relying on creating original content to do that authority building and to get out in front of current and prospective clients and referral sources.

When I’m talking about content curation, I’m talking about compiling relevant news articles, thought leadership pieces (from inside your firm and out), and other pieces of content that are relevant to your past, current, and prospective clients and referral sources, and then including short blurbs (i.e., no more than a handful of sentences) that summarize the content and explain why the recipient should care. Most often, this is going to be in the form of an email newsletter, but it could easily be published as a blog post.

It might seem strange that lawyers can build authority regarding the areas of law they practice and the industries they serve merely by compiling content regarding both. But they can—directly and indirectly. Here are five reasons why curating content is an effective way for lawyers and law firms to build thought leadership and authority when they’re unable to create content themselves.

Curating relevant content makes you appear knowledgeable about the subject matter of that content.

When you send content regarding legal issues, business issues, and societal issues that could impact your recipients’ business operations, you’re showing you’re cognizant of the issues they might be dealing with, or soon will be, as part of their day-to-day responsibilities.

Your target audiences will interpret your inclusion of content regarding these issues as an indication that you are knowledgeable about these issues and that you could help them deal with those issues as they face them. After all, to be cognizant of these issues and to curate articles and insights about them is to understand they are relevant to your target audiences.

Additionally, your blurbs accompanying each piece of curated content, assuming those blurbs are well-written and show you’ve given some thought about why the topic of that curated content is relevant to your target audiences, will further evidence your ability to connect the dots between what’s happening in the world and how those events and trends are impacting your target audiences.

If you’re skeptical about this, imagine receiving a newsletter from a “handyman” company you’ve used in the past. Now imagine that newsletter includes best practices for installing outdoor security cameras, new trends for kitchen remodels, and how to “baby proof” your home. What impression does the inclusion of these articles give you? That the company is knowledgeable about these services—and related ones—and can perform them for you, right? For that reason, this handyman company will probably be among the first places you call for help regarding those services or related ones.

Curating content takes less time than creating content.

When you’re curating content, you’re not spending five or six seven hours sitting down and writing a 1,500-word blog post or bylined article for an external publication. You’ll be spending much less time than that compiling the content you’ll be curating—especially if you compile that content on an ongoing basis as you encounter it in the course of your own content consumption—and drafting the accompanying blurbs before sending both to a colleague to assemble and distribute as an email blast or publish as a blog post.

Going one step further, you could also delegate much of this work. You could task a colleague with monitoring various online sources on a regular basis and pulling for you a group of potentially interesting articles from which you would select the handful to include in the next curated collection. You could also task a colleague with writing the first draft of the blurbs so that all you’ll need to do is to review them and, if necessary, edit them.

Curating content forces you to stay abreast of what’s going on in the worlds within which your clients operate.

We all, occasionally, put our noses to the grindstone for periods of time during which we’re so busy with the work we have on our plates that we don’t pick our heads up and take a look around. We miss interesting news items and other pieces of content because we’re just too darn busy.

When you’re consistently curating content, you have no choice but to take a look at what’s happening around you and to consume timely content. By being forced to stay abreast of what’s happening within the worlds in which your clients (and referral sources) operate, you will be both a better lawyer/adviser and, perhaps, a better business developer. Issues raised in content you’re consuming as part of your curation efforts may prompt you to discuss those issues with your clients. Those discussions could strengthen that relationship, show that you are knowledgeable about the issues your clients are dealing with, and position you favorably for more work from those clients down the road.

Content you curate can inspire the content you’ll eventually create.

When you’re curating content for your target audiences, you’re being exposed to content containing different topics, angles, and perspectives you might not have otherwise been exposed to in the course of your day-to-day work. Chances are good that these additional topics, angles, and perspectives will inspire you—consciously or subconsciously—to eventually write about a topic that is related to your legal practice and relevant to your target audiences.

For example, let’s say you advise fintech companies on regulatory issues. In the course of your curation efforts you come across an article in which a fintech start-up founder is quoted as saying their company is operating within an area that has not yet been addressed by regulators. Skeptical about what you’re reading, you do five minutes of research concerning the regulation you would have assumed would cover what this startup is doing. You learn the founder is correct. You’re concerned about the implications for consumers if this startup grows like wildfire before regulators swoop in and regulate this gray area. You feel so strongly about this issue that you commit to writing an article for The Legal Intelligencer about it.

Curating content gives you an opportunity to connect with the people whose content you’re curating.

When you curate content, you have the ability to build relationships with the people whose content you’re curating, especially if you tend to include a particular author’s content on a regular basis in your curated set. They’ll certainly appreciate you getting their work out in front of additional eyeballs. For that reason, you could reach out to them and say:

Hi—I’m a lawyer who handles [insert practice]. I’ve included a handful of your articles over the past few months in my curated email newsletter that goes out to my [insert industry] clients, including [insert titles of/links to articles]. I think you’re doing great work. If you ever have a question about a legal issue regarding the [insert industry] industry, or if you’re interested in ideas or trends to write about, please reach out to me. I’d love to chat.

Likewise, you could ask the people whose content you’re curating if their publications accept articles written by lawyers. Again, by mentioning that you’ve been curating their publications’ content recently, you might start a relationship that bears fruit by providing you opportunities to externally publish content you eventually create.

Content curation isn’t content creation, but it’s still an effective authority building tool.

When you curate other people’s content, you’re not going to be seen in the same light by your target audiences as if you created all of that content. But that’s OK. For the reasons I described above, you’re still likely to be seen as an authority concerning the work you do and the topics covered by the content you’re curating.

Interestingly, you have the opportunity when you curate content to be seen as an authority on a larger universe of issues than those you normally would have written about. You are unlikely to be covering pure business issues and tangential societal issues in the content you write. But you’d cerainly want to curate that content because it impacts your clients’ professional (and likely personal) lives. Plus, by curating content concerning a wide range of relevant topics, you may be seen as an authority when it comes to your clients’ industries and business issues generally and not just a lawyer who can advise on a small universe of legal topics.

When building your authority, your prominence, and your book of business, few if any tactics are more effective than consistently creating relevant, valuable, and compelling thought leadership content. But when you don’t have the time to do so, content curation can still help you position yourself as an authority in your field—and may even bring with it benefits above and beyond those you will realize by creating original content.

Wayne Pollock, a former Am Law 50 senior litigation associate, is the founder of Copo Strategies, a legal services and communications firm, and the Law Firm Editorial Service, a content strategy and ghostwriting service for lawyers and their law firms. The Law Firm Editorial Service sets free the knowledge and wisdom trapped inside Big Law and boutique law firm partners by collaborating with them to strategize and ethically ghostwrite book-of-business-building marketing and business development content. Contact him at waynepollock@copostrategies.com.

Reprinted with permission from the March 7, 2023, edition of The Legal Intelligencer © 2023 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited, contact 877–257–3382 or reprints@alm.com.