Law Firm Social Media Marketing Agency

ABA Formal Opinion 18-480, issued March 2018, addresses lawyers who blog and comment publicly, and its central holding surprises most people who haven’t read it. 

Model Rule 1.6 provides that a lawyer “shall not reveal information relating to the representation of a client unless the client gives informed consent” or a narrow exception applies. The opinion is explicit that there is no carve-out for information that is publicly available. As the analysis puts it, the protection afforded by Rule 1.6 is not forfeited even when the information is available from other sources or has been publicly filed. 

The practical consequences are broad: 

Case result posts require consent. The verdict being reported in the local paper does not release you from Rule 1.6. 

Commentary on your own matters requires consent — analyzing a decision in a case you handled, explaining what happened, using it as a teaching example. 

Responding to a negative review is constrained. If the reply would reveal information relating to the representation — that the person was a client, what happened in their matter, why the outcome went as it did — Rule 1.6 restrains it. This is the single most common way firms get into trouble on social, because the provocation is real and the instinct to correct the record is strong. 

And Opinion 18-480 also points at Rules 3.5 and 3.6 — ex parte communications and trial publicity — as further limits on what can be said online about pending matters. 

The constraint rules out roughly the content most firms would start with. It leaves a great deal that works better anyway. 

Explain the law, not your cases. How a process works, what a statute changed, what happens at each stage of a matter, what someone should do in the first 48 hours after an event. This is what people are actually searching for, it requires no consent, and it demonstrates competence more convincingly than a verdict figure does. 

Answer the questions people are embarrassed to ask. What does this cost. How long will it take. Do I even need a lawyer for this. What happens if I do nothing. Most legal marketing avoids these; addressing them plainly is a genuine differentiator in a category people find intimidating. 

Use consented client stories properly when you have them. Consent is obtainable — many clients are pleased to be featured — and a story told with permission is more powerful than a number. Get the consent process right, in writing, with scope, and treat it as a workflow rather than an afterthought.

Talk about the firm, the people and the work. Attorney backgrounds, why someone practices in an area, what the office is like, community involvement, recruitment. None of it touches Rule 1.6 and all of it does the trust work that legal buyers need. 

And publish the general lessons of your cases without the cases. “Three things people get wrong in the first week after a workplace injury” is drawn from experience, teaches something useful, and identifies nobody.

Most firms think about the post. The exposure is usually below it. 

Someone will describe their situation in the comments and ask what they should do. Publicly, in detail, sometimes about a matter with an opposing party who can read it. A substantive answer risks creating expectations of a lawyer-client relationship, giving advice without the facts, and doing so in a jurisdiction where the responding lawyer may not be licensed. 

And a lawyer’s audience is national while their license is not. A firm licensed in one state has followers in fifty. General educational content is one thing; something that begins to look like advising a specific person in another jurisdiction is another, and the line is easy to cross when the question is sympathetic and the answer feels obvious. 

The working solution is unglamorous and it needs to exist before the first post, not after the first awkward comment: 

A standard response, used consistently. Warm, brief, and non-advisory: we can’t give advice on specific situations here, every case turns on its facts, here’s how to reach us for a consultation. Templated so nobody improvises it at 11pm. 

Marketing owns moderation, not the attorneys. A trained person monitors comments and DMs, escalating anything that needs a lawyer’s judgment, and applying the standard response otherwise. The failure mode is a partner answering a comment personally because they’re being helpful. 

An explicit jurisdiction line in the profile and where appropriate in content. Where the firm is licensed, and that content is general information rather than advice. 

And a rule about pending matters. Rules 3.5 and 3.6 exist. Live litigation is the worst possible subject for spontaneous posting. 

A final point that changes budget allocation more than any of the above. 

For most firms, the highest-value social audience is other lawyers, not consumers. Referrals are the dominant client acquisition channel across most of the profession — particularly in specialized, high-value and business-facing practice areas. A boutique that gets three referrals a year from other firms has a better economic outcome than one with a large consumer following. 

That reframes the program considerably. The referral audience lives largely on LinkedIn, responds to demonstrated expertise rather than to accessibility, and is reached by content that would bore a consumer — a genuinely useful analysis of a recent decision, a clear explanation of a procedural change, a considered take on where an area of law is heading. It’s also a small, identifiable audience, which makes it a B2B social problem in a professional-services wrapper, with the same measurement caveats: you will not be able to attribute the referral to the post. 

Recruitment is the other under-used audience. Associate and lateral hiring is competitive and expensive, and the content that shows what a firm is like to work at is largely content the firm should be producing anyway. 

Consumer-facing practices are the exception. Personal injury, family, criminal defense, immigration and consumer bankruptcy do have genuine consumer social audiences, and short-form video reaches them effectively. Those are also the practice areas where the comment-moderation problem is most acute, because the people asking are distressed and the questions are specific.