Document Type
Article
Abstract
The advent of technological tools such as social media present the legal industry with the potential for both perilous liability and unparalleled rainmaking. However, the full potential of social media remains untapped in the legal field because the topic has yet to be fully integrated into a broader understanding of inbound marketing and content leadership. The current treatment of social media in the legal literature is uneven-it tends to disproportionately emphasize the potential liabilities over the benefits, and it fails to provide a thorough framework to guide its optimal use. This article aims to rectify this uneven treatment by situating social media as but a single element within an inbound marketing scheme driven by content leadership. More precisely, this article presents a hub-and-spoke model of inbound marketing in which attorneys establish themselves as content leaders (the content hub) and then create and cultivate client relationships through the spokes of social media, blogging, and search engine optimization (SEO). To support this model, this article provides a brief history of marketing along with an introduction to foundational marketing theory augmented by recent technology. Those principles are then applied to law firms through the examination of case studies in both traditional businesses and law firms. Finally, this article concludes by arguing that utilizing this model provides solo practitioners with the ability to establish a more pronounced voice for themselves, which, in effect, puts them on equal footing with larger more established firms.
First Page
389
Last Page
410
Recommended Citation
J. Mark Phillips, Kyle A. Huggins, and Lora Mitchell Harding,
From Old Spice to the Texas Law Hawk: How Inbound Marketing, Content Leadership and Social Media Can Level the Playing Field for Solo Practitioners,
9 J. Bus. Entrepreneurship & L.
389
(2016)
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/jbel/vol9/iss2/6
