Podcasting for Lawyers

How Lawyers and Law Firms can use Podcasts for Marketing and Business Development

What a Podcast Can Actually do for Law Firm?

At One Stone Creative we use a framework called the Business Podcast Blueprints to design podcasts that do specific jobs within companies. A Blueprint is the overarching reason a podcast exists, and there are 5 of them:

• Relationship Building Podcasts are designed to connect you with colleagues and other professionals one on one.
• Audience Engagement Podcasts help you educate your community and build knowing, liking and trusting at scale.
• Thought Leadership Shows are used to share your unique expertise and IP to build authority in your practice area.
• Conversion Podcasts are designed to change watchers and listeners from one type of relationship to another.
• Content Podcasts are designed to create the assets you will use in other areas in your business.

So let’s look at how each of the Blueprints can be specifically applied to the needs of a law firm.

Relationship Building Podcasts

If your business largely comes from word of mouth and referrals, this is the podcast for you.

A Relationship Building Podcast in a law firm is usually going to have one of two goals:

1. Connecting with referral partners – professional colleagues in related firms, businesses or institutions who have access to the type of clients you serve. The podcast is your way to get to know them and build the relationship over time.

2. Becoming known in your area of practice. If you are a newer practitioner, opening a new practice or just feel like you don’t know anyone in the space, a relationship building podcast will give you a compelling reason to reach out and connect with the people you need in your professional network.

Let’s say you’ve finished your articling and want to go solo instead of taking the associate route (brave thing, you!) –  a relationship building podcast can help you create the professional relationship you need to build a viable practice.

Alternatively, if you’re in a very high-trust area of practice like family law – connecting with clients at the right time is challenging, but having a network of dozens of local financial planners, therapists, other attorneys and mediators you’ve met through your podcast can keep the referrals flowing even if your SEO work still has you on page 2.

They key to making this type of podcast work is in the planning and in the follow-up. If you want a new relationship to send you referrals you have to build enough of a relationship that they feel confident in your abilities and professionalism. This will mean being in touch after the episode to continue building the relationship. The podcast opens the door, but you still need to walk through it.

Audience Engagement Podcasts

One of the challenges of marketing legal services is that, until someone needs them, they’re not really interested, or looking for information.

This means you need to have the right content available (and discoverable!) when the right person does start looking.

Audience Engagement Podcasts for law firms means playing the long game, creating content about your business, your experience, your cases and your methodologies now, and making them available when people search for them later.

One lawyer we’ve worked with, Michael Volkov of Volkovlaw.com attributes at least 40 of his current clients directly to his efforts podcasting. People call him and reference specific situations or strategies he mentioned, and ask for help with the same thing.

These shows can be interviews with clients or colleagues, conversations between partners, case studies or educational pieces that will help people down the road.

This is also the type of podcast that can do the heaviest lifting in terms of public service and education. If you want to help people who aren’t in a position to be abe to hire you (with the proper disclaimers around it NOT being legal advice, of course) this is the way to go. Think of it like scaled pro-bono work. If the type of person you want to help needs information about family or employment law, for example, you can provide that to them without spending too much time on free consultations.

Thought Leadership Podcasts

A mistake that we often see in podcasting is that a business owner wants to be a thought leader… and then starts a podcast wholly dedicated to interviewing others about their expertise. It doesn’t work like that.

To be a thought leader, you need to be sharing original thought, and creating content that other people cite or respond to. This can do a huge amount in terms of building authority in your practice area, and becoming THE lawyer or law firm who handles that particular thing.

This, of course, leads to to increased demand for your services, invitations to speaking opportunities or memberships, access to the best interns and lots of referrals.

A Thought Leadership Show might have interviews, but those are going to be conversations between equals about areas of mutual interest, and not just interviews. They might also be commentary on the news, changes in legislation, or recent rulings – if things happen and you have opinions about them, that is fertile ground for Thought Leadership podcasting.

Like with Audience Engagement, this is often a longer term strategy than a shorter one – it takes time and consistency to build a reputation, so often firms will pair Thought Leadership content with another Blueprint, like content, to maximise return on investment.

Conversion Podcasts

Conversion podcasts mainly exist to change the type of relationship you have with the listener or viewer. For legal podcasts, this is most powerful as a part of the sales and discovery process.

Now, of course you want your phone to be ringing until you and the rest of your team are at capacity, but it’s the rare law firm that doesn’t spend a lot of time talking to people who they, ultimately, can’t help.

And in a perfect world, clients would come to you prepared, ready to take action and aware of the behaviours they should and shouldn’t engage in as part of thier legal process.

This is far from a perfect world, but a podcast can help a great deal.

One of my favourite use-cases for legal podcasts is a short series of episodes that teach a potential client if they can help at all and how to be a good client.

When done well, someone who finds you on social media or through a search when they are looking for support will find (or be directed to by a member of your team!) your podcast, learn about how you work, if you can help them, and how they can maximize their chances of success – before you get on the phone with them. This not only saves you time, but when you do talk to people, they feel like you know them, are confident you can help, and have an idea of what to expect. It makes for an excellent relationship.

Content Podcasts

This is one of the unsung heroes of podcasting, and in the age of AEO and GEO, is something to seriously consider.

All podcasts create content, it’s a natural side effect of the medium, but not all podcasts use that content in a genuinely effective way. Using the medium of podcasting to create the content you need to be found by search engines, referred by AI platforms and build traction on social media is practical and efficient. Lawyers are not famously burdened with excessive time to spend recording short form video, but a batch-recorded podcast can create a month’s worth of content in under an hour.

The most important part of content podcasts – after the content they contain – is how they are presented to be discovered. Strategic content planning means that, over time, a law firm can create clusters inter-linked content readable by AI platforms and search engines so that when people are looking for information, it’s available to be shared. Further, by creating audio and video content, you are able to build knowing, liking and trusting AND a cross-platform presence using social media, the podcast players, YouTube and your website.

We can see in the Canadian Legal Podcasting Report that most of the shows we sampled are using Audience Engagement (55%),Thought Leadership (35%), with some using Relationship Building (10%). These are excellent use cases for shows, but there are many more ways to take advantage of the medium.

Critically, none of this requires a large audience. Downloads, views or listens are rarely a meaningful metric for legal shows. It’s not about the quantity of listeners – it’s about individuals hearing what you have to say at the right time.

When you look at podcasting this way, it stops being an independent project with its own critera for success or failure. It becomes a structural part of your marketing and business development. And THAT means that what you invest in your podcast is likely to show you a good return, and reduce what you have to spend in other areas.

This is the difference between an expensive vanity project, and creating a strategic asset.

But wait! There’s more…

When you choose a Blueprint, or an overarching style for your podcast, you’ll achieve it – but that isn’t all you’ll achieve. Relationship Building podcasts create content, and Audience Engagement podcasts can build relationships. You can optimize a podcast for more than it’s overarching purpose, getting more mileage out of each piece of content.

You choose one primary goal as the most important so you have a way to focus your efforts, but you can design a podcast that takes uses multiple Blueprints, and the benefits expand and compound over time.

You can learn more about the Business Podcast Blueprints right here, or if you’re really motivated, you can download a free copy of the book Podcasting for Business. For now, let’s dig deeper into how law firms are using podcasts.

Time and Resource Investment for Podcasting.

Rates and time investment for podcasting can vary a lot.

Things that contribute to the equation are the type of podcast you’re creating, the format it’s in, the length of episodes and number of speakers, the frequency of release and how many assets go with each episode. The time of the hosts and any other involved team members also needs to be considered.

To give you a sense of what you can expect to invest, here is a quick breakdown of the time and monetary investment for each of the examples above. This is based on our own experience and pricing, and if you are considering podcasting and start researching vendors you will find those who charge both more and less. The important thing is to find the right mix of support and assets for your needs that works within your budget. And if at all possible, you should like your production vendor – they’re going to get to know you very well.

Getting Started

There is a decent amount of front-end work in starting a new podcast – designing the show, art and music, possibly some equipment purchases. A launch can start at around $1500-$2000 for an audio or video show and take around 6 weeks from ‘let’s do this’ to ‘we’re on spotify!’

In terms of equipment, this is another area where you can spend as much money as you want to, but if you are going to be recording in your home or office all you really need is a decent mic and webcam and a quiet place to record that isn’t too echoey.

A quality mic will usually run about $150, and a good webcam will cost less than $200. If you’re getting started, don’t invest more than that right away. You can always upgrade when you fall in love with the medium.

Weekly Interview Show

For a 45-minute weekly interview show, you can expect to spend up to an hour finding the guest and prepping your interview questions or conversation talking points. (You can delegate some of this work, and you will probably find you get faster as you do more episodes.) The recording itself will take about an hour, allowing for sme chatting at the beginning and end. Following up with your guest takes just a few minutes a few times a year. Where things get variable is in the post-production. If you want to edit yourself or have a team member do it, a decent rule of thumb is 5 minutes of work for each finished minute of podcast – but that can vary a great deal.

The cost typically starts at around $500/episode, but can go up or down depending on how many different assets you are interested in.

Solo or Co-Hosted Podcast Season

A limited-release season can be a great entry point into podcasting, and can often come with a lot of help. For the types of seasons we generally create, you would have a time investment of about 20 hours over 90 days for the whole thing. Most of this time would be spent reviewing and practicing outlines, and recording your episodes with a producer in a virtual studio.

The cost of this type of season starts at $6000 for audio and $8500 for video.

Solo or Micro-Podcasts

Solo podcasts of 10-20 minutes will usually take about an hour to prepare and 20-40 minutes to record. (Unless you are one of those enviable people who can turn on mic and go off the cuff!)

Micro-Podcasts are recorded in a batch and it usually takes about half an hour to prepare and an hour to record 12 episodes.

Solo podcasts usually start at about $300/episode, and micro-podcasts at $85/episode, but go down with volume.

This is not an exhaustive list or definitive pricing – different firms need different things, and different vendors have a variety of different packages, inclusions and strategies that can all impact the time investment and price of your show.

Hopefully, however, this is enough to give you an idea of whether or not podcasting can be a workable strategy for your firm now.