Think Like an Editor: Getting Published in Law360

[00:00:00] Michelle Calcote King: I’m Michelle Calcote King. I’m your host, and I’m also the principal and president of Reputation Ink. We’re a marketing and public relations firm for B2B professional services firms, including law firms. You can learn more about us at rep-ink, that’s ink with a K, dot com. So you likely know Law360. It sends newsletters to three million recipients every business day, and its Expert Analysis section is where the deep thinking lives.

Not recaps, not breaking news, but the why does this matter analysis that attorneys and GCs actually rely on. So today, we’re talking with Ellen Jones, she’s the senior editor of Expert Analysis at Law360, about what it actually takes to get your analysis published and what legal marketers can do to set their attorneys up for success.

So welcome to the show, Ellen.

[00:00:55] Ellen Jones: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It’s so great to be here.

[00:00:58] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. I’m excited about this, because this is something I know our clients really love to be featured in. So let’s just set up. Walk us through the Expert Analysis section, what it is, and how it differs from other sections of Law360, like the news coverage.

[00:01:16] Ellen Jones: Yeah, I mean, you said it already. It’s where the deep thinking lives. I think that was a really great way of putting it. But Law360 is distributed to more than three million people every business day. Our readers are across law, business and government. And we have around 350 journalists in our newsroom. Those folks are spread out over the country, and they are the ones who are covering our breaking news. They’re in the courts, they’re on Capitol Hill, they’re covering what’s going on in litigation as well as what’s going on from the regulators, what’s going on at the national level, at state legislatures as well.

So when something big happens, those are the breaking news alerts. Those are the quick news articles that are like, this party filed a motion in this case, or here’s a new class action that’s been filed against a big company or whomever. So that’s what we might call the day one news. That is like, “Here’s what happened. We’re just giving you the facts.” We’re not doing any kind of deep commentary, we’re just letting you know what’s going on to keep you in the loop, similar to how any news wire or any news service might work.

But then expert analysis is maybe more what we refer to as the day two news, which is like, “Okay, here’s what’s happened. Now, here’s what it means for you. Here’s what it means for your business. Here’s what it means for your compliance planning. Here’s what it means for how you interact with regulators.” So we look for attorney experts to write about these issues in a deep way. And it’s not only to say, “Here, if you’re a peer of mine or someone who works in this area, here’s how you might want to be thinking about these issues,” but also, “Hey, if you’re a business that’s been impacted by this news, be it a new rule or regulation or a case, here’s how you might want to be thinking about it as well.”

[00:03:21] Michelle Calcote King: That’s great. So tell me — for the people who are listening who want to get their attorneys to write more for Expert Analysis, what works in terms of the submissions that work and those that don’t?

[00:03:38] Ellen Jones: That’s a good question, and I’m excited to talk about that because we do field submissions all day long. And not only do we accept submissions unsolicited, we also reach out to regular contributors as well to write about things. But from those unsolicited submissions that we get, what kind of separates things from just the normal slush pile of articles and pitches that we get all day long are the articles that really have a new point of view and really have something to say other than, “Here’s what happened.”

[00:04:11] Ellen Jones: Because like I said, we have journalists and folks who are out there telling us what happened — the breaking news, the day-to-day. And not only that, we serve a very sophisticated audience. So our audience can go and find the text of the rule, or they can pull up the court documents to read the procedural stuff for themselves. So we’re not looking for summary. We are looking for deep commentary. The pitches that get rejected the quickest are probably going to be those that are not going deeper and are not showing the expertise. Because what we really want is to showcase our authors’ expertise — we know they are thought leaders in their industry, they are authorities in their practice area, and we want to showcase that.

So the best thing that makes you stand out if you’re an attorney who wants to write for us is to really show what you know about a subject and also offer a new and novel point of view on it, to kind of separate it out from just all the noise about whatever this update may be.

[00:05:25] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, it sounds like they’re answering the “so what” question. Like, we know the news. Now so what? What do we need to do? What do we need to be aware of? What do we need to be thinking about?

[00:05:36] Ellen Jones: Right. Exactly. What does it mean for me? So if you’re writing a client alert or a blog post or a LinkedIn post, and you’re thinking about your content strategy, I would tell people to be thinking about that across the board — not just in your pitches to the media, but tailoring content to really say, “Okay, but what does it mean for the people in our target audience?”

[00:05:58] Michelle Calcote King: And in terms of the topics you’re covering, do you cover some evergreen topics or are you really looking for that “this just happened and now give the analysis” angle?

[00:06:10] Ellen Jones: We do both. The general timetable that we look at for what we might refer to as newsworthy is around the 90-day mark, or around the last three months, because we’re not necessarily looking to publish something about something that happened yesterday. Now, if we can publish a really great analysis of a Supreme Court decision that just happened within the last few days, that’s fabulous and we’re always looking to plan ahead on that kind of thing.

But we do like to give a little bit more time when it comes to what can be considered a news hook for our articles, because we are looking for something a little bit deeper. We want you to think about it for a few weeks or a month and say, “Okay, but what does this actually mean and what do we think the kind of runway on this is going to be?”

But evergreen as well. Especially when it comes to some of these big overarching topics that are kind of staying in the news — like AI, ESG — some of these things that have really been taking shape over the past few years, we definitely can publish more evergreen or trend pieces on some of these things. But we do need to bring it back to why does it matter right now. Why does it matter on this Tuesday morning that you’re going to be reading it in your inbox?

So we try and work with our authors — and I’m always happy to have a little brainstorm session on what has been going on in the news that we can connect a larger, more evergreen trend topic to. So maybe you’re seeing in your practice area that there’s been a huge uptick in consumer lending class actions that you’re working with your clients on. Obviously, maybe you can’t talk about a matter you’re involved in for confidentiality reasons, but what you might look at is another jurisdiction or another area in the U.S. that might be seeing a similar uptick in these types of cases, and find one to kind of hinge your discussion to. So there is always a way to make those more zoomed-out pieces work.

[00:08:18] Michelle Calcote King: So if an attorney has an idea and they’re going to their in-house marketer or PR person, what can in-house folks do to set their attorneys up for success before they submit?

[00:08:35] Ellen Jones: I would say the easiest thing to do would be to look at our guidelines. We have a PDF that we send around to people, and you can also find it on our website at Law360 — go to the Expert Analysis landing page. We have a pretty clear set of guidelines. What they’re going to mention is that 90-day window, our word count window, which is between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and that we can’t have anything that’s overtly self-promotional, among a few other core guidelines. So often I receive pitches where clearly no one even looked at those guidelines. They’re like, “Here’s this case we won, and we want to tell you all about it.” And again, we want to show your expertise, but we can’t do it in that way.

So definitely, if you’re an in-house legal marketer, take a look at those guidelines, maybe send them to your author, make sure they’ve seen those guidelines as well, and then work with them to tailor a pitch. We are happy to receive fully written articles, but I think the most collaborative and streamlined way to get something published is to send it as a pitch first.

[00:09:54] Ellen Jones: That way everyone can be on the same page, and it can just be 150 words. And I think actually better if it is, because if you can’t say in 150 words why something matters, then maybe it’s not worth writing an article about. So if you’re on an in-house team and you’re thinking about this and getting ready to reach out to the media, see if you can distill your idea into a paragraph or two, see if it aligns with our guidelines, and then reach out and we can all go from there.

[00:10:27] Michelle Calcote King: And are you often helping shape the article? Do you often say, “I like this, but I’d like it to be a little more focused on this”? Is that part of the collaborative process?

[00:10:43] Ellen Jones: Yeah, it definitely is. And if I do receive a draft that’s already written, we just use Microsoft Word. I might go in there and start putting my editor hat on, highlighting things — “Can you say more about this?” or “I know our readers are really interested in this right now. Can you talk more about that and why it might matter to them?” And we do kind of shape it from there.

And sometimes those directives may not work for whatever reason. Like, sometimes the attorney might say, “Actually, that’s not going to be as important as what you flagged, but this is.” Because they are the experts at the end of the day. But we do have that insight into what our audience cares about and what they are clicking on and reading. So I do like to, when it makes sense, work with our marketers and our authors to shape the article into whatever I think is going to be the most impactful when it actually hits people’s inboxes on a weekday morning.

[00:11:46] Michelle Calcote King: Some attorneys pitch you directly, without a marketer involved. What’s the difference in how those conversations tend to go compared to when you’re working with a PR or marketing team?

[00:12:09] Ellen Jones: We do work with both. It’s probably split 50/50. We work directly with attorneys when they come from small law and mid law — smaller firms and boutique firms obviously don’t have the resources that some of the larger firms we work with do. So in those cases, we might be working directly with the attorney, and they might have their admin CC’d on there to help with assets and things like that.

When a marketer or a PR person is on there, that is great because they can help guide the whole process. Marketers and PR folks have such a wonderful understanding of the news and of the media, so they can help guide their authors in the direction that we need it to go. Because sometimes attorneys want to write about things that maybe aren’t quite what we consider to be newsworthy, and that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something there, but it goes back to, well, how can we connect it to the news?

I think that marketers and PR professionals definitely do have a better idea of what the news actually is, and they can help guide that discussion. And then also for logistical purposes, it’s better to have someone CC’d on the email chain who can send over headshots and bios and website links and things like that, because attorneys are super busy. So when we are working with attorneys directly, I want to keep the discussion with them focused on the content and their expertise and what is actually in the article. And with marketers and PR people, they’re there to shepherd the process through.

[00:14:22] Michelle Calcote King: I know that you reach out proactively to some attorneys. What makes someone somebody you think, “I need to reach out to them. They might be great for this”?

[00:14:38] Ellen Jones: I think that in-house teams can be thinking about this in how they showcase certain talent within their firms. Because depending on what people are doing, that’s how we find people to write articles. So maybe you are an expert in banking, and you’ve been at a banking conference recently, and you spoke on a panel about some industry issue that’s affecting your clients. I’m looking at all of that kind of stuff. Our editorial team, when we’re out there looking for sources, we’re looking at webinars, we’re looking at conferences, we’re looking at client alerts, blogs — all of those kinds of things are where we most readily find sources to reach out to. Occasionally we’ll also find sources if they’ve been quoted in an article or a podcast or something like that. But that’s all to say that the more visibility the better, because that’s how we find attorneys to write about the stuff people want to read about.

[00:15:41] Michelle Calcote King: Are there any topics right now or practice areas that your readers are especially hungry for?

[00:15:50] Ellen Jones: There are a few different things. I already mentioned AI, which I know everyone is getting maybe tired of talking about, but it’s definitely still evolving. Law360 has more than 100 sections, so when it comes to a big mainstream topic like AI, it can be really interesting to look at how it affects different niches. The fintech space has been super busy the last couple of years, so our readers have been really interested in that. Same with private equity — that’s really big right now. But we do monitor what people are reading and also what people are talking about outside of Law360 — webinars, podcasts, other ways that people are discussing things in the industry — to see what topics are rising to the top in terms of what people are interested in and what might make for a really ripe commentary.

[00:16:52] Michelle Calcote King: As AI changes how people find firms and consume content, do you see the role of expert analysis changing at all?

[00:17:07] Ellen Jones: I don’t know if I see it changing, but it definitely stakes it out as maybe more important than ever. Because expert analysis is where you can find analysis from a human expert. We know that people are going to be going to ChatGPT or whatever and asking it to unpack a court document or whatever. But at the end of the day, that can’t offer human experience and lived experience of what some of these matters mean. So I think it definitely just makes it more important and more valuable to our readers, because it offers something you can’t find anywhere else.

But that being said, AI is changing how all of us engage with this kind of thing. It makes you think about how your firm shows up in AI, how your firm shows up in search, how it shows up in SEO. So I think it’s not only good for readers to have valuable content they can engage with that’s not just AI summarizing something, but it’s also good for your own visibility.

[00:18:22] Michelle Calcote King: Do you have an AI policy in terms of contributors using AI in the drafting of articles?

[00:18:33] Ellen Jones: That’s a great question, and we do. Right now our guidelines allow AI to be used for research and refinement, because of course we know that it’s being used for that. But the article itself must be written by the author.

[00:18:48] Michelle Calcote King: By a human. There you go. Well, you’ve given us some great information. Is there anything we didn’t cover that you think is important for our listeners to know?

[00:18:59] Ellen Jones: I definitely want to emphasize again that when you’re reaching out to us, the most important aspect is just having something new to say and having something original to say, because I think that’s not only great for the traction you’re going to get in our newsletters, but it’s also great for the traction you’re going to get outside, because we do give a shareable PDF to all of our authors who contribute with us that you can share on your LinkedIn or with your network or send to a client or another professional contact.

And we know that general counsel and corporate counsel engage with unique content. I actually heard a great panel earlier this year at the Legal Marketing Association conference that was presented by JD Supra. They did a survey of 200 corporate counsel and talked about how they engage with thought leadership, especially now that AI is a thing — are people still engaging with it? And the answer they came down to was yes, general counsel are still engaging with thought leadership content. In fact, almost 80% of them are engaging with it on a weekly basis. So we know there’s still an appetite for this kind of thing, but we also know that people want something they can’t get from AI and that they can’t get from somewhere else.

[00:20:23] Michelle Calcote King: Great. Well, we have been talking to Ellen Jones with Law360. Thank you so much for your time today.

[00:20:30] Ellen Jones: Thanks again for having me. This was great.