Guest Blog: James Swede, Darlingtons.

The concept of Know Your Client (KYC) is well known to most lawyers in the context of money laundering and other identity and bona fides checks, but lawyers should maybe spend more time, when writing on the web, on Know Your Reader (KYR).

There has been an explosion in legal blogging in the last year, but as with many aspects of legal practice, a sheep mentality is perhaps too apparent.

Reading legal blog posts can be painful – many strike us as attempts by 1 lawyer to prove how clever he or she is or knowledgeable about a very specific niche.  Many write on the basis they are writing for other lawyers.

In some cases and on some blogs that is the case, but in the vast majority of cases, readers will be non-lawyers looking for an overview, some practical tips and experience which answers their needs. If the blog post is written in that way, it offers an insight that the lawyer understands the readers needs and may then lead to the reader getting in touch.

As lawyers (on the basis that lawyers may be reading this particular blog post) how many of you check the levels of engagement with your blog posts ? This is very simple to do, just by accessing google analytics or any other web analyticsprogramme.

If you do so, you will find that the average amount of time readers will spend on any legal page or post is around 90 seconds.

Remember the old story that if you can’t explain a new business proposition to a potential investor by writing it down on the back of a cigarette packet, your investor is unlikely to invest ?The same holds true for writing on the web.

For any non-academic writing, we suggest that when writing, lawyers remind themselves of who they are writing for and that, if the post cannot be understood and the main points easily absorbed in 90 seconds, it’s unlikely to have the impact you want from it.

Darlingtons home page, http://www.darlingtons.com 

Darlingtons provide a range of legal advice for individuals (link tohttp://www.darlingtons.com/site/srvindividuals/) and businesses (link tohttp://www.darlingtons.com/site/srvbusiness/).

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