Twenty years ago, thought leadership in most law firms meant PR. A glossy report with lots of quotes, a byline in the trade press, definitely a seminar or two… probably over breakfast, or curly sandwiches. Thought leadership meant visibility, and success was measured in cuttings. In whether people recognised your thought leaders as experts in a particular field.
But this has changed. Now, thought leadership combines business development with press relations. Alongside press outreach it covers client briefings, research reports, blogs, webinars, podcasts, LinkedIn and the firm’s own channels. It is judged on whether it helps win and keep work, not on how often the firm appears in print.
The audience has changed too. Clients, in-house teams and, more and more, AI search tools are looking for proof of expertise on a specific issue, not a general sense that a firm is well known.
What hasn’t changed, however, is the need to have something specific and credible to say, as well as the evidence to back it up.
The problem of parallel tracks
Thought leadership doesn’t start with a blank page. For most UK law firms, it starts with a document they’ve already written, argued, evidenced, and filed. The directory submission sitting in last season’s portal contains matter narratives, referee language, and market positioning that took months to assemble.
In most firms, directory submissions and PR run as entirely separate projects. The BD team handles the directories work. The communications team handles press. They operate on different timelines and answer to different people.
So, what happens? A journalist calls about a regulatory development. A newsjacking moment opens. A partner is invited onto a podcast. Someone in comms has to construct a case for the firm’s expertise from nothing, under time pressure, often by calling around fee earners who are already busy.
Meanwhile, the submission that argued that very case, with specific matters, quantified outcomes, and referee contact details, is sitting in a portal no one has looked at since it was uploaded.
This isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a workflow problem. Firms that separate ‘doing the submission’ from ‘doing PR’ end up making the same case for market positioning twice: once carefully and with evidence, once badly and at speed.
The cost isn’t just wasted effort. It’s the quality of what gets published, and whether it gets published at all.
Asset one: matter narratives as byline material in waiting
A well-written matter narrative does most of what a byline pitch needs to do. It identifies a problem, explains the firm’s approach, establishes the stakes, and demonstrates the outcome. The only thing missing is a broader market argument around it.
It’s far closer to a publishable piece than most firms realise when they’re staring at a blank document trying to pitch a trade press editor.
Across our clients, the teams who produce the strongest byline content are rarely the ones who sit down to ‘write thought leadership’. They’re the ones who treat a submission’s matter narratives as the first draft of something longer. They’ve already done the hard part: identifying what was distinctive about the work and articulating it precisely enough to survive a directory researcher’s scrutiny.
That precision is, however, important. Trade press editors receive dozens of generic pitches every week. The pitches that land are specific. They name the problem, they show the work, and they answer the obvious question: why this firm, on this issue, now?
A matter narrative, properly developed, answers all three. And you already have it written.
Asset two: referee language as journalist-ready proof of expertise
Referee quotes are gathered for one purpose: to persuade a directory researcher that a firm’s reputation matches its claims. But the language clients use when they describe a practice group is often the most credible market-facing material a firm has, and almost no one uses it twice.
When a journalist is checking whether a firm is worth quoting, they need confirmation, from someone other than the firm, that the expertise is real. A referee who has already described a team’s work in specific, verifiable terms is exactly that confirmation. The directory process has already identified those people and, in many cases, captured what they said.
That doesn’t mean republishing confidential submission content. It means knowing, before a journalist calls, who can speak to the firm’s expertise and what they’re likely to say. It means having a list of referees who are already warm, already briefed, and already on record internally as advocates.
Firms that know this going into a pitch are in a different position from firms that have to build it from scratch. The call to a referee that used to take two days to arrange becomes a thirty-minute conversation, because the relationship was maintained through the submission cycle, not abandoned once the portal closed.
Asset three: the market positioning argument, already written for pitch use
The B10 section of a Chambers submission requires a firm to articulate, in plain terms, what makes its practice distinctive. Not what it does. What makes it different from every other firm doing the same thing.
That’s also exactly what a press pitch needs.
Most pitch letters fail at this point. They describe the firm’s capabilities without making any argument about why those capabilities are worth writing about. They assert their reputation without evidence. They claim market position without saying what position, or why it matters.
A B10 argument, tested against directory scrutiny, has already had to do better than that. It’s been written to persuade a researcher who has seen dozens of similar submissions. If it works, it contains the seeds of a pitch that will work too.
In our experience, often the firms that produce the strongest press pitches are those whose BD and comms teams have shared their submissions thinking, not because they planned a thought leadership programme, but because the same people were involved in both. The positioning language crossed over. The market argument was already live.
Turning last season’s portal content into a thought leadership programme
Here lies the problem, however. True thought leadership, in a traditional sense, relies on newsjacking… on pushing content out to press when a judgment lands, a regulatory announcement is made, or a consultation closes. To jump into a conversation credibly, you have to be ready before the moment arrives.
But modern day thought leadership allows for greater use of content collected in an annual cycle, such as directory submissions. It allows for a more reflective look at key matters and themes, industry insight and emerging areas of law.
A firm that has just completed a submission cycle has all of that. The matters are documented. The expertise is argued. The referee feedback is fresh and supported with client service and competitor data. A market positioning argument that has been tested and refined. All you need to do is identify the myriad different ways you can and want to use it. It requires a different way of thinking about what the submission process produced and who else in the firm should be using it.
If your last submission produced matter summaries and referee evidence that never left the portal, get in touch and we’ll show you how to turn that into a thought leadership and content repurposing programme built on material you’ve already proven.
