Law firms and lawyers maintain a significant presence on social media, according to the ABA’s 2021 Legal Technology Survey Report. Most lawyers (86%) said their law firms are on social networks.
The most popular social network for law firms is LinkedIn. Among the lawyers who said their firms use social networks, nearly 9 out of 10 (87%) said their firms maintain a presence on LinkedIn. A majority (61%) also said their firms are on Facebook. Only one-third (37%) said their firms use Twitter.
Law firms also use social media to market themselves, according to the survey, but no single online source is used by most firms. The most popular site for marketing purposes is LinkedIn (45%), followed by Facebook (31%), Twitter (15%) and Avvo (10%). Nearly half of all lawyers (42%) also said their firms market by email.
But law firms also continue to use traditional, non-online sources for marketing. In fact, the most common method for firms to market themselves is event sponsorships. Half of all lawyers (50%) said their firms market themselves this way. Other non-online marketing includes print (25%), direct mail (18%), radio (9%) and Yellow Pages (8%).
The great majority of lawyers (81%) personally maintain a presence on social media for professional purposes. Among those lawyers, virtually all (95%) are on LinkedIn. Only 29% are on Facebook professionally, followed by Twitter (17%), Instagram (13%), Martindale (11%) and Avvo (10%).
Blogging is becoming more popular among law firms. In the survey, 37% of lawyers said their firms have a blog. That’s up substantially from 24% in 2018. Blogs are far more popular among big firms. The bigger the firm, the more likely it is to have a blog. Only 12% of solo practitioners blog. But among law firms with 100 lawyers or more, more than half (62%) blog. Among those lawyers whose firms blog, 1 in 4 (26%) said their firm retained a client as a result of blogging.
Very few lawyers – only 5% -- said they personally maintain a legal topic blog. Of those, nearly all (88%) said they blog for client development.