Jumpstart your content writing by leveraging these free resources

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

On Tuesday, I highlighted three approaches I use when I’m feeling stuck and can’t seem to come up with content ideas for my own blog or the blawgs of my clients.

To get the ideas flowing once again, I discussed:

• Listing frequently asked questions
• Using keywords identified by Google Analytics
• Setting up Google Alerts

Here are three more free research and intelligence-gathering tools you can use to guide your legal blog content writing efforts and boost your traffic.

1.  Use Wordtracker to identify keyword questions

Wordtracker''s Keyword Questions is a nifty tool. Enter a single or short keyword phrase and you’ll receive a list of questions that people type into search engines. Use those questions to come up with blog topics. You’ll also want to use the question in your headlines.

For example, I typed in the search term “personal injury.” The questions Wordtracker identified included:

• Is a personal injury settlement community property?
• What is the average personal injury settlement?
• What to expect in personal injury mediation?
• What personal injury attorney handles dog bites in Tucson area?

2. Use Google Insights for Search to identify breakout searches.

Google Insights is a tool that allows you to look at search trends over time, then highlights predictions for the future. It allows you to track newspaper headlines and identifies not only the top search queries related to your keywords but also rising or breakout searches. It’s not unlike enjoying a great new restaurant before the rave reviews are printed: The breakout terms allow you to avoid the rush of the crowd and get the best seat in a soon-to-be-popular venue.

Once again, I typed in the search term “personal injury.” I limited the query to the state of Georgia. It identified seven breakout searches, including:

• Atlanta injury lawyer
• Personal injury cases
• Personal injury claims
• Personal injury settlements

3.  Use Google Sets to identify lists of words related to your practice area

Google Sets allows you to create a list of words related to your keywords. You can use the list generated as a word-association game to get the creative process going. Once again, you’ll have new words that you’ll want to incorporate into the post to make it more likely that prospective clients will find you.

I entered the following terms:  “personal,” “injury,” “lawyer,” and “attorney.”

The expanded list of Google Sets predictions included:

• Probate
• Legal services
• DUI
• Auto
• Car
• Truck
• Trial
• Insurance law
• Wrongful death

Of course, these tips are all helpful for Web content writing, too.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

Feeling blocked? Follow these steps when content ideas are scarce.

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

In addition to writing for my own blog, I help law firms keep up with the demands of their own blogs. That might mean anything from planning a blogging calendar to create content that conforms to their legal PR aims to writing drafts of blog content.

But even as a professional legal content writer there are occasions when I find myself blocked as I’m trying to come up with content ideas.

Here are three approaches that help me get unstuck and back on the writing track.

1. List Frequently Asked Questions

When I speak to prospective clients about law firm website writing, blog writing or legal PR work, the questions I’m asked tend to be similar despite differences in practice areas and geographical locations.

When a lawyer meets with a client or conducts an initial telephone consultation, the concerns raised are rarely novel. Clients want to know about their legal rights and options, legal procedures, the scope of the representation and the law firm’s fee structures.

I find it helpful to make a list of questions frequently raised in the initial consultation and use them to plan upcoming blog posts. Try writing down the initial questions a client raises during the meeting.  If you use  your client's terminology to frame your questions, you may improve the chances that a search engine query will lead to your blog post.

2. Use Keywords Identified by Google Analytics

Everyone should have his or her law firm’s website or blog configured with a program that measures traffic. One of the most popular free programs is Google Analytics. (In “How to install Google Analytics to measure your marketing campaigns,” Enrique Serrano provides step-by-step instructions explaining the process. )

Review the keyword phrases that are bringing visitors to your website. You can sort the phrases in a number of ways — for instance, identifying the most frequently used phrases that bring people to your site and the phrases that have received the most page views on your website. Consider writing a blog post that capitalizes on those keyword phrases.

3.  Set Up Google Alerts

If you scour the Internet in search of mainstream and legal media articles highlighting the latest news touching on your practice area, let Google Alerts do your Web surfing for you. You can enter your search parameters into Google Alerts, another free service, and receive a daily or weekly update highlighting the latest Google results on the basis of your topic or search terms.

The e-mail roundup is an efficient alert that pulls together late-breaking news and recent legal developments. Because you’re able to find out about it early, you can use the opportunity to weigh in or explain the debate on your legal blog.

These are just a few of my tried-and-true methods. Do you have any suggestions for overcoming legal content writing block? If so, I’d love to hear about them. Feel free to leave a comment to this blog post or email me at geri@legalmediamatters.com.

For our follow-up post on additional ways to generate story ideas, read "Blawg Topics: 3 More Brainstorming Tools."

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

The site’s purpose, the use of fresh content and tone often play a role in distinguishing between the two

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

Last week a lawyer sent me an e-mail asking me to explain the difference between a blog and a website.

The answer is not as simple as it might seem. As methods of communicating information by way of the Internet evolve, differentiating between a website and a blog is sometimes difficult.

Here are some of the traditional distinctions between the two.

Law Firm Website

Generally a law firm’s website contains static sections with descriptions of the types of legal services offered. It includes basic information explaining who your firm is and what it does:

• A home page introducing the firm to potential clients
• A practice areas page listing the types of cases the firm handles. The website may also contain several subpages that explain the types of cases in further detail
• An attorney page containing the biographical information of members of the firm
• A contact page with the firm’s telephone number and address and an online contact form

Law Firm Blog

A blog is generally an easy-to-update collection of short articles known as posts.  Blogs are updated frequently, and visitors tend to read the newest posts. Common topics on law blogs, or blawgs, include:

• New or recent court decisions or rulings that affect the firm’s practice area
• Current events that involve the firm’s practice area
• Answers to clients’ frequently asked questions
• Legislative developments
• Opinion or editorial comments about legal news or trends

The Blurring Line Between Blogs and Websites

Increasingly firms are embedding blogs in their websites under the same domain. An embedded blog helps keep a law firm’s website supplied with fresh content, which provides some search engine advantages.

Firms are also using blog engines, or content management systems, as the skeleton on which a website is built. Content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla! are user friendly; when they are adapted for use on a law firm’s website, updating the website becomes much easier.

Choosing the Best Option for Your Firm

For firms on a limited financial budget or with limited human resources to devote to maintaining a blog, a website should be the priority. It will allow potential clients to gather more information about your firm and provide quick access to contact information. An outdated blog that does not have any recent posts could undermine your firm's legal marketing efforts.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

Our weekly roundup of legal news links, legal PR client news and story ideas

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

We’re heading into the second major U.S. holiday of the summer, the Fourth of July. Many businesses will be closed on Monday. I won’t be posting a blog entry on July 5, but here are a few stories to check out over the three-day weekend.

LMM Client News

A $1.5 million personal injury settlement obtained by Jim Lemonds and Andrea McNairy of St. Louis-based Brown & Crouppen and Greg Roberts of The Roberts Law Firm was highlighted in this week’s Missouri Lawyers Weekly.

Spencer Farris of The S.E. Farris Law Firm received the Missouri Association of Trial Attorneys’ President’s Award, which is given annually to an attorney whose efforts help Missouri citizens gain access to the civil justice system.

Notable Links for Lawyers

My Top Ten Rules for Job Search Success

Richard Russeth, the wise counselor behind The Last Generalist, shares his top 10 rules to follow if you’re in the job market. In addition to reminding readers that it takes work to find work, noting that doing some volunteer work at least once a week will give you a sense of accomplishment and encouraging us to say thank you, he gives us this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.”

Essential Tools for SEO on a Budget

Analyzing your site with the use of Google’s free Webmaster Tools, researching keywords and obtaining inbound links are three strategies suggested by ReadWriteBiz’s John Paul Titlow for improving your website’s performance.

Keeping Your Online Reputation Up to Par

Rob Stretch’s guest post on The Saint Louis Social Media & Tech Report reminds businesses to monitor their online reputations, remain active on the Internet by using several different methods for reaching customers and remaining engaged on social media sites.

Six Ways to Manage International Relationships Online

Zachary Sniderman’s post on American Express OPEN Forum and Mashable is handy for anyone who conducts business internationally. Suggestions for researching basic country information, a time zone converter, translation help and quick faux pas checks to help avoid embarrassing etiquette breaches are just a few of the links provided.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

A professional design and typo-free, frequently updated legal content top the list

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

What makes a law firm website a good one from the perspective of a potential client?

In 2002, the Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab released the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility.  Based on three years of research involving more than 4,500 subjects, these guidelines are useful not only when it comes to planning a website but also in measuring the effectiveness of your firm’s current website.

Here are the guidelines, adapted for use by law firms.

1. Make it easy for people to gauge your website’s accuracy. Provide third-party links to support your information.
2. Demonstrate that there’s a real law firm behind your website. Include your phone number, a physical address and representative client lists or links to news articles about your firm.
3. Highlight your law firm’s services and the expertise of your attorneys. In addition to providing information on undergraduate and law degrees, include the honors and awards an attorney has received and the articles he or she has written.
4. Show that honest and trustworthy people are affiliated with the firm and its site. Use the attorney profile page not only to highlight a lawyer’s expertise but also to allow the potential client to connect with the lawyer as a person and a problem-solver.
5. Make it easy to contact your law firm. Is your contact page clearly visible? Do you provide multiple ways for clients to contact the firm?
6. Does your law firm’s website appear professional? Forty-seven percent of website visitors base their evaluation of a site’s credibility on its appearance. A poor visual design, bad layout, formatting errors, typographical errors and amateurish images can hurt a website’s credibility.
7. Provide a website that is both useful and easy to use. Are your pages informative? Will potential clients find them educational? Can potential clients find the information they’re seeking easily?
8. Frequently update your law firm website’s content. Offering outdated content is like showing up in court wearing a tomato-red polyester suit and your best pair of white dress shoes: Your law firm’s website will stand out, all right — but not in a good way.
9. Use restraint when offering promotional content. Prospective clients don’t expect to see third-party advertising on an attorney website.
10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how inconsequential they might seem to you. Does your website contain typographic errors, grammar errors or broken links?

At Legal Media Matters, we use our know-how to help your law firm’s website get positive notice. We create attorney bio pages; provide fresh, useful, easy-to-understand content that will attract the attention of potential clients and keep your website current; and offer copyediting services.

For more information, contact us by filling out our online contact form, e-mailing geri@legalmediamatters.com or calling 314-520-3897 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              314-520-3897      end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

Photos, videos and screenshots can give your legal blog zip

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

I once participated in a focus group whose members were asked to share their opinions about a legal publication. We were to comment on the content as well as the overall look and feel of the paper.

I remember one lawyer in particular indicating that he preferred dense text, very little white space and a lot of legalese. In law school he had become comfortable with treatises and works that most find off-putting. He felt that photos, white space and the “plain English” approach to writing watered down the reading experience.

Having written for both mainstream and legal publications where the mandate was to make it as easy as possible for people in a hurry to absorb information quickly, I hadn’t considered the reader who actually enjoys settling in with a hornbook.

It was an “aha” moment for me.

Working with lawyers on website and blog content, I have noticed that some tend to prefer a screen filled with long paragraphs of dense text, devoid of images, white space or video because that is what they encounter day in and out, whether it is case law or statutes.

But prospective clients are often not so eager or patient when it comes to gathering information online. White space, images, headings and bold text make information more accessible.

A dense wall of words can be so intimidating that the would-be reader flees the page. (By checking your site statistics you can tell how long someone lingers on a page.)

I’ve found on my own site that the time spent on the page goes up and the bounce rate goes down when I incorporate images. Here are three ways in which you can liven up your legal blog, break up pages of dense text and increase the number of people who remain on your site for longer periods.

1. Incorporate video.

Short video clips interspersed with your text can be an effective tool with which to make your point. They’re also a good way to keep a reader on your blog — and remember it.

Here I’ll paraphrase Pee Wee Herman’s famous “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer!” Add video, and your visitor will linger longer.

2. Add photos and clip art that are free of royalty restrictions.

A number of free sites offer downloads of photos and clip art that aren’t bound by royalty restrictions.

One site that I often use is a free site from Microsoft’s Office.

3.  Add a screenshot of a Web page.

As anyone who regularly reads my posts knows, I love to incorporate screen shots of Web pages. It’s a convenient way to illustrate a point or walk a reader through a particular task.

For lawyers, the ability to take screenshots can be useful indeed. For example, divorce filings typically require the parties to fill out a variety of income and expense, property and child support calculation forms, and many states provide these forms online. A blog post explaining how to fill out the forms or addressing common questions about various aspects of the form could include screenshots of the relevant sections. Just below or above each screenshot, the attorney can provide a more detailed description or explanation of the information the form is trying to elicit.

I use a free web page capture plug-in called FireShot. It allows me to not only save screens with common photo extensions such as .png but also to edit what I save. Typically when I upload the screen shot to my blog I embed a link back to the original site.

Do you have a favorite tool for livening up your legal blog? If so, let me know.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

An in-house lawyer wants to reach executives and explain the services a general counsel offers

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I invited my Twitter followers to pose a question (in 140 characters or fewer, of course) that I would take up on this blog. One lawyer sent a direct message wanting to know the best keywords to attract chief executive officers and chief financial officers who want to learn more about what their in-house lawyers can do for them.

The question is much more complicated than it might seem at first blush.

Here’s a driving analogy. If someone asks how to start a car, the easiest answer is: “Just turn the key in the ignition.” But there’s a complicated assortment of processes going on behind the dashboard and beneath the hood that are responsible for starting the engine.  Even though the key signals to the engine that it is time to start, it is the first piece of a complicated process.

In other words, simply possessing a key will not make a car run — and the same key won’t start every car.

As with cars, there’s often a multilayered process that is engaged in before keywords will work. As with car keys, the keywords that will deliver the best performance are going to vary; one size does not fit all.

Legal Keywords and Problem-Solving

Keywords help people sort through the huge pool of information provided on the Internet and find what they’re looking for. But vague keywords, or inefficient keywords in areas where there is a lot of expert competition, are like replacement keys that are almost exact duplicates: They’re not going to work in the way you want them to.

To discover what types of keywords might attract them to your website or blog, you must first figure out what keeps executives up at night. Once you’ve done that, you can explain how an in-house lawyer is a problem-solver and ally when it comes to providing solutions to those specific problems.

Is an executive looking for loan workout help or bankruptcy reorganization advice? If the company is located in the U.S., does the executive have questions about the new healthcare legislation and how it applies to his or her company? What are the legal pitfalls a domestic company looking to expand abroad must avoid?

Once you’ve brainstormed ideas, it’s time to test them. There are several free tools — among them Google Insights, Wordtracker and Google AdWords — you can use to conduct research. (For more on the mechanical steps of finding keywords used in actual searches and then including them in your content, read “Law Firm Websites: Seven Tips for Legal Content Writing.”)

For a test run, I chose the simple phrase “in-house counsel” to see what would come up.

At Google Insights, a worldwide search of the phrase revealed that the top searches involved finding jobs and salary information.

I went to Wordtracker and plugged in “in-house counsel” to see what would come up. The most-searched phrase turned out to be the most specific grouping of keywords (a “long tail”): “in-house counsel obligation regarding spoliation.” Several job search-related queries also surfaced. There were two searches recorded for the keyword phrase “evolving role of in-house counsel.”

At Google AdWords, the “in-house counsel” query once again pulled up several job-related searches. However, it also indicated that the phrase “general counsel” is extremely popular and that “attorney client privilege in house counsel” is one substantive area that receives some inquiries.

There are, of course, additional strategies and techniques to sort and sift the information, but this brief exercise illustrates four points:

1. When it comes to keywords, there is no virtual master key.
2. Avoiding certain keyword phrases, such as the ones related to job searches, is just as important as finding the phrases you want to use.
3. The best-performing site will have one page dedicated to each distinct phrase — for example, a page addressing spoliation, another explaining attorney-client privilege and a third discussing the evolving role of in-house counsel. (For more information on how to use your keywords on a page, read “Three Keyword Rules for Law Firm Website.”)
4. You must measure the performance of your Web pages and keywords. Most sites require monitoring and adjustment. Because keyword selection isn’t as straightforward as one might hope, you may find one set of keywords performing extremely well and another set underperforming. (For more information on measurement, read “How to Install Google Analytics to Measure Your Marketing Campaign.”)

Integrate Your Legal Keyword Efforts with Media Outreach

At Legal Media Matters, we research keywords, develop strategies based on the basis of our clients' goals and then write content. We also emphasize the importance of integrating online and traditional public relations strategies.

In addition to your online outreach, don’t forget traditional print publications as a means of reaching out to executives. Some of the best places for this type of outreach are the so-called industry bibles and trusted trade publications that accept guest articles. Review the editorial calendar to find an opening. (For more on this process, see “Writer’s Guidelines and Guest Articles,” and “Editorial Calendars and Guest Articles.”)

Another way to educate your audience is to post comments to articles related to your topics. In both instances, comments and guest articles can serve as the initial means of engaging your target audience. A website address or link back to your blog, if an executive is reading the information online, will allow him or her to continue the conversation — and may also provide valuable inbound links to your site, boosting its performance and the reach of your keywords. (For more ideas on finding your audience, see “Law Firm Marketing: To Draw Clients In, Reach Out.”)

If you need help researching keywords, writing content or devising a print publication placement strategy, contact Legal Media Matters. We can help you with your legal content writing project and tailor a legal marketing and public relations plan tailored to your firm’s unique goals.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

By Enrique Serrano

For law firms, an online presence is essential: It is a marketing tool for building your firm’s brand, a way to attract new clients, improve your reputation and ultimately expand your practice. Once your website has been set up, you may be tempted to judge its performance simply by the way your business improves or in terms of the number of new clients who tell you that they found you through your website.

But that's a narrow approach. Your website can generate valuable information if you install a statistics tracking program.

Why do you need stats tracking on your website?

Stats tracking is more than a traditional hit counter or a graph with the number of visits. It’s vitally important because it:

• Allows you to determine the most interesting content for your clients
• Helps you discover new business opportunities, keywords and markets
• Is a reliable way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns
• Removes the guesswork from website-improvement tasks, making website optimization a scientific process

Your stats will give you new ideas about how to improve your site. They provide a reliable measure of what is working and which web pages are underperforming. In short, stats tracking allows you to experiment, measure and optimize.

Why should you choose Google Analytics?

I prefer Google Analytics as a stats tracking tool because:

• It’s completely free for traffic volumes of fewer than 5 million page views per month
• Google Analytics features an easy-to-use customizable interface that allows you to find the most important information, such as traffic volume, top performing pages, visitor locations, traffic sources and most effective keywords, at a glance. This is a straightforward way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
• It contains advanced stats tracking features such as dynamic graphs, site overlay reports displaying your most interesting links and Google Intelligence, which highlights important changes in your traffic. All of these tools are great ways to understand how is your site working and find opportunities to improve your public relations strategy.
• Google Analytics is easy to install. You just need to copy and paste a small piece of code inside your pages. You can even install it yourself, saving your time and your budget — which are better invested in understanding your reports and improving your website marketing.

How to install the tracking code of Google Analytics in HTML pages

Follow these steps to install the newest and fastest version of Google Analytics code on your website:

1. You need a free Google Account to create a Google Analytics account. You can create a Google Account here.
2. Access Google Analytics (or sign up for Google Analytics here if you’re a new user) through your Google Account.
3. Select your new account and create a new website profile, clicking the Add Website Profile link in the lower left corner of your account overview. You will need a profile for each site that you own.
4. Fill in the fields of your new website profile form. (Be sure to check 'Add a profile for a new domain'.) Type in your domain name and pick your country and time zone, then click Finish.
5. The next screen displays your Google Analytics tracking code. Your default options should work for this kind of installation. Copy the tracking code, which you will need to paste into all of your pages, and click Save and Finish.
6. Download your web pages (HTML files), using FTP. A variety of free FTP clients, such as FileZilla, are available. (Windows comes with a built-in FTP client.) You can use the Add Network Place Wizard in Windows, or just type ftp://yourWebsiteAddress.com into your Windows file explorer bar and then provide the user name and password given by your web hosting company. Once you’re logged in, copy your HTML files to your hard drive.
7. Edit your original files, pasting this stats tracking code just after the opening <body> tag. Any basic text editor (e.g., Windows Notepad) will work. (Be sure to keep the original file extension — .htm or .html. Finally, upload your files by way of FTP, overwriting the old ones.

How to install Google Analytics in WordPress

Not all websites are composed of HTML files. Many legal websites use content management systems. With a CMS you only need to paste your Analytics code in one place. If you are using WordPress, you can either install a Google Analytics plug-in or do it manually, following these steps:

• Access your site by way of FTP and go to yourWordpressFolder/wp-content/themes/yourChosenTheme/.
• Locate and download the file called header.php.
• Edit the file, pasting the Analytics tracking code just after the <body...> tag.
• Upload the new file, overwriting the old one.

How do you know if Google Analytics code is working correctly?

Once the setup process is complete, you only need to verify that Google Analytics is working as expected:

• In the overview page of your Analytics account, you should see the status of your tracking as an icon. Click the edit link in the right edge to check it again.
• In the upper right corner of the Analytics Profile Settings, click the Check Status link.
• In the Tracking Status section, confirm that your Google Analytics code is working correctly, displaying a Receiving Data message.
• If you still get an “Analytics code not installed” error message, confirm that the time of the last code check is the current time.
• You can also make sure that your Google Analytics code has been pasted properly. Navigate to your site and use the View Source Code option in your web browser (Page > View source code in Internet Explorer, or just press CTRL+U in Firefox or Google Chrome).

That's it! Now you only need to wait till the system gathers some statistical data. Use Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and to improve your public relations strategy through the process of experimenting, measuring and optimizing.

Enrique Serrano is a telecommunications engineer expert in online marketing and website development.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

It has been a busy week.

On Tuesday, Thompson Coburn hosted its annual Women’s Event. The networking event is a draw for women representing the business, law, civic and academic communities.

The venue was St. Louis’ Third Degree Glass Factory. Among the crowd were two Missouri Court of Appeals judges, two St. Louis County judges and Pamela Raymond, owner of the Raymond Experience and contributor to Girls’ Guide to the Galaxy.

And on Thursday, Focus St. Louis presented its annual What’s Right with the Region awards. Congratulations to the Center for Survivors of Torture and War Trauma for being honored in the category of Improving Racial Equality and Social Justice.

LMM Client News

Butsch Simeri Fields LLC and two other law firms have filed a federal class action lawsuit against Farmland Foods in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri. The suit alleges that Farmland failed to pay employees at its Milan, Mo., processing plant for “donning and doffing” time -- the time they spent getting into and out of safety gear, cleaning it and walking to and from their workstations.

San Francisco Bay Area attorney Madan Ahluwalia has begun posting summaries of his Saturday-morning radio show, Your Attorney on Radio, on his website. For a schedule of upcoming topics, visit the broadcast calendar page.

Notable Links for Lawyers

‘If Mama’s Not Happy…’

Did you know that the new health care law in the United States requires employers with 50 or more workers to provide reasonable breaks to nursing mothers who need to express milk? An article by James Napoli and Lynda Noggle for Corporate Counsel discusses the new provisions, which are effective immediately.

Full-Body Scanners Still Raise Many Legal Concerns

Canadian lawyer Yosie Saint-Cyr discusses the privacy and human rights concerns raised by “virtual strips searches,” noting that the concerns are more than academic. This past February, airport security staff in London circulated naked images of a film star from India.

Effectively Marketing a Solo or Small Firm Practice

Writing for the New York Law Journal, lawyers Deborah Hrbek and Jill Miller stress the importance of proactive marketing for the success of your firm. Among their many tips: the need to identify your target market and create a brand.

Networking Effectively: Who Knows You?

Dr. Benjamin Akandé, dean of Webster University’s school of business and technology, presented a seminar on how to network, whether you’re in a room full of professionals or working at Starbucks. Tracy E. Williams III sums up the presentation for the post on Consortium Finance Network. (Special thanks to The Saint Louis Social Media Week in Review for highlighting the entry.)

Making a Place for Yourself in the Blogosphere, Part 2

For his second installment on blogging for TechNewsWorld, writer Brian R. Hook outlines ways to help your blog grow and thrive. Quality content, cultivating an audience and using social media like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to drive traffic are just a few of the topics discussed.

Start an Embedded YouTube Video at a Certain Timestamp

If you’ve got a blog and you’re embedding video, this tip from Matt Cutts on his Google, Gadgets and SEO site is a gem. Use it when you want a snippet of the video, not the whole thing.

Story Ideas for Business and Law Reporters, Writers and Bloggers

New Mom, New Rights?

As I mentioned in the notable-links section, federal law on breastfeeding in the workplace has changed. Has your company put into place policies to comply with the new health care law requiring accommodations for employers with more than 50 workers? Are you a new mother wondering about your rights in the workplace?

Is Your Office Prepared for an Emergency?

This past week, as tornadoes touched down across the Midwest, the issue of how to protect workers, clients, customers and even schoolchildren was brought to the fore. In Oklahoma, truck stop employees scrambled to find a haven for customers as a tornado bore down. Bad weather in Wichita activated a communications system that rerouted school buses filled with children to the nearest school to take shelter.

Whether the emergency is caused by a tornado, fire or workplace violence, are firms and businesses putting together – and communicating – contingency plans? Are there any liability risks associated with not having a plan, poorly executing a plan or putting in place a 'bad' plan?

A Service of Note

Joe Greco, the owner of Legal Technology LLC, a St. Louis-based company that provides trial technology and multimedia services to lawyers, is offering his high-tech trial services to clients on a sliding fee scale based on the dollar value of the case. For more information, contact Greco at 314-831-0700.

Have any links to suggest? Give them a mention in our comments section. And if you have any recommendations for next week, feel free to e-mail them to me. geri@legalmediamatters.com

Have a great weekend!

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Check your content to make sure it’s meeting these aims

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

In its May issue, the ABA Journal tackles the topic of bad blogs. In particular it notes that Findlaw’s 15 hyperlocal news-based blogs have been dubbed “spam blogs” by the legal blogosphere.

Writer Rachel M. Zahorsky explains the controversy over the blogs, which some have criticized as little more than regurgitations of local accident reports designed to dump search engine-friendly copy onto the Internet without adding to the legal discourse.

The blogs have also been criticized because nonlawyers have been hired as blog writers, resulting in mix-ups of criminal and civil terms and other snafus.

In a May 13 TechNewsWorld article, “Making a Place for Yourself in the Blogosphere, Part II,” writer Brian R. Hook interviewed several successful bloggers. This point cannot be emphasized enough:

“Content is king, but quality is queen.”

To ensure that you are publishing quality content, evaluate it, using these four criteria.

1. Is the law characterized correctly?

This may seem like an elementary point, but you need to have enough legal knowledge to write a blog post. If your law firm has hired a professional writer, does he or she understand the basic differences in the types of law and burdens of proof and how the justice system works?

This also applies to lawyers. As a lawyer, I follow the law closely for new developments and I know the lawyers to whom I can turn to make sure I got it right. If you’re writing a blog post that touches on a topic outside your regular practice area, don’t be afraid to run it by a colleague for feedback.

2. Can a lay audience understand the post?

Most first-year law students are told on arriving at school that learning the law is like learning a foreign language. Anyone who clutched a legal dictionary, as I did, for the first semester and constantly thumbed through it to find the meaning of various arcane terms understands what that entails.

The problem with learning the law as a language is that it can be difficult to drop the legalese once you’ve learned it. Terms such as “tort,” “estoppel,” and “res ipsa loquitur” may be bandied about by lawyers, but for those standing on the sidelines they’re nothing more than jargon.

But nonlawyers are genuinely interested in the law and new developments.  They're also potential clients. Have you written your post in a way that is accessible to a variety of audiences?

3. Is your post keyword optimized for search engines?

No matter how great it is, content must be found before it can be of use. That means using keywords — but not all keywords are equal. If your website is still new and small, achieving a good ranking through the use of the most popular keywords may not be the best strategy. Sometimes, at the outset, opportunities for good rankings can be found in less popular combinations. Then the strategy entails building up to the most crowded keyword combinations over time.

Keyword placement in the copy is important. The same goes for heading choices and the use of bold typeface and bullet points.

4. How does your blog entry fit into your law firm’s marketing and public relations goals?

How do you see your law firm’s website or blog fitting into your firm’s marketing and PR plan? Do you have concrete and specific goals for these tools? Are you measuring the performance through programs such as Analytics?

Reviewing your goals and comparing the information with your data can provide insight on how to make adjustments to the text or create new entries in the future.

Do you have any additional tips you'd like to share?

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