What Law Firms Can Learn From SCOTUSblog (Perspective)

Editor’s Note: The author is a former legal journalist who co-created The AmLaw Litigation Daily.

In our digital age, practically every company trying to promote its brand and strengthen its relationships with customers is in the publishing businesses, convinced of the importance of being “part of the conversation.”

But those companies have been learning it’s a noisy world where the consuming public is easily distracted and not especially moved by obvious marketing ploys. It turns out, producing truly valuable content is hard.

Instead of giving up, some companies are doubling down, intent on driving the conversation, not merely participating in it. Taking a cue from the news business, they’ve been hiring reporters over the last few years with the aim of telling stories and reacting to current events in ways that traditional publishers might. Brand newsrooms, as they’re called in marketing circles, are used on the one hand, to stay in front of customers and engage them in a consistent way, and on the other hand, to promote a company’s brand but not lay it on too thick.

A deep commitment to useful, timely and entertaining content that is not exclusively about a brand is critical to making them work. For output by one of the more innovative brand newsroom operations, take a look GE Reports. (Trust me: not a client.) You’ll find not only articles about GE, but also pieces on 3D printing, robotics, public policy and the global economy — a cross between Wired and The Economist.

The concept of brand newsrooms has not been widely adopted in the legal industry, but it has the potential to gain traction. That’s because of the intense demand for the kind of analysis and insight that law firms can provide on a daily basis. You can’t say the same for companies that sell, say, underwear. With law and regulations constantly changing, law firms have an opportunity to produce informative content for their clients in a consistent way that many companies don’t.

One big issue firms will have to consider: how much independence to give their newsrooms and how much focus to put on their own work.

As a reference point, it’s worth considering SCOTUSblog, the award-winning site that throws more resources at providing news and analysis of the Supreme Court than any other journalism outlet in the country. What’s instructive — and relevant to the conversation about brand newsrooms — is the history and evolution of SCOTUSblog.

The site, which was started in 2002, was conceived as a “marketing ploy,” in the words of its founder, Tom Goldstein of the appellate boutique Goldstein & Russell. But the site didn’t do what he had hoped, which was to drive business. “People weren’t hiring Supreme Court counsel because they had a blog,” he told me in a recent email exchange.

The sited started to dramatically change when it hired veteran Supreme Court reporter Lyle Denniston a couple years later. Denniston was tasked with covering the court like he would for any other news organization. Credibility and a sponsorship deal with Bloomberg Law eventually followed. In a recent post on SCOTUSblog about Denniston’s retirement from the site, Goldstein wrote that his arrival “marked and probably caused — the blog’s evolution into a serious news organization.”

Besides the quality of news and analysis, SCOTUSblog is also striking for its lack of branding. You might expect that Goldstein, who has the title of publisher, would want to advertise his firm’s services on the site. But Goldstein believes the lack of advertising helps emphasize the independence of the site.

How does Goldstein & Russell, which is making a substantial investment into the site, benefit?

“The independence of the blog has been critical to increasing its credibility, which has been vital to the practice,” Goldstein told me. “It is a real irony.”

Indeed, in an interview with ABA Journal in 2013, Goldstein estimated that SCOTUSblog was indirectly responsible for 75 percent of the Supreme Court work he got hired to do. But it’s also important to note that Goldstein didn’t predict that producing a more independent site would help his business. He simply recognized that the old model wasn’t working and that he wanted to provide a public service. The takeaway for me: the more your audience respects your intentions, the more likely they are to take your content seriously.

Clearly, there are all kinds of ways to go about building a brand newsroom. SCOTUSblog went to the extreme end of public-service journalism. Not every organization will want to go that route. Some will want to emphasize their brand and make sure their work and accomplishments get top billing.

That may be viable and beneficial to those firms. But it’s hard to argue with proven success. And for what’s it worth, Goldstein told me there are “lots of courts” and “areas of the law where you could do something similar” to SCOTUSblog.