Personal Branding for Lawyers: How to Define, Build, and Grow Your Professional Brand

Personal branding has become essential for setting yourself apart from the competition in today's professional landscape. To create a strong personal brand, you must understand who you are, how you help your clients, and how to articulate your value proposition. This involves setting realistic, strategic goals for your professional development that enhance your personal practice goals while simultaneously aligning with your law firm’s overall brand identity. By taking an intentional approach to your personal brand, you can elevate your professional visibility, define your career trajectory, and position yourself for success.

What is brand strategy?

A brand strategy is the development of a well-defined engagement plan governed by a single, clear direction. It enables an individual or a firm to enhance their competitiveness and boost their reputation in the marketplace. While often grounded in concrete values and practices, a brand strategy is aspirational and focuses on the vision and goals of the organization or individual.

What is your personal brand?

Personal branding, sometimes known as professional branding, is the deliberate effort to influence public perception based on your experience, expertise, actions, and achievements. Personal branding is all about articulating what makes you unique as a legal professional and expressing this unique identity in your professional engagements and public activities, including at networking events and on social media.

For lawyers, developing a personal brand is an effective way to take control of your career, helping you to focus your business development strategy and grow your legal practice in a way that aligns with your background, experience, and long-term goals. Cultivating a strong professional brand provides numerous career benefits, including:

• Increased visibility and enhanced reputation amongst existing clients and target prospects
• Clear articulation of your value
• More effective communications
• The opportunity to expand your network
• Improving the likelihood of people recommending you
• Validating premium pricing for your services

A well-honed personal brand can elevate your credibility, differentiate you from your competition, and ultimately advance your career, making it a powerful addition to your professional toolkit.

Building Your Personal Brand

When building your personal brand, you’ll want to ensure that the narrative you create is accurate, compelling, and unique. The good news is that you are already an expert on the topic at hand—you. So dive deep into what sets you apart as a legal professional and refine how you present yourself in accordance with your core values, goals, and expertise. Having a clear understanding of who you are and what you want to be known for can help you focus on activities that deliver on your brand. Here are a few things to consider when defining your personal brand.

Determine Your Practice Goals

While it is important to look internally, it is equally vital to consider your practice goals when determining the direction of your brand. This involves reflecting on how others perceive you and your work, how you differentiate yourself from others with a similar background, and the skills or knowledge valued by leaders in your area. Consider the reputation you are building and make changes in alignment with your practice goals. Honestly assess if you already possess the skills or attributes associated with the field, and determine if you are willing to acquire them as part of your professional development.

When determining your practice goals, concentrate on finding your niche and picking your lane. The more you focus, the better your brand positioning. By developing a singular reputation, you become easier to identify—and easier to choose for top projects.

Become an Expert in Your Target Market

Understanding your target market is one of the most essential parts of branding; without it, there is no brand. Keep in mind that you can’t be everything for everyone. Rather than attempting to satisfy the diverse needs of multiple audiences adequately, focus on serving the needs of a single audience exceptionally well. Educate yourself on your client’s business and their corner of the world by following them on social media, reading trade publications, and attending industry events and trade conferences. Once you know more about your client’s world, put yourself in their shoes and consider their needs, influences, and challenges—then figure out how you can help them address their issues. This will set you apart as a lawyer and help you develop a value proposition for your personal brand that aligns with your audience.

Establish a Brand Value Proposition

A brand value proposition is a brief statement that explains how your services solve a potential client’s problem, meet a need, or enhance their life. It sets you apart from your competition and explains “why you.” Make sure to create a brand value proposition that effectively leverages the unique value you bring to the table.

Conducting a brand audit of your competitors is a great way to assess your brand and find a way to differentiate yourself. When performing the audit, examine your competition’s professional bios on LinkedIn or firm websites, discover what they say in blogs, webinars, proposals, videos, and social platforms, and see what is said about them in cases, awards, social media, and news. Evaluate how they describe themselves, identifying the attributes and benefits unique to them and what skills, credentials, social capital, cultural capital, and personality traits they have. From here, you can identify what’s missing and where your brand can step up to the plate through its value proposition.

Develop Your Personal Narrative

A brand is more than just a bunch of descriptors floating in the minds of your target audience; it’s built on the meaningful stories you tell and how they are received by your audience. As a lawyer, you need to identify, craft, and refine the narratives that will communicate your unique approach to your practice, ensuring consistency between previous experience and future goals. You’ll want to use your personal narrative to build a total picture of your brand, one that anchors your professional aspirations in personal meaning and highlights the value your prior experience brings to your clients. If possible, weave your story into your firm biography, connecting the dots between your professional qualifications and personal history.

Implement Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is a strategic approach used by content marketers to establish credibility, positioning themselves or leaders within the firm as industry experts. Keep in mind, though, that there is a difference between influencers and thought leadership; both seek influence and authority, but thought leadership requires subject matter expertise. Thought leaders live to educate people on things they’re passionate about, enhancing their reputation and accelerating brand recognition along the way.

Though leadership provides the platform to demonstrate your value to your audience while providing them with informative, educational content that is relevant to their interests. Authoring blogs or insights, sharing your perspective on LinkedIn, or producing a podcast or video, all provide avenues for showcasing your expertise. Consistency and long-term commitment are essential for success, helping your audience to develop an expectation of—and relationship with—your work, your area of expertise, and your brand.

Make People Take Notice

Although it might feel uncomfortable at first, outlining what makes you valuable as a lawyer is critical to your success. You’ll want to strike a balance, however, between promoting yourself and providing a service. Develop an approach that doesn’t come across as self-serving by sharing your time and expertise in a way that demonstrates your enthusiasm for your work. You may wish to experiment with one or more of the suggestions below for raising your profile:

• Creating a robust, engaged online presence
• Being a subject matter expert (e.g. conduct research, write books)
• Sharing your knowledge (e.g. publishing, public speaking, and seminars)
• Volunteering your time (g. committee, group, association)
• Participating in and organizing professional events (e.g. for your local bar association, practice group, or firm)
• Becoming a mentor, ally, teacher, and role model
• Connecting with high-profile people and leveraging your extended network
• Praising and promoting others

Tailor the suggestions above to what works for you, keeping the focus on developing useful, relevant, and engaging content for your target market.

Concentrate on Engagement

Building your personal brand is more than elevating your profile; it’s about making a connection with your core audience that helps people know who you are, what you know, and what you stand for. Engaging with online not only helps build meaningful connections with others in your industry, when done strategically, it builds brand awareness and generates leads.

You can do this by engaging thoughtfully online with your network, sharing topics related to your practice area and amplifying the voices of clients, colleagues, and industry leaders through likes, comments, and reposts. Post content and takeaways that people in your network will like, share, and comment upon, allowing your posts to be shared with their extended networks and reach new audiences. Overall, be consistent with the type of content you share, your pace of engagement, and tone of voice. In other words, create a personal brand your audience can count on.

Are You Ready to Build Your Personal Brand?

In summary, personal branding is the cornerstone of professional differentiation, empowering individuals to articulate their value and carve out their legal niche in the competitive landscape. Through strategic storytelling and thought leadership, you can cultivate a compelling brand identity that resonates with your audience, driving lasting impact and success in your endeavours.

At Cubicle Fugitive, we specialize in helping lawyers and law firms develop brand strategies that meet their business development goals. Whether you need support refining your biography, building a strong personal brand, or crafting impactful thought leadership content, our team can provide tailored solutions to help you stand out in the legal industry. Contact us today to learn how we can help you build your brand and elevate your professional profile.