Writing the Playbook for Competitive Content Campaigns For Law Firms

CREATE Communications is pleased to introduce The Sharp End: Conversations With Legal Marketing’s Leading Voices.

In rock climbing, the lead climber takes “the sharp end” of the rope. Assuming the risk and taking responsibility for the climbers who follow, they set the route upward against unknown and often shifting terrain. In legal marketing, it’s much the same. In The Sharp End, we’re sitting down with the boldest minds in legal marketing to talk about how they got where they are, where the industry is headed, and how they’re leading their clients and firms to push boundaries and gain a competitive edge.

After serving in high-level communications and marketing roles in Big Law, including at Jenner & Block, Crowell & Moring and most recently Reed Smith, Phill McGowan started his own consultancy, Phill McGowan Marketing, in August 2024. Phill advises major law firms and global organizations on driving growth through data-driven content marketing and communications by aligning marketing strategies with business development goals to deliver measurable results. The Sharp End caught up with Phill to talk about the growing role of content at law firms, the impact of campaigns on business development and building brand, and the evolving strategies for content distribution as web search and AI increasingly aggregate information online.

The Sharp End (TSE): Like many people working in marketing and communications, you started out as a journalist. How did that background help get you where you are now?

Phill McGowan (PM): I started my career thinking that I was going to be an editor of a major American newspaper. In 1999, that seemed possible in a certain way. I was a copy editor at The Baltimore Sun and worked in different parts of the newsroom, but primarily in sports. Throughout my 10 years there, I was also a metro reporter, a designer and a social media promoter, so I got to have my hands in a lot of different cookie jars. I think thatserved me well over the years.

But, by the time I left the industry in 2009, the world had turned upside down. In 1999, when I joined The Sun, it had 406 employees in the newsroom and five international bureaus. When I left in 2009, there were 138 in the newsroom, all the foreign bureaus had been sold off, The Sun was part of the Tribune Co., and essentially, the reporting was outsourced nationally to the LA Times or the Chicago Tribune.

While I was there, I witnessed the industry’s shift into true digital experimentation — exploring new formats, real-time coverage and evolving storytelling approaches that continue to inform my work today.

I worked my way from copy editor to metro reporter — after hearing a lot of “no.” I knew if I wanted to be a senior editor that I needed to first become a reporter. I worked for a few months freelancing while working full time as a copy editor and building new relationships within the newsroom. That was a valuable career lesson in perseverance and the power of the personal rebrand. When the industry began collapsing, I went back to copy editing. By then, I was getting my master’s degree in interactive journalism. I could see that the industry was headed toward a focus on all aspects digital and digital engagement, which meant building audiences in different ways, and a changing business model.

At a certain point, the Tribune Company decided, across its properties, to create the role of community coordinator — essentially social media specialists who sat in different parts of the newsroom to help promote content throughout the day, to create engagement and to build new audiences that weren’t reading the physical newspaper.

I learned a lot about traditional social media channels, but also about different ways to build audiences, including local audiences. What we came to realize over time is that we could attract a national and international audience, but from a digital advertising standpoint, that didn’t matter as much as building local audiences. We appreciated the financial necessity to segment audiences. It’s a sensibility there that applies to other industries, including legal marketing.

TSE: From there you moved into government communications as Public Information Officer for the City of Annapolis and then Communications Chief of the U.S. House of Representatives. How did you navigate that transition?

PM: I had some knowledge of Anne Arundel County government and Annapolis from my time at The Sun, so I knew the people and the issues. I had to put on a different hat and say, “I’m a government communicator,” and I needed to do it in 2009 when communicators were just starting to embrace digital channels.

Being on the other side was fascinating for me. As a reporter, I wanted to know everything the mayor, city council and other leaders had to say about different policy and law enforcement issues. But when you elect people, they need the space to formulate decisions and not necessarily reveal their thinking. So that was a change for me. I was now accountable to an organization in a different way. As a journalist, your job is to break stories any way you can. That’s not your job as a government communicator — unless it meets the interests of the organization.

TSE: How did you get into legal marketing?

PM: Like many people, I stumbled upon legal marketing. I was working in a nonpartisan role in the House of Representatives managing a full-service creative team. I was an institutional communicator, doing all aspects of communication except for public relations. I started looking for opportunities to run a full-fledged communication shop, including PR. When I found an opportunity at a law firm, it became about convincing folks that I could understand legal and that I could operate successfully within legal.

TSE: How did you convince them?

PM: At the time I was working on Capitol Hill, so I said I work for a bunch of lawyers. Not every member of the House or every elected official is a lawyer, but there are a lot of lawyers on the Hill. We also had all kinds of very specific rules and procedures, and if you don’t follow them, you get your hands slapped. And when you’re working to do something right for 10 people or 100 people, the whole effort could still fail if you upset one or two particularly important members of that constituency.

Doesn’t that sound like a law firm?

Translating my experience that way, I was able to make people feel comfortable. You have to think about the world through the perspective of the people who want to hire you, understand what their needs are, and then speak to that. In law firms, lawyers want to feel safe in their choices, and a precedent-based explanation resonates: You did this there, so it makes sense for you to do the same over here for us.

TSE: What prompted you to launch your own consulting firm, and what’s been your biggest challenge so far?

PM: My biggest challenge is, once again, rebranding myself at a key moment. You have to succeed where you are in different points in your career. Whether, in my case, it’s going from copy editing to reporting, or government communications to legal marketing, it’s about rebranding yourself and not allowing people’s expectations to put you in a box. You’re a communicator. So that’s what you do, and that’s all that folks think about. You have to extend folks’ imaginations to see you’re something different, and that does take a lot of work. I’m literally rebranding myself right now because I’ve got a business and I’m saying that I can do different things than others may have imagined based on my experience.

I’ve been in legal marketing for over a decade. I’ve been a director of marketing and communications at three firms, Jenner & Block, Crowell & Moring and, most recently, Reed Smith, for almost the last six years. At Reed Smith, I ran a team that grew from 18 to 31 people, with global responsibility. I felt that I had done everything that I could possibly do in my job. I was, quite frankly, a little burned out and I was looking for a different challenge.

So, I took a leap of faith, kind of like Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in “The Last Crusade,” where he steps out over the chasm and finds the bridge to the other side. You have to believe in yourself and what you’re doing. I’ve built a network. I’ve received a lot of great feedback over the last year about how I can help organizations and people with their legal marketing. And so

I just decided to take the leap.

TSE: In a presentation you gave last year, you talked about promoting insights and campaigns for Reed Smith across an astounding 58 social media accounts. What’s your thought process behind developing and implementing that kind of a digital program?

PM: Reed Smith has 1,600 lawyers and more than 30 offices on three continents, so we have to level-set against that expectation.

What is the size of the organization? How many practice and industry groups do you have? Because those are each distinctive business lines. Do you have enough people and enough thought leadership to position each of those business lines? And is there an opportunity to create connection with distinct audiences?

Then, it’s really a question for the lawyers and for the BD and marketing teams: Is there enough of a critical mass to launch a channel? Can you put out enough content to make it a meaningful experience for the audience?

Sometimes it’s simply just experimenting — and sometimes discovery beats strategy. You might say we’re a firm with five principal practice groups and we’re only going to run social media channels for those five. Well, maybe you don’t have a strong IP practice but there’s demand for IP insights. You can produce content around IP; you’ve got lawyers who are attending events and providing insights. So maybe you give it a shot and launch a social channel devoted to IP for six months or a year. If it doesn’t work, then you drop it, you move on — it’s relatively low cost.

I think that’s part of the philosophy you need to embrace regarding social media. Not all 58 of those channels are going to remain as they are. Some will drop off; others may add on. You see an audience with changing expectations and you’re trying to meet that moment wherever you are. Whether that’s with one channel or 58, or something in between, as long as you’ve got that mindset, then you’re probably heading in the right direction.

TSE: You’ve also talked a lot about content campaigns — you’ve developed your own definitive playbook for them. What are the biggest challenges in content campaigns and how does your playbook address them?

PM: I was fortunate at Reed Smith. Sadie Baron was CMO, and about four years ago she thought that we needed a dedicated campaigns team to bring forth branded content principally around the five industry groups that matter to Reed Smith, and to bring that content to market with the goal of not just branding the firm, but trying to win work. I was part of the team that hired and built that function. In my time at Reed Smith, that campaigns team and my broader comms and marketing group produced more than 15 campaigns of various sizes.

Some campaigns took months to produce — what I came to define as “Capital C” campaigns, with fully developed sub-brands, dedicated web presence and long-term positioning. Others prioritized speed to market, ran for a shorter duration and launched in just a couple of months — those were my “lowercase c” campaigns.

So, you think about content ideation, you think about an editorial process.

Then you launch, and there’s the whole other piece to campaigns — and it requires changing lawyer expectations.

In the past, lawyers might have thought: “I’ve created a piece of content. I birthed my baby and now I’m done. I don’t need to do anything else.”

We created the expectation over time so now lawyers think: “OK, I will create the content, the content will launch, and I now have a bunch of responsibilities during and after the launch to instigate engagement. I need to update my bio. I need to update my LinkedIn profile. I need to identify a list of clients and reach out with my content, and also reach out with other content that’s being written as part of the campaign to say, ‘Hey, this might be helpful to you.’” And then I need to follow up with information with my business developers to get that into the CRM system, to be actionable and accountable.

It can be a multiyear change management process for firms to get right.

But the goal of the campaigns, any campaigns — which now a lot of firms are talking about — is not just as a brand-building exercise. Brand is important, but it’s not the chief objective.

Amid a sea of increasingly indistinguishable law firm brands, do you want to brand yourself on your name or is it more advantageous to brand yourself on the key topics that matter to your clients?

That’s a rhetorical question for lawyers and for marketing leaders to decide, but, to me, if you can identify yourself as the solution for key topics that align with your business strategy, I think you’ve gone a long way to not only keep or bring back existing clients but also attract new clients who never knew you existed, and never knew you could help them — and exactly in a way that they had never expected.

That’s the goal of campaigns. I provide a playbook on how to get the lawyers engaged and the process for getting to the end line, and then how to think about KPIs and other aspects so you can measure the effects of those campaigns, with the goal all the way through of trying to drive conversion.

TSE: In this context of content, what should firms and their legal marketing professionals be doing now?

PM: Law firms need to be more nimble and on the front foot. Firms should empower marketing teams to help set the editorial direction of content because strong editorial direction facilitates business development and leads to growth. It’s about creating helpful content that enables lawyers to engage their clients.

Legal marketing teams are realizing — or need to realize — that the balance is shifting in who decides what content is created and how, and it carries broader implications for how marketing teams should exhibit leadership in advising partners on client engagement.

What has been happening for decades, and what continues to happen in a prevailing way, is that the lawyers drive the content process. Once an issue is identified, a partner then gathers up some associates to work on an alert or a blog post. That team might take a day or two or three for that content to come together, and then they’ll launch it out. The lawyers are establishing their own editorial process at a time and place of their choosing. When they’re going to market, they’re thinking about their clients and what they need — so they’re connected with clients in that way — but the lawyers are the decision-makers about when and how that content gets published.

As marketing teams take on greater leadership and responsibility in driving growth strategy, how can they have a role in shaping the editorial process?

Marketing teams should be empowered to tap lawyers on the shoulder when there’s an emerging issue and say, “I need your team to write something now. Not a 1,500-word alert, but rather 300 or 400 words — and you’re going to get that out to market today. Then we can follow up on that tomorrow or the next day or next week.” It’s about being more responsive to the news cycle, to the social cycle, so lawyers can create impressions at a moment where the issue is live for clients.

Firms need to institute change management so marketing teams can be empowered to set the direction on at least some aspects around thought leadership content creation.

Many lawyers I’ve spoken to over the years have successful books of business. The work that they bring in validates whatever marketing approach they are taking. Some people will hear me talk about content and engagement on social and think, “I don’t need to do that, and I don’t think I ever will,” because it doesn’t resonate with them.

That’s fine, but what I’ve come to know is that good lawyers want to hear what’s going on in the space, what are the trend lines. It’s helpful to have your proof points in your back pocket so you can comfortably share information with lawyers so you can move them a little bit off their traditional thinking. For example, many general counsel spend eight to 16 hours a week reading content; clients are reading information all the time. The top-of-mind brand awareness of most major law firms among general counsel is like 1, 2 or 3%, unless you’re a mega-firm. So, for many of your clients, your firm is likely not top of mind.

You provide all that information and ask them: “What’s the best way to engage your clients in the space?” For some people, that approach will resonate, and for others it won’t. But I think that over time, the view will prevail that content is a way to connect with clients, to help maintain and build relationships, and hopefully that turns into business.

On the other hand, sometimes discovery beats strategy. Lots of firms will have strategy. Marketing leaders will have an understanding of how they want to roll out content campaigns, which individual lawyers they want to support and why, and in what markets. But law firms that allow for experimentation will be able to stumble upon solutions they did not know existed. How do firms provide for some experimentation so they can figure out the best way to engage with clients, win new clients and new work? I think you have to have some kind of framework to accommodate that.

TSE: As search engines and AI-driven tools increasingly shape how audiences discover and consume content, how should law firms rethink their approach to content distribution?

PM: Every firm will create content — the question is, what type of content is it? How does the content respond to a widely known development, for example?

You’ll have many firms write an alert about publicly known issues. That information might be helpful. It’s advisory, but it’s not proprietary. Then there are types of thought leadership content that are highly proprietary.

Here’s an example. Maybe you’ve created a campaign, a white paper, a compendium of information that is organized, has value and a longer shelf life. So, what are you going to do with it? There’s tremendous SEO value in putting it on your website, and you’ll attract an audience. But in the era of AI, you have to worry about your content being scraped, culled and commoditized.

About 70% of people start their web journeys at “search.” With the rise of AI, online searches are becoming even more streamlined. Rather than reading extensively, people scan for the one definitive answer they need to move on with their day.

How do you create content for that kind of search expectation, where people aren’t necessarily reading? They are exploring. They’re searching for needles in a haystack — and they expect to surface answers instantly, presented in a way that delivers immediate value.

If all of your content is publicly available, how much of it really benefits your firm and how much, over time, benefits the content aggregators?

The question then becomes: How do you protect and segment that content? Not all content has the same value. At some point, firms have to decide what to keep open and what to gate, so they can preserve its value, guide prospects through the buyer journey and help drive conversion.

From an optimization standpoint, it’s not just about making content discoverable on search engines. Firms need to think beyond traditional SEO and structure content for machine readability, context relevance and authority — so AI tools recognize it as a trusted source when generating responses. If you’re at a mid-sized or large firm, SEO should be embedded in content creation and campaigns from the outset.

For example, if you’re launching a new practice, you’re positioning it on the website, creating a brochure and sharing marketing content on social. But how are you thinking about writing the captions, key takeaways, lead paragraphs and descriptions? How are you structuring content to align with how people are searching, whether through Google or AI-driven tools?

BD teams have the first opportunity to tell the lawyers: We need you to create certain pieces of content, and we need you to do it now. If you address the SEO aspects of all of the content from the beginning, that helps facilitate your outreach all the way through.

I’ll give you one quick example. Reed Smith launched an ESG practice very quietly in the fall of 2021. We just put up a web page, but didn’t announce it with a press release or anything. The firm uses the Passle content platform, and the lawyers proceeded to write nearly 80 ESG posts between October 2021 and June 2022. We also issued an energy transition report before the official launch of the practice in June 2022. Our ESG practice jumped from the 10th page in Google search results to the second page. Although we didn’t get to the first page, it was still very helpful for us to position our content around ways that people could use internet searches to find it. You can’t give that the short shrift in this era.

TSE: You’ve built up a broad network over the course of your career. What might people be surprised to know about you?

PM: I am a college basketball fanatic. I’m a Marquette University alum and I follow Marquette basketball, and also college basketball generally. I live-tweet every Marquette game and talk almost exclusively about Marquette basketball and college basketball. The NCAA tournament is a real fun time of the year for me.

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