Newsletters are dead.

That’s what one legal marketing professional told me, shortly after I joined Faegre & Benson. Given that we were in the process of launching a new firm-wide publication at the time, her remark made me uneasy. So I went back and reviewed some of the reasons we had concluded that a newsletter ought to be a powerful marketing tool for a law firm:

• It keeps you "top of mind" by putting your firm and your lawyers in front of clients and potential clients on a consistent basis;
• It showcases the breadth of your practice capabilities for clients who may only know your expertise in certain limited areas;
• It allows you to bypass traditional media sources and communicate directly with your target audience;
• It demonstrates your "partnership" with the business community.

However, the more I thought about my colleague’s comment, the more I realized she was right. To a large extent, the legal newsletter was dead--but not because the vehicle itself was ineffective for marketing. Instead, law firms killed it.

[Editor's note: According to last month's Sugarcrest Poll, 41.2 percent of respondents said that their firms did not publish a newsletter.]

This lesson was driven home to me after we had been successfully producing our bi-monthly publication Trends for a couple years. Several representatives of a consulting firm visited us and picked up a copy of Trends in the lobby. When I sat down with them, one of the consultants pointed to Trends and said, "I see you publish this bi-monthly." She then leaned forward and in a conspiratorial whisper asked, "How often does it really come out?"

I whispered back, "Bi-monthly."

That’s the first reason most law firms and their marketers have declared newsletters dead. They can’t produce them consistently. If you produce newsletters erratically, without any fixed schedule, you lose much of the brand value of keeping your firm name in front of clients and potential clients. In addition, much of the content tends to be stale--because the timely articles usually are shelved while the firm or group hunts for other articles to fill out an entire issue.

There are other reasons why newsletters don’t work:

They’re poorly written. It amazes me that so many firms slough off the task of writing newsletter articles to their most junior associates. With few exceptions, lawyers just out of law school tend to write as if they’re doing a piece for the Law Review, instead of for a business client with little interest in legal minutiae or pages of footnotes. Why would you want to take a dense, legalistic article and broadcast it to thousands of business clients? What does that say about your ability to understand or relate to a business person’s needs?

They’re unattractive. Most legal newsletters that arrive in my mailbox look like funeral announcements on parchment paper. No graphics. No color. Nothing but paragraph after paragraph of block text. Would you take the time to read something that is so graphically uninviting? Neither would your clients.

They’re not client-focused. Okay, this is a subset of newsletters that are poorly written. But it merits a separate mention because it’s so important. Time after time, I see articles about new case law or new decisions by the Supreme Court. These articles do a wonderful job of outlining the facts and incorporating long quotations from the court’s decision. But they rarely answer a fundamental client question: "Why do I care?" If a newsletter doesn’t provide practical information--or explain why a given issue really affects the client’s business--it’s worthless to them.

You’re better off doing no newsletter at all than sending a publication that commits the sins above. Poor newsletters undercut your marketing message by portraying your firm and lawyers as out-of-touch with business reality. If you want to add value to clients, then your newsletter better do the same.

Many law firms have recognized this dynamic, which is why so many firms have gotten out of the newsletter business. They’ve tried and tried and finally raised the white flag.

Others have jumped on a different bandwagon--signing up for a "canned" newsletter, where a third-party firm writes content and sells it to multiple law firms with modest personalization. If you’ve been tempted to go down this road, consider the following:

• Do you want your client getting content "you" wrote from more than one law firm?
• Do you trust the legal know-how of a third party enough to stake your firm’s reputation on their content?
• Do you want your client to think that you have neither the time nor the aptitude to prepare this material yourself?

The fact is that you can do it yourself. We’ve done it bi-monthly with our Trends publication at Faegre & Benson since 1998. The Miller Canfield firm produces Hot Points, a lively and informative legal newsletter with consistently high-quality content and attractive design. But there seem to be relatively few other firms that have made a commitment to do newsletters right.

Here are the principles we used in our original vision for Trends:

Consistent publication. We set ourselves on a bi-monthly production schedule, and we’ve kept to it ever since. There’s a hard deadline for content, but the publication is frequent enough that we can include timely content. It also allows lawyers who were in groups that did not publish a separate newsletter to have a vehicle for contributing material.

Breadth. Our publication covers the full range of business legal needs. We want clients with whom we may work in one area of practice to know about our expertise in other areas. But we’re finicky, too: we won’t accept pieces that are too narrowly focused (in either geography or practice) that they won’t have value for a broad-based business audience.

We’ve got one of the nation’s leading food contamination defense practices--but the audience for an article on salmonella is too narrow for Trends. (That’s where practice-specific newsletters are valuable.) Similarly, we distribute our magazine around the country, so we try to avoid articles that are of value only in a specific state.

Size and design. We wanted to distinguish Trends from other newsletters and magazines. So we adopted a distinctive size (5 ½" x 8 ½")--easy to drop into a briefcase--and developed an attractive and unique 4-color cover. We developed it as a self-mailer, with the table of contents right on the cover, so that our readers don’t have to dig to find out what’s inside.

The articles are generally contiguous, making it easy for a reader to follow the thread of each article without leaping from place to place within the magazine. And there’s a handy topic reference in the upper right-hand corner of each page, to make it easy to find a topic of interest while flipping through the magazine.

Business-friendly writing. Most of all, we vowed to have a newsletter where the content is crisp, concise, and business-friendly. The articles are largely written by partners and senior associates, who understand the concept of "adding value" in the information they provide to clients. I also edit every article in the newsletter personally, to assure that we maintain a consistent, readable editorial style. This is true right down to the headlines, which are interesting teasers for the content inside ("Hello, SEC Calling," "Is Your Software Investment at Risk?", "Love, Marriage, and Custom Software," and the like).

Having a vision is one thing. Executing on it is another. Ah, but with 400 lawyers, it should be easy to get six or seven quality articles every two months, right? Think again. Here are a few inside secrets we’ve used at Faegre & Benson:

Overbook. Think like the airlines. Regardless of the commitment a lawyer may make to write a given article, there’s a better-than-average chance that he or she won’t deliver the product by your deadline. So I always "overbook" content for Trends, to make sure I’ve got enough quality content to fill the magazine on time.

Maximize opportunities. Most lawyers regularly do CLE presentations on various topics. These are often a gold mine of ideas and concepts that can be adapted into client articles with relatively little difficulty. (I once had the good fortune of adapting a forty-page CLE thesis on the risks of pollen drift of genetically modified organisms into a 1,000-word piece called "Blowing in the Wind" for the trade publication Seed World. After that, nothing scares me.) CLE’s, client work, seminar presentations, all make for interesting potential articles that can be leveraged with modest effort on top of the original investment of time.

Edit ruthlessly. One of our senior partners confessed that he used to be a pretty good writer, but several decades of practicing law had ground all his writing instincts out of him. Similarly, when lawyers refer to an associate as a "good writer," they almost always mean that he or she is a precise writer--which has very little to do with whether anyone would want to read what he or she has written. As a result, we edit ruthlessly to make sure that our material is geared for an executive audience that wants concise, practical information in an easy-to-read style. (If your article begins with a citation, or includes the words "pursuant" or "promulgate," don’t expect to see it in Trends.)

Get design support. If you want a professional publication, use a professional. Don’t pass off your newsletter to your word processing department. We use an in-house graphic designer, and firms that can’t afford to keep a designer on staff should develop a relationship with a freelancer.

You shouldn’t expect to create a superior newsletter without investing in talent and spending a lot of money. But the payoff is worth it. As one of our clients wrote recently:

"Your articles are wonderful marketing tools and good sources of information. I like it that you have a steady stream of articles written by your own lawyers on a variety of topics. I can't figure out why other firms in town (or across the country) don't try to inform and keep their visibility high."

He must not have heard that newsletters are dead.