How to create LinkedIn pages for each of your law firm's practice groups

Don Schindler (@donschindler), Marketing Director at the University of Notre Dame, recently met with Linkedin, which was interested in helping the University advertise on LinkedIn. Schindler’s personally a big fan of LinkedIn. He also has the University of Notre Dame set up with a company page on LinkedIn. But a big problem for Schindler is that Notre Dame cannot list out every great college/school/program that the university has on its LinkedIn company profile. I saw the same challenge when I blogged last week about law firms completing their LinkedIn company pages. Saw the same issue during a LMA presentation covering LinkedIn pages on Friday in Dallas. Law firms can put up company pages to highlight the law firm, but not it’s practice groups. Highlighting unique offerings of the firm on LinkeIn appears impossible when the firm has diversified practice groups. No problem says the LinkedIn person Schindler met with. We should follow the Harvard model on LinkedIn.

…[S]et up company profiles for each individual school/college and do programs if you want. This way you have a larger digital footprint in Linkedin and you can tie in your social media content and news content to specific pages.

Look what you get for a list of LinkedIn company pages when you set this set up.

What’s this mean for your law firm?

• Set up separate LinkedIn company pages for each of your practice groups.
• Create separate favicon icons for each group’s name using your law firm logo so you gain a consistent look.
• Describe in detail the services you offer from this practice or industry group, using suggested keywords and keywords you ascertain on a Google keyword search.
• List by name the key contacts, including their contact information, for the group.
• Tell lawyers in the group to get their LinkedIn profiles complete and to include a link to this new practice/industry group page.

Law firms spend lots of time on law firm profiles of attorneys and practice groups. Nothing wrong with that. With the increasing use of LinkedIn by clients, prospective clients, reporters, bloggers, and business leaders combined with the fact that LinkedIn profiles often outrank law firm profiles on a Google search, perfecting your LinkedIn presence is critically important.