This week: a guest issue from Uma, our VP of Operations, on the machine behind 800+ lawyer posts a month.

Also inside:

• The 5 systems behind every post we write
• 8 things our winning clients have in common

Hey, I'm Uma. I'm VP of Operations at StoryLeads.

We write for 90+ lawyers. That's 200+ posts a week, which is 800+ posts a month (ikr??!!). Not to flex or anything, but we've written over 10,000 posts for lawyers at this point :)

Suffice it to say, we know what works on LinkedIn, and we have the systems to pull it off.

Some screenshots to hype up what’s coming ;)

Today I want to show you those systems, the behind-the-scenes stuff, so you get an idea of what it's actually like to work with us. Then I'll tell you what we're seeing from the clients who are winning right now.

Let's get into it.

⚙️ Part 1: How we pull it off

The short version: our content strategists get on a call with our clients once a month (the recurring content call) for an hour. We interview them. From that call, we write 8-10 posts for the month. The client approves, we schedule.

Here are the 5 things that tie it together.

1. Strategy

Jacob covered this a couple of weeks ago but I think it’s worth repeating. Four years ago, almost no lawyers posted on LinkedIn. You could put up five random posts and they'd blow up, because you had no competition. Now everyone posts. Jacob counted 20+ PI lawyers in Florida alone posting every week. So "PI lawyer in Florida" is not a reason to remember you anymore.

What we want is for you to be known for ONE specific thing. The lawyer known for trucking cases. The lawyer who’s building a solo firm to spend more time with his family. The lawyer with the Monster can (cough, cough Kurt London).

Suppose your goal is to get referrals out of LinkedIn.

Referrals run on memory. A lawyer reads your post today and forgets it. Three months later, a car accident case walks into their office. They can't take it, so they think of a name. Whoever comes to mind first gets the case. Being known for ONE thing is how you become that name.

To get you there, we publish 4 types of content:

1. Your cases: the work you do and how you do it (shows your expertise)
2. Your personality: Maybe you’re a founder, a mom, or a dad, or obsessed with golf. We also put out your hot takes, your opinions, the misconceptions you're sick of hearing (we want people to see your personality. We want you to be likeable.)
3. How you practice: your craft, your skill, the way you actually run a case (again, showcases your expertise)
4. Your firm: what you're building, your culture, your values (people want to know what kind of firm you run!)

Together these get you one of three things, and we lean on whichever you actually want. I call them the 3 R's: reach, recruitment, referrals.

Want referrals? We lean on craft and personality.

Want to recruit? We lean on firm and culture.

And when an angle starts working, we double down on it.

2. Research

What you get out of a content call depends almost entirely on how much prep goes in. So before every call, the strategist builds a one-pager of questions. It has 4 sections:

• General questions, based on your strategy. Practice areas, cases you handle, misconceptions, hot takes.
• The most viral posts from your niche on LinkedIn and X. THIS IS JUST FOR INSPIRATION. We ask if you have a different take.
• Recent news in your niche. One of our clients commented on the Luigi Mangione case and got 700K impressions off one post. News travels, so we use it to our advantage, duh.
• A set of personal and business questions on what matters most to you, what happened at home this week, etc.

P.S. Our very first two calls together during onboarding are completely different. We just dig deeper into your story and the experiences you've had, to set the initial strategy up. Clients have asked us, half-joking, whether we ran an FBI search on them. We take that as a compliment :)

3. The content call

Our job on the call is to make you comfortable enough to open up, so we can get to the stories underneath the stories. That's how our strategists are trained.

We've had clients call it "the monthly therapy I'm paying for." Which makes sense. For most lawyers, it's the first time anyone has asked them to say out loud how they did something, what they were thinking, and why. It's a liberating hour.

We also always ask what happened in the last 2 weeks, and we'll have you pull up your calendar and walk us through it. What meetings, which clients, what's on your mind. That's how we keep fresh, top-of-mind content in the mix.

4. Editing process

Every post from every strategist passes through our editorial lead before it goes to you. She's been with us close to 2 years and has edited tens of thousands of posts at this point.

This is our biggest advantage. She sees what works across every lawyer we write for. If a hook lands for someone, she'll come back and recommend another version of it for a similar topic. We cross-pollinate across 90+ lawyers in a way where everyone wins. We also have a large repository of winning hooks stored in our database, indexed by practice areas and topics, so that we can always pull from it.

We have a big playground, and we play in it!

5. Audience

During onboarding, we ask who your clients are, who you want to connect with, and who your ideal referral partner is. Then we send 200 connection requests a week to exactly those people.

They may never like your posts. BUT they're still seeing them. There's a phrase coined, "LinkedIn lurkers," for a reason. One of our criminal defense attorneys built a referral-based practice this way, and he put it better than I can: "I might have 10,000 followers on LinkedIn, but my LinkedIn is for the 80 people who send me cases."

That's what we're building for you. And we make sure to get them to see your content.

That's the process!… Now the fun part.

🏆 Part 2: What's working

We have a client-wins channel in Slack. It's always blowing up: referrals, viral posts, DMs from people who read something and picked up the phone.

I went through the last 2 months of it. I know all of these lawyers very well. Here are the 8 things I notice that separate the ones winning from the rest.

THE CLIENTS WHO ARE WINNING RIGHT NOW ALL HAVE:

1. A constant stream of ideas

They show up to the call with something. They've tapped into what I call a content brain. They get on and go "Uma, I've been thinking about this" or "this happened last week, I want a post on it." What we'd love every lawyer reading this to realize is that content is everywhere. Anything can be content. And right now, with all the AI slop in the feed, it's the exact right time to show personality. Casey leaves us 31 ideas (or more usually, he must be having a down week) every 3 weeks on his Notion board. He's killing it.

2. Minimal edits

It's funny, the clients doing best are the ones who change the least. Our lawyers are good writers. Most could write these posts themselves. The reason we write them is that a post has to be packaged a specific way to get read on LinkedIn. If we say we want a spicier hook, they say "go for it." They trust us to do our jobs, and the results show it.

3. 90 minutes a month

Our clients who are winning make time to meet us at least once a month. One call, plus reviewing posts. It is the smallest time investment you will ever make with any agency. Weirdly, the flip side matters just as much: they're busy enough that they don't mess with the process. They give us the 90 minutes, then they're too busy to care about anything else and let us do our jobs.

4. No fear of being vulnerable

Some people feel weird opening up on LinkedIn. But that is the content that wins right now. Adam wrote a post about his sobriety and landed a case from it, because someone read it and felt seen. LinkedIn is becoming a personality-driven platform. The people who are open to sharing their experiences will make better connections. Simple as that.

5. A clear goal and a clear ICP

They can tell us on day one who they want to reach and why. Makes it way easier for us to get them in front of the right people.

6. A willingness to play

I'll be real, we're not a magic genie. We've had posts go viral in the first 2 weeks. We've had clients get a referral off their first post. Doesn't mean it will happen for everyone. We experiment a lot: which cases to lead with, how we send connection requests, who we connect you with. You have to be okay with some of that, and our best clients are.

7. A willingness to double down

Once we find an angle that works, we repurpose it three ways to Sunday. If a post got you in front of 100K people, there's a good chance the next version does too. We write about that topic again and again and again and again.

8. An understanding that impressions ≠ results

Conversely, the best clients know the most impressions don't mean the best results. Some of Jacob's own posts, the ones that drove the most sales for us, barely got any likes. A post about a case in your practice area probably won't go viral. But it might be exactly what a founder looking for a VC lawyer needs to read before they reach out.

Thanks for having me, Jacob. Back to you next week.

Uma
Connect with me on LinkedIn →