Addressing in the Language of Your Audience

Attorneys write for a living, but they must shift gears when writing for business-development purposes. Promotional materials must be written from the reader's viewpoint, emphasizing significance of the facts and benefits to the audience.

This article discusses

 

• Importance of addressing the reader's needs and interests.
• How to ensure that facts about an attorney or practice are translated into benefits for the reader.
• A formula to analyze written materials to ensure clarity of context and subsequent understanding.

Attorneys write. This activity is integral to the practice of law: briefs, re ports, analyses, and correspondence of all kinds.

When the attorney writes for marketing purposes, the activity requires a different approach, one that is oriented toward a non-attorney audience whose interests and "language" are far different from the attorney's. Even attorneys writing to other attorneys should use non-legal approaches to the prose. Written materials generated by attorneys in the normal course of practicing law are almost always prepared to inform and persuade. The attorney writes knowing that the recipient of the message-be it a court, colleague, or client-will read it.

But this is not the case in marketing. People do not have to read many marketing-oriented materials produced by attorneys. People voluntarily read things for two reasons:
 

1. They will enjoy the process.
2. They think they will learn something from it.

It is safe to assume that potential readers, upon seeing a brochure, newsletter, or other "optional" message from an attorney, will be inclined to read it only if one or both of the two reasons are present. Therefore, the attorney needs to write with this approach in mind.

For instance, consider an attorney's brochure from the potential client's viewpoint. It is nice to think that the reader will voluntarily pick up the brochure in search of general information about an attorney or firm. In reality, brochures are used almost always by clients or potential clients for specific information at a specific time. The most effective brochures are therefore those that can address a client's needs as clearly and directly as possible. Brochures are most useful when they provide valuable information, written in clear, concise, and easily understandable language.

Facts versus Meaning

The minds of attorneys, like their libraries, are storehouses of facts. The client-focused attorney succeeds in marketing communication when he or she can sort through those facts, select the relevant ones to pass on to clients, and then translate or assign meaning to them. When writing for marketing purposes, attorneys can check the communication value of their prose in this way:
 

1. Periodically, review two or three sentences for their factual content.
2. Then look elsewhere in the same paragraph for some sort of interpretation of the facts or a description of their significance. "What does this mean to me?" is always the question in the reader's mind. The attorney's job is to make sure the answer is always clear.

Since a common writing activity for attorneys in marketing is the drafting of brochure copy or firm descriptions, extra care must be taken to ensure the text has meaning for the reader.

One successful approach is to address the attorney's capabilities in terms of legal activity and problems solved, rather than merely naming practice areas. The reality is that clients generally don't care about legal terms; all they want is their immediate and specific problem solved.

Keeping It Simple

Besides looking for meaning in text, good writers pay attention to the over all difficulty of the words. Writing simply and clearly is actually a courtesy, enabling the reader to understand quickly and easily what is being said.