In many of my conversations with JD Supra clients, I’m asked some variation of a deceptively simple question:
How is our content doing?
It’s an important question worth asking regularly. In fact, I’d encourage every marketing team to conduct a periodic audit of your firm’s content, but I’d also encourage you not to jump too quickly to the obvious metrics.
When you ask, How is our content doing?, you are really asking a series of much more important questions:
Are we writing about the things that matter to our clients? Are we reaching the people we want to reach? Are we giving those readers something genuinely useful? Are we demonstrating expertise in the areas where we want to be known? And, ultimately, does our thought leadership support where the firm wants its business to go?
Those are big questions and there are many others in the follow-up. Rather than trying to answer all of them at once, I recommend a three-part framework when thinking through a content audit:
- Quantity/Volume: Are we publishing enough?
- Targeted Visibility/Audience: Are the right people seeing it?
- Strategy Match/Business Support: Are we publishing content that supports our business growth?
As we make our way through this framework it should become clear that the three legs of this stool are deeply interconnected. Asking and answering one impacts, and is impacted by, the others. For this first in a series of three posts on auditing your firm’s content, let’s start with the question I’m asked most often:
Are we publishing enough?
If you are building an ongoing relationship with readers, consistency matters. If your firm produces one article every few months, it will be difficult to build much momentum with an audience. And so, as a rough starting point, I’d suggest publishing something useful every couple of weeks versus appearing sporadically and disappearing again.
However, my more immediate answer to this first question is: enough for what?
There is no magic number of articles that constitutes a successful content strategy, because quantity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The right publishing cadence depends on what you are trying to accomplish, what your readers need, how quickly your subject is developing, and what everyone else competing for those readers’ attention is doing.
That last point matters enormously.
A greenfield calls for a different strategy
Consider what happens when a new area of law or business risk begins attracting attention.
Cybersecurity, now ubiquitous among thought leadership topics, was once such a field. Artificial intelligence has been another. Data centers an interesting current example.
If your firm has legitimate expertise in an emerging area and wants to become known for it, frequency can be an important strategic advantage. Readers are learning alongside the subject itself. They need someone who will tell them what happened, explain why it matters, and come back when something changes.
One of the best examples I’ve seen over the years: Linn Freedman at Robinson & Cole. Over the last decade or so, Linn has established an extraordinary presence around cybersecurity, data protection, and privacy by publishing consistently as those disciplines grew in importance. Her approach has included brief, timely updates on new developments alongside deeper analysis and commentary. She didn’t need every publication to be a definitive treatise. She needed to be consistently useful.
Over time, frequent useful publishing does something that a single excellent article generally cannot: it creates a habit, both for writers and readers.
Someone discovers you because you answered one question they had. They encounter you again when the next development occurs. Eventually, they stop encountering you accidentally and start looking for you, make a habit of counting on you for news and insights.
That progression — from reader, to repeat reader, to follower, to someone who recognizes your name as a trusted authority — is one of the real goals of thought leadership.
In an emerging field, then, I would ask: How often does our audience have a new reason to need us?
If important developments are happening every week and your ambition is to own that subject, publishing once a quarter probably isn’t enough.
What if everyone is already writing on this topic?
Now take a mature, heavily covered area such as labor and employment.
There is no shortage of excellent employment lawyers publishing useful analysis. The subject applies to virtually every organization with employees, encompasses an enormous range of issues, and generates a tremendous amount of content. Stands to reason, it is one of JD Supra's most active channels in terms of publishing and readership.
In that environment, simply deciding to publish more often may accomplish very little. The better question becomes:
What reason are we giving someone to count on us?
I am reminded of an early legal blog from FordHarrison called That’s What She Said. Its premise was wonderfully simple: the firm's attorneys used episodes of The Office television show and the spectacularly inappropriate behavior of Dunder Mifflin manager Michael Scott to discuss workplace and employment-law issues.
The publication had a natural cadence because the show did. But weekly publishing wasn't what made the concept smart. It had a point of view. It knew how it wanted to earn attention.
That distinction is useful in a content audit. If you are publishing in a crowded field, increasing volume may simply increase the amount of content competing with thousands of other articles that look and sound much the same.
Sometimes the answer to “Are we publishing enough?” is “No.” Sometimes it is “Yes, but we aren't sufficiently differentiated.” And sometimes the most valuable conclusion is:
We should publish less of one thing so that we have the resources to publish more of something that matters.
That is why raw article count is only a medium-value data point in a content audit. It tells you something. It doesn't tell you enough.
Don't benchmark yourself against an imaginary average
Rather than comparing your firm against an abstract industry average, compare yourself against the people competing for the attention of the audience you want.
JD Supra's annual Readers' Choice Awards are a useful place to start. Choose the category closest to the practice or subject you are auditing and look at the recognized authors. These are people who have earned the widest readership and engagement in that particular field over the course of the year.
Follow them. Look at their output over several months. How frequently do they publish? What do they write about? How quickly do they respond to developments? Do they write short alerts, longer analysis, recurring columns, practical guides — or some combination? How narrowly have they defined their subject? How clearly can you tell whom they are writing for?
You'll probably discover there isn't one winning cadence – and that's the point. You aren't looking for a number to copy; you are trying to understand the relationship between publishing behavior, subject matter, audience need and reader attention.
Then you can make an informed decision about your own approach.
What your publishing data is really telling you
I like to compare publishing volume and readership over time rather than looking at either number alone. Suppose you published 25% fewer articles last quarter and readership fell by roughly the same amount. That's useful information. Your overall visibility may simply be sensitive to publishing volume.
But suppose you published 25% fewer articles and readership increased? Now we have something interesting to investigate.
Was one topic responsible for the increase? Did a particular author suddenly find a larger audience? Did you write about an emerging issue at exactly the moment readers needed information? Did an older article begin attracting attention again because circumstances made it newly relevant? Did one industry-focused piece outperform several broadly written legal updates? Did a particular format — a practical checklist, FAQ, forecast, or explainer — consistently outperform your standard alerts?
Those aren't merely analytics questions, they are editorial clues.
A successful content audit should turn those clues into decisions: write the follow-up. Build the series. Refresh the older piece. Narrow the audience. Bring another practice into the conversation. Turn the subject into a webinar. Stop spending scarce attorney time producing content that consistently fails to find an audience.
The purpose of the audit isn't to produce a report. It's to decide what to do next.
Three quick content audits you can conduct right now
1. Compare your publishing activity with your readership
Log into your JD Supra dashboard and find the Publishing Activity module on your Overview page. Look at the past 90 days: how much did you publish? Now compare that to your Results: how many reads did that content generate? [You can also find this information in your monthly analytics email and by going directly to your analytics dashboard.]
Now, in your analytics dashboard, change the date range and compare these two totals against the previous quarter.
Don't stop at up or down. Look for the relationship between the two. If you published less but readership increased, find out why. Which subjects, authors, industries, article types, or older publications drove the change? If a new topic is finding an audience, mine that vein: build a series, recruit additional authors, or explore a webinar. If an older article is attracting new readers, ask why the subject has resurfaced and whether the piece deserves an update or follow-up. Your analytics should produce hypotheses — and those hypotheses should produce your next editorial decisions.
2. Study the people already earning attention in your field
Visit the JD Supra Readers' Choice Awards category for the practice or subject you are auditing. Follow the recognized authors and spend some time simply being their reader. Compare cadence, subject selection, article length, format, specificity and responsiveness to new developments. Some may publish weekly; others much less frequently.
Don't copy the number. Look for the strategy behind it. What appears to make each author's cadence appropriate to the audience and subject?
3. Put an AI agent to work as a second editorial filter
Give ChatGPT, Claude or another AI tool links to your firm's publication library and those of several competitors and ask it to compare them. Start simply: Who publishes most frequently, and on what subjects?
Then go deeper. Ask the AI to act as a law firm content strategist and evaluate the libraries side by side. Who demonstrates the greatest depth? Who appears to own particular subjects? Who makes the intended reader clearest from titles and opening paragraphs? Where is everyone writing about the same things? Where might there be an underserved audience or subject? Don't treat the first response as an oracle. Treat it as the beginning of a conversation: challenge its conclusions, add what you know about your business and clients, and ask it to refine the analysis.
The useful output isn't an AI-generated grade. It's a new set of questions to bring back to your own content strategy.
And that brings us to the second post in this series. Publishing consistently matters, but visibility alone isn't the goal.
The next question is: Are the right people reading us? Stay tuned for that post, upcoming…
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Paul Ryplewski is JD Supra’s VP of Client Services.