When we started law school, we expected to spend three years mastering case briefs, statutory interpretation and the finer points of civil procedure. What we didn’t anticipate was how those skills might translate outside traditional practice – or that we’d find ourselves drawn to the business side of law. Legal public relations and crisis communications offered something most of our coursework didn’t: a chance to see how firms build their reputations, attorneys position themselves as thought leaders and the legal industry markets itself to clients who need more than just technical competence.

As content interns at a PR and communications firm, we’ve had a front-row seat to that translation process. Some of what law school drilled into us has proven invaluable; other habits we’ve had to unlearn entirely. The skills that make you successful in the classroom don’t always map neatly into effective marketing – and understanding that gap has been as instructive as any lecture we’ve sat through.

Here’s what we’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t when applying a law student’s toolkit to the world of legal PR.

What Works

Legal writing’s precision training. Law school beats into students the importance of accurate terminology, precise language and supporting every claim with authority. That discipline translates directly to PR content, where you can’t afford to misstate a legal development, oversimplify a nuanced regulatory change or mischaracterize a court’s holding. When you’re drafting an article about high-stakes issues, that training in getting the details right becomes essential. Clients and journalists alike will notice if you confuse a motion to dismiss with a summary judgment motion or claim a ruling “establishes” something when it merely “suggests.” The stakes are different than with a graded memo, but the need for precision is the same.

Research stamina and source evaluation. When you’re writing blog posts or bylined articles for law firms, the research process looks remarkably similar to what you do for an upper-level paper. You’re tracking down primary sources, reading through recent opinions and digging into regulatory history. The difference is the end product: Instead of a legal memo, you’re producing a 1,200-word article that positions a partner as an authority. But the underlying work – navigating Westlaw efficiently, distinguishing binding authority from persuasive commentary, verifying that a case actually says what a secondary source claims – is identical. You can’t write credible thought leadership content about emerging litigation trends if you haven’t read the key opinions or understood how they fit into the broader legal landscape.

Strong foundations of legal principles. Almost all American Bar Association-accredited law schools require a uniform first-year curriculum, including torts, contracts, civil procedure, property and legal writing. These courses are instrumental in building the foundation for the remainder of law school and introduce core doctrines that nearly all other areas of practice draw from. That same foundation translates directly into legal writing and marketing, where precision, clarity and proper use of legal terminology are essential. Understanding how doctrines function in practice allows law students to communicate complex ideas accurately and efficiently, whether we’re proofreading client-facing materials, summarizing case studies for internal research or contributing to firm publications.

Legal marketing and professional conduct. Nearly all prospective attorneys are required to pass the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination, a two-hour multiple-choice test on legal ethics. To prepare for this exam, law students take a professional responsibility course and learn the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct. These establish standards governing attorney behavior, including rules related to advertising and client communications.  Many states have adopted these rules in whole or in part, making them highly relevant to real-world practice. For law students, this provides early and practical insight into the ethical and legal boundaries of legal marketing and public relations. This background not only informs what can and cannot be said in the client-facing materials we contribute to but also encourages a more thoughtful and responsible approach to messaging, helping ensure that communications remain both effective and compliant with professional standards in the legal industry.

What Doesn’t Work

The tyranny of the Bluebook. As a law student, precision in citation is a discipline in itself. You learn to format every period, comma and parenthetical according to exacting rules and your credibility depends in part on getting those details right. Writing in AP style flips that instinct on its head. The goal isn’t to showcase the source through dense citation but to integrate information cleanly and readably into the narrative. Hyperlinks replace footnotes, attribution is streamlined and sentences are shorter, sharper and far less tolerant of the kind of clause-heavy structure that legal writing rewards. Letting go of the Bluebook mindset doesn’t mean abandoning rigor, but it does mean accepting that clarity and flow matter more than demonstrating mastery of citation form.

Reorienting who the “client” is. Most of a lawyer’s work is framed around serving a client with a legal problem – spotting the issues, minimizing risk and advocating for a particular outcome. Even in clinics or internships, the focus is outward facing: How do you advise or represent the person in front of you? In a legal PR setting, your audience shifts. Your “clients” are often law firms or attorneys themselves, and the work is less about solving their legal problems than helping them grow a book of business and shape their professional narrative. That means thinking in terms of visibility, positioning and strategy rather than purely legal analysis. It’s a subtle but significant shift from answering questions to helping generate them and from resolving disputes to creating opportunities. This requires a different understanding of what value looks like.

The “show your work” instinct. In law school, you earn points for walking through every step of your analysis. Professors want to see your rule synthesis, application to facts and consideration of counterarguments. In PR writing, clients and readers want to see the bottom line first. They don’t need to see your full analytical process or your complete chain of citations. They want the takeaway, the implication and the so-what. The same thoroughness that earns you an A on a memo can make marketing content feel labored and inaccessible. Learning to cut straight to the point – and trust that you’ve done the work, even if you’re not displaying all of it – requires recalibrating what “good writing” looks like in order to be effective in this context.

Assuming your reader has context. In law school, you’re writing for professors who know the doctrine and classmates who have read the same cases. In legal marketing, you’re often writing blog posts aimed at potential clients – laypeople who don’t have legal training and don’t know why a particular development matters to them. You can’t assume they understand what summary judgment means, why a circuit split is significant or how a new regulation might affect their business. The challenge is explaining those concepts clearly and quickly without talking down to your audience or losing them in jargon. Law school doesn’t teach you how to translate complex legal principles into accessible language for a general readership, but that’s exactly what effective legal marketing requires.

Final Takeaways

What’s become clear over the course of this experience is how much we’ve gained by stepping outside the traditional law school track, even temporarily. Learning to write with precision but without excess, think strategically about audience and understand how legal expertise is communicated – not just practiced – has added a new dimension to how we see the profession. The ability to translate complex ideas, anticipate what different audiences need and communicate value clearly is just as important as getting the doctrine right.

At the same time, being law students in this space has given us a perspective that feels distinctly our own. We’re close enough to legal education to recognize its habits and assumptions but far enough removed in this setting to question them. That dual vantage point – part insider, part observer – has made it easier to see where legal training aligns with the realities of the industry and where it falls short. It’s also made the work more meaningful. We’re not just learning how legal PR functions; we’re understanding how future attorneys like us might engage with it, benefit from it and, in some cases, misunderstand it. That sense of proximity has made the experience feel like an extension of our legal education – one that’s broadened our view of what a legal career can look like.

Gillian Flannery is a second-year law student at Mitchell Hamline School of Law working toward her Juris Doctor.

Jacob Anderson is a third-year law student at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota.