Law firms invest significant time and resources into building and maintaining their websites. But many firms overlook a platform that may be doing more to shape a prospective client’s first impression and determine whether that person ever reaches the website at all: LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is not a secondary channel. It is where legal professionals network, where clients vet attorneys before picking up the phone and where firms demonstrate whether they are active, credible and worth engaging. LinkedIn does not replace the firm website – but it often determines whether someone visits it, which pages they visit and whether they arrive with a sense of confidence in the attorney or firm behind the content.

That makes LinkedIn more than a visibility tool. It is a gateway to website performance.  

LinkedIn Is the Dominant Platform for the Legal Industry

Social media is no longer optional for law firms. According to the American Bar Association’s 2024 Legal Technology Survey Report (the most recent one available), 80% of law firms now maintain a social media presence. LinkedIn leads among all platforms at 78% of law firms using it, well ahead of Facebook, Instagram and every other platform. Additional ABA reporting on solo and small firm technology use also reinforces LinkedIn’s continued importance among legal professionals.

The 2023 Tech Report from the American Bar Association made the same point. Among firms with one hundred or more lawyers, 97% maintained a LinkedIn presence. Even among solo practitioners, those with a presence held at 73%. The platform’s reach extends across every segment of the profession.

This prevalence is not coincidental. LinkedIn is where attorneys look for referral partners, in-house counsel evaluate outside firms, legal professionals track developments in their practice areas and prospective associates assess culture before they apply. In the legal industry, LinkedIn is the professional commons. For firms that are not using it well, the cost is not just missed engagement but missed perception and missed website traffic.

A strong website can only perform if the right audiences are finding it. LinkedIn is one of the most direct ways to move those audiences from awareness to action.

LinkedIn as a Marketing Tool: The Free Channel Most Firms Underuse

LinkedIn is free to join. Company pages are free to create and maintain. Individual attorney profiles require no subscription. The platform can be managed internally by a marketing coordinator with a clear content calendar and an hour or two each week.

For smaller and mid-size firms without large marketing budgets, LinkedIn represents a high-reach marketing channel that costs nothing but some time. For larger firms, it is an extension of brand and thought leadership strategy that can be built organically, with paid promotion reserved for campaigns where it makes sense.

But the return on that investment depends heavily on the quality of the underlying foundation. According to LinkedIn’s own data, pages with complete information receive 30% more weekly views than incomplete profiles. LinkedIn also reports that companies posting at least weekly see a 2x lift in engagement, and that posts with images typically see a 2x higher comment rate than those without images.

For law firms, those engagement points should not live in isolation. Each post should have a role in moving audiences toward the firm’s highest-value website content: practice area pages, attorney bios, client alerts, event pages, case studies, rankings, contact pages and thought leadership.

Content compounds this effect. A post about a regulatory development can drive readers to a related client alert. A lateral announcement can link directly to the attorney’s website bio. A webinar promotion can direct registrants to an event page. A practice group update can send viewers to a service page that explains the team’s capabilities in more detail. None of this requires a production budget. It requires intentional alignment between LinkedIn activity and the website content the firm most wants audiences to see.  

The overview section also functions as a search optimization tool. Because LinkedIn members can search by keywords, selecting terms for this section that reflect the firm’s practice areas directly affects whether the firm surfaces in native LinkedIn searches. This is SEO logic applied to a platform most firms are already on but rarely optimizing. When the overview also points visitors clearly back to the website, LinkedIn becomes part of the firm’s broader discoverability strategy rather than a disconnected social profile.

LinkedIn as a Community Builder: Where Legal Relationships Develop

Experienced professionals in legal practice acknowledge that law is heavily a relationship business. Clients come from referrals, co-counsel relationships grow from professional trust, and talent arrives through networks. LinkedIn is where those relationships are maintained and extended at scale – across geographies, practice areas and industries that individual attorneys can’t reach on their own.

The platform’s community-building function is distinct from its traffic-driving function, but the two work best together. An attorney who regularly engages with content in their feed is building something a well-optimized profile page on its own cannot: a reputation for being present, engaged and worth knowing. When that activity connects back to the firm’s website, it also helps convert visibility into deeper engagement.

This is where individual attorney activity amplifies firm-level value. When attorneys share their firm’s posts, their connections – many of whom will never find the firm through search – encounter its work through a trusted voice. LinkedIn allows firm pages to notify employees of important posts up to once per week, extending organic reach without requiring any media spend.

That amplification matters for website performance. A firm page may have a limited audience, but its attorneys collectively have a much larger one. When attorneys share links to firm insights, bios, event pages or practice content, they create additional entry points into the website through networks built on trust.

The professional network dimension also matters in the context of lateral transitions. Research on lateral integration in the legal industry shows that 75% of lateral hires underperform expectations – and that gap between hiring and integration is where firms most often lose the return on that investment. A LinkedIn presence that accurately reflects a new role connects networks to the new firm’s page and shows active engagement from day one, functioning as a business development asset.

It also creates a direct pathway from the lateral attorney’s existing network to their new website bio, related practice pages and firm announcements — all of which can help accelerate market awareness and integration.

Is Your Firm’s LinkedIn Page Still Accurate?

This is the first question of any LinkedIn audit. Company pages get claimed, partially filled out and then left unchanged for months or years. Logos are outdated, the overview section no longer reflects current practice priorities, and contact information has changed – but no one has updated the profile. Encountering this version of the firm before ever reaching the website can leave a meaningful impression, but not the kind a firm wants to leave.

A LinkedIn audit should not stop at whether the page is accurate. It should also ask whether the page is helping users get to the right places on the firm’s website. A basic audit of the firm’s company page should include these questions:

• Is the logo current and properly sized?
• Does the overview section include keywords to help optimize search result visibility?
• Is the website URL correct and functional?
• Are office locations, firm size and industry classification accurate?
• Has the firm posted anything in the last 30 days?
• Does the LinkedIn page direct visitors to the most strategic pages on the firm’s website – such as key practice areas, attorney bios or a contact page?
• Do recent posts include clear links to relevant website content?
• Are post captions written in a way that gives people a reason to click through?
• Are campaign-specific posts driving to the strongest available landing page, rather than simply the homepage?

Claiming and actively managing a firm’s LinkedIn page allows the firm to control the information presented to potential clients, peers and recruits. It signals that a firm is prepared to lead in the digital space, and a neglected page communicates the opposite.

From a website-performance perspective, the goal is simple: Make sure LinkedIn is not just creating impressions, but sending qualified visitors to the pages that best support the firm’s visibility, credibility and business development goals.

Are Your Attorneys Showing Up?

The second layer of a LinkedIn audit focuses not on the firm page but on the individuals behind it. Individual attorney profiles are often the first thing a prospective client sees when searching for a specific lawyer by name. They surface in Google results, appear when a referral source wants to verify someone before making an introduction and present an opportunity for peers to assess whether an attorney is worth knowing.

The stakes are high, and the gaps are common. Attorneys who have moved to a new firm but have not updated their LinkedIn profile don’t show their current employer. Bios reflect a prior practice focus, and profiles that were never fully built out show only a name and a title – no activity, no network signal and no reason to engage. Incomplete or outdated profiles can also weaken click-through to an attorney’s bio on the firm website, undermining the website experience before a prospect ever arrives.

This is especially important because attorney bios are often among the most visited and highest-value pages on a law firm website. If LinkedIn is where a prospective client first encounters an attorney, the profile should make it easy to move from that initial impression to the fuller website experience.

An attorney-level audit should ask:

• Does the profile reflect the attorney’s current title and firm?
• Is the profile connected to the firm’s company page?
• Does the bio accurately represent the attorney’s current practice?
• Is there a link to the attorney’s profile on the firm’s website?
• Has the attorney posted or engaged with the firm’s content recently?
• Is the profile photo professional and current?
• Does the profile link to relevant firm content, such as a bio, practice page, article or event?
• Has the attorney shared recent website content that supports their practice or industry focus?
• Does the attorney’s LinkedIn presence reinforce the same positioning reflected on the firm website?

Every attorney’s LinkedIn profile is a representation of the firm, regardless of whether the firm is involved in how it is maintained. It is also a potential referral source into the website. Firms that treat attorney profiles as part of the website ecosystem, rather than separate personal pages, are better positioned to convert professional visibility into meaningful engagement.

Where to Start

A LinkedIn audit does not need to be a large undertaking. A marketing coordinator or business development professional can conduct a baseline review of the firm’s company page and all individual attorney profiles in short amounts of time. That review will almost always reveal actionable items: outdated bios, missing calls to action, attorneys not connected to the firm page and profile photos that belong to a different decade.

For firms focused on website performance, the audit should also include a content-pathway review. Look at the last 30 to 60 days of LinkedIn activity and ask where the posts are sending people. Are they driving to strategic website pages? Are they supporting current campaigns? Are attorneys sharing firm content in a way that extends its reach? Are high-priority pages receiving enough support from LinkedIn?

Prioritize completeness first: Every profile should be accurate and fully built out. Then establish a content cadence that is sustainable. Encourage attorneys to engage with the firm’s content, not as a mandate but as a professional habit that builds their individual visibility alongside the firm’s.

Next, connect the content calendar to the website. For every LinkedIn post, identify the website destination it should support. For every major website update – a new attorney bio, client alert, practice page, event, award or case result – consider whether LinkedIn should be used to drive additional visibility.

Relevance in the legal market is not just inherited from a strong reputation or a well-designed website. It is maintained through consistent presence, credible expertise and the kind of professional engagement that reminds peers and clients on a regular basis that your firm is active, current and worth knowing.

LinkedIn is one of the most direct and cost-effective places to do that work. When it is managed well it does not just build the firm’s reputation in the abstract – it drives real traffic to the website, directs prospects to the right practice pages and attorney bios, and supports the visibility, engagement and inquiry goals that the website itself is designed to achieve. The question is whether your firm is doing it.

A law firm website may be the central hub of the firm’s digital presence, but LinkedIn is one of the most important paths leading people there. The question is not simply whether your firm is on LinkedIn. It is whether LinkedIn is helping your website perform.

Georgie Palm is a licensed attorney in Minnesota and a seasoned marketing and business development professional with more than a decade of experience in the legal industry. She specializes in content creation, strategic communications and business development, with a proven ability to collaborate closely with attorneys and law firm leadership to advance firmwide goals.

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