I have had a number of conversations with law firm clients over the last with weeks, discussing whether law firms should "Gate" their content (i.e. Make a visitor to your website fill in a form with their personal details if they want access to your content) or not.

There are a number of advantages to Gated Content.  The main ones being the fact that you can see who is viewing your content and you have the ability to then contact and nurture them as a potential sales lead.  If the data is monitored well you might be able to send those who gave their details more relevant content in the future.  This can work very well for some industries such as tech or software firms which will often have sophisticated sales teams and processes as they attempt to move prospects down the "sales funnel". But does that work for law firms?

Moving law firm buyers, such as General Counsels, in-house lawyers or CEOs down a sales funnel does not sound much like how law firms do their business development.

It's also hard to get gated content in front of lots and lots of people who are interested in it.  So you could spend a lot of time and money producing the research or white paper and then unless you put some proper work and budget into promoting it to your potential clients, then it is going to be tough getting those potential clients even getting to the "Gate"!  If they do manage find the piece of content then there is nothing more annoying than having to give your details to read it.  For those that do give their details and read the insight, they will be much less likely to share it to LinkedIn because it is Gated.

From the way I have seen law firms sell and do their business development, it is a lot more effective to keep your content open. 

Instead of gating content, make it much easier for clients and potential clients to consume your content and then maybe provide a form or pop up that says something like "if this was useful and you want to hear more from the expert lawyers at our firm on this subject fill in this firm and we can send you the latest every week".

If your content is genuinely useful, it is written by your true subject matter experts and is authentic and timely, then those clients and future clients will much more likely give you their details.  That feels so much more in tune with the way successful law firms do their business.