The team here at Passle recently published our annual UK Legal Thought Leadership Index.  There are a number of measurements throughout the report and one of those is the number of LinkedIn Followers each firm has.  This is by no means the most important measurement for thought leadership success but it's a pretty basic and simple (possibly a little crude) way of looking at who is taking digital marketing, thought leadership and social selling seriously.  

You can download the report here where you can also ask to have a personalised report made up to see how your firm ranks across all the various measurements used in the report.

THE NUMBERS

So here they are - the top 10 which is led by DLA Piper:

All the firms listed in the top 10 above are also ranked in the top 10 UK law firms by revenue (https://www.thelawyer.com/top-200-uk-law-firms/) except for Clyde & Co who are ranked 13th.

If we look across all of the Top 100 UK law firms we can see that the average number of LinkedIn followers for UK law firms is 26,190:

VIEWPOINTS

It is not a huge surprise that the biggest firms, in general, have the biggest number of followers.  Your staff will often be followers, so more staff will likely equal more followers. 

More LinkedIn followers on your corporate page are obviously better but actually, the real value in LinkedIn is opening up the networks of your lawyers and wider team.  The average number of LinkedIn followers per person using LinkedIn is quoted as being 930.  (https://techjury.net/blog/linkedin-statistics/#gref) If this is correct, this means that the potential reach through the team of employees is so much greater than the number of LinkedIn followers on the corporate page.  By way of example:

1. DLA Piper have 185,994 followers (actually 195,290 at the time of writing this)
2. They have 11,388 people listed as working for them on LinkedIn
3. At an average of 930 connections, this means a combined potential reach of 10,590,840
4. So the potential reach of the employees is 50X greater than the number of followers on the corporate page

HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY GET YOUR TEAM ENGAGED ON LINKEDIN

Driving this employee engagement is not easy.  There has to be something in it for the individuals and not just the firm.

I have worked with 6 of the firms listed in the top 10 above and I have seen that for lawyers, the real hook is enabling them to see the value of LinkedIn by letting them use the platform as a way of showing that they are an expert in the field in which they specialise.  Enabling these very knowledge-rich but time-poor individuals and teams to create relevant insights for clients and potential clients is what will get them opening up their networks.  If they have written a relevant insight or one of their close colleagues has written it, they are much more likely to share it to LinkedIn because it means something to them.  Sharing more of these expert insights will start to help build their online profile and in turn the firm benefits.

Indeed, in a recent event we ran, the Marketing Communications Lead for London at Ropes & Gray said that once their lawyers starting using Passle to create regular insights they  "... saw a 720% increase in activity on LinkedIn by our lawyers in London."