Blog

3 reasons why web content can elevate your business game

Manuel Pueyo · Apr 14, 2022 ·

The job of regularly updating your website with news, thoughts and useful information is a time consuming craft that requires a good deal of thinking. But it can bring great advantages that are worth considering.

Showcasing your expertise

If you work in a sector that is knowledge intensive, your team has knowhow and information that is certainly valuable to someone out there.

Web content is about giving extra use to that knowledge. You can publish part of it in a web page so that it can be found by people that might need it.

You are openly showing to the world that you know what you are talking about (your field of expertise) and that you are willing to share that knowledge as part of your service.

One of the dangers of being an expert is that, sometimes, you ignore that you know too much about a topic. This is why we believe effective content is a partnership between subject matter experts and content publishing experts. They will make sure that the content you write is accessible for people and algorithms.

Using content to learn & explore new territories 📍

In the current volatile and changing world, the capacity to learn new things is essential to stay afloat in business.

For example, let’s imagine you are a real estate lawyer and you would like to explore how upcoming technologies (Virtual Reality or Blockchain) are going to change the real estate regulatory environment. You know nothing about those topics but web writing as a process can help you critically explore them. Writing as a process makes you ask the right questions and maybe find some answers.

Writing is also a great excuse to get in touch with other subject matter experts in the field you would like to learn about. I find writing a blog post, is often a good argument to start a conversation with an expert I don’t personally know. Maybe asking him a question, a written contribution or a quote.

Leading with content

Many business and other institutional actors have lost touch with their customers. People are lost and they need leaders they can trust.

This is your opportunity to shine and be different from your competitors. You know what the problems of your clients are and web content can be a great tool to reconnect with them.

In order to reinforce that trust, show more of your real opinions in an authentic way. A content strategy can be a great process to listen to people around you, rethink your core values and show what you think is fair, what is pertinent to do right now.

When you start creating content that is aligned with your core values, you are going to start to attract the people that connect with those values at the emotional level. Your ideal clients and collaborators start to pop up🍄. Your can use that momentum to hire new people, invite them to your events and start building community with them.

Don’t know where to start? Seize the opportunity 🙋‍♀️

I hope I gave you some solid arguments to decide to invest in web content. It can become a business asset to make you gain competitive advantage and elevate your business game.

We love helping teams at the initial phase of a content strategy.

Apply for a discovery session. Let’s have a conversation on how you can start tapping into the business value of web content.

How can Service Design improve Legal Service?

Manuel Pueyo · Mar 17, 2022 ·

Many lawyers these days are making efforts to be more competitive in pricing and to develop healthier client-firm relationships.

In this post, I argue that Law Firms that want to invest in operations (‘legal ops’ for acronym lovers🤓), and transform their service could be looking at Service Design, a methodology that has been there for more than 20 years and that we have been practicing for quite while now.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a thinking process that comes from “product” designers. Basically the the people designing the mouse 🖱️and computers follow these thinking processes to build useful products that people love. This type of thinking is what sets appart good designed products from poorly designed products. You get the picture right?

From products, these thinking methods moved to the design of services which are immaterial more relational interactions between people and companies.

This is one of my favorite quotes from Herbert Simon a political scientist from the 60s who was the first person to come up with the term Design Thinking.

Everyone designs who devises course of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

I love this quote for two reasons :

first because it opens up the methodology to everyone and not just the product designers.
And second, As Diana Pinos perfectly states in her blog, Design Thinking goes much further than “product”, to solve all kinds of situations in an organization: new products, services, ways of communicating, how you treat your employees, ways of working, political systems, education systems, activism, etc.

What is Service Design?

Service Design is the practical application of Design Thinking to the development of services.

The goal is to restructure your organization (teams, tech and processes) so that it adapts to offer a better experience for all the actors involved. I know this may sound a bit is a bit abstract but it’s because it is. But The vast majority of what goes into a service is essentially invisible. Agree?!

With Service Design you need to go “meta” and get the big picture of how are you actually delivering your service as a system. You need to identify and visualize where are the points that need to be improved.

Service Design includes things like:

visualization tools allow bringing different technical disciplines together and
meeting facilitation techniques
a step by step process to innovate: create a new service or re-organize an existing one
research methods to discover insights about your audience and other stakeholder’s
create regular communication “avenues” to include your client in the design of your legal operations

Service Design can improve a legal service

If you are into streamlining your service so that you can repeat same processes with new clients and boost profitability, this can be a game changer.

You will be able to clearly see bottlenecks back end (hidden processes) and front end (what customer sees). Come up with ideas to reduce the amount of time you spend on certain tasks.

Current business management in the digital age is a complex matter: Service design promises to be great method to manage and visualize complexity.

What are the skills you need?

Service Design is optimistic. Service designers really believe that the perfect service is possible to achieve if you are willing to dream it, imagine it and co-create it with everyone involved.

You need people to be able to work in different “modes”. This requires to use brain functions that often are not used in legal profession:

During the service design process there is a time for ideation in which you can be creative and “brainstorm”.
There is a time for strategy and organizing the way forward.
Collaboration skills. understanding people working from different disciplines. talk with people that are from other disciplines.
Tools to visualize, sketchnote and draw.

Seeing operations through your customer’s eyes

The ability to listen and to extract user needs from human interactions will help you succeed as a lawyer. Service design believes that the user is also an expert in his/her life. What they see and how they speak about their problems can give you great insights on how to improve your legal operations. Design thinking includes also the left part of the brain so emotions are also taken on board in the design of the perfect service.

What are the challenges?

It’s an innovation process right? And let’s be honest, lawyers have not been trained to innovate. I say it from my own experience as trained lawyer.

This means you are going to spend some time working on things that are very uncertain and that you don’t know the outcome. If your team does not have an innovation mindset, or the mental resilience to trust this process, this is going to generate frustration and stress.

Also make sure you explain very well the innovation journey. What are we going to be doing at each phase because it’s very easy for people to get lost.

Ok, enough buzz words and theoretical concepts🤯. As I always say,

Design is like Yoga. It’s about doing it and not talking about it.

So now it’s time to get our hands dirty. Let’s start including design in our practice.👇

We have worked with Law Firms starting their design challenge and we would like to help you . Apply for a free consultation call and let’s see together if we come up with a plan to start this exciting journey.

Thanks 🙂 Xenia Viladas

How to research promising keywords as a law firm or attorney. *Online Course

Manuel Pueyo · Feb 28, 2022 ·

This is Twitter post captured my attention at the beginning of 2022 and it gave me some “food” for action.

Here is my wish list of skills for the legal industry in 2022. Anything else to add #lawtwitter ? pic.twitter.com/WQPdJNN7F5
— Sarah Ouis (@lawbuthow) December 29, 2021

In this course, out of the 8 skills we see in this info graphic from Sarah Ouis, we are going to work on 3:

Tech awareness,
Content creation and
Information Design

In this 3 hours ⏱️ course, we outline the basic fundamentals of Search Engine Experience Optimization (SEO) for lawyers, with specific tips and examples that can be easily applied to your website so that you start showing up in search engine results (Google, Bing, Duckduckgogo).

A “promising” keyword is one that can help you get new clients but also helps the reader to solve his/her legal issue.

If you have a website, Schema.org markup can improve how you reach your target audience. It can improve how search engines (like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) show your website, resources, and services to your potential audience.

You’ll get an understanding of what SEO is, learn tactical strategies for researching promising keywords as a law firm that has a website and wants to create more content.

Learning Objectives

After this training, the participants will be able to:

Understand what is SEO main ranking factors
Use Google Adwords Keyword Planner to Discover Keywords and how to identify an opportunity
Use other free tools to explore content opportunities and analyse the competitors.
Specific tips and examples that can be easily applied to your website so that you start showing up in search engine results.
Use Schema.org markup to improve how your target audience finds you online.

About the trainer: Manuel Pueyo

Web Developer with a legal background.
Content strategist Founder of the agency BigKids
Manuel has extensive experience in web design, business design
and communication campaigns for the public sector, large global corporations,as well as startups.

Practical Issues

Date: 1st of April 2022
Place: online in our Jitsi Channel (Teleconference)
Price: 300 euros (TVA not included).

👇 Course Signup form 👇

Open Justice may hold the recipe for a digital transformation of any legal team

Manuel Pueyo · Nov 6, 2021 ·

Next week I will be taking part in the event Nojember by Open Justice and hosted by Ulegalize in Charleroi Belgium. I will be taking part on Atelier Tech (Room 5 at 11:30 ) and the title of the workshop is Culture, practices and tools of the Digital Transformation of the Belgian Justice System.

I have been collaborating with Open Justice for a couple of years. They are, in my humble opinion, perfectly suited to talk about this because they are an example of an organization that is “digital”. And I will explain why I think they are “digital” in this blog post 🔑.

The question to define first is… What is a digital organization🤌? Digital is a way of doing things in our times of disruption(VUCA times or the Exponential Age). Digital about is applying the culture, practices, processes and technology of the Internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations.(Tom Loosemore)

Raised expectations? Private companies (and startups are specially good at this) are very fast adapting to digital and placing the needs of the users at the center. Users are getting used to excellent experiences in digital environments so they are going to be more and more demanding and pushing on public services (like a justice system) to adapt to those high standards.

So…In what ways is Open Justice a digital organization?

Open Justice is “Agile” in the way they start and move forward projects

“Agile” promotes short production cycles (sprints): when they have an idea of a project they are already making a small component, releasing it and testing early. This way they wont spend too much time making something that they quickly find out that is not useful, or that it has already been done.

Short term production processes with concrete objectives to build something big

OJ quickly release this small component to everybody inside and outside (via social networs) (even it’s not yet perfect) to gather people in the community who want to be involved.

Is your leadership aware of whatever is going to disrupt your sector?👓

Are you listening to what is happening outside your organization? 🐦 Open Justice has a #random channel in slack (intra company collaboration tool) in which community members share things that they find interesting , new tools, project or actors that are working in the same area as they work.

Break your “Bubbles”

Do you have a diverse network? 🐦🐒🦓 This is helpful for enlarged listening capabilities and this is something that clearly legal companies are strongly lagging behind. Lawyers tend to like to work with people that speak the same language. This often translate with lawyers only working or hiring other lawyers. This must change!

Being Digital means being open to re-examine (rethinking) your entire way of doing business.

3 things you could be thinking when thinking about your business model:

* Change work process. In many cases this rethinking involves crafting web applications that makes your services easier for you and better/faster for your customers —- optimize procedures and processes: become more competitive. reduce costs. Making it really easy to deal with government (do the hard work to make it simple), safely and securely.

* New complementary activities: La Poste in France is thinking about suggesting ensurance companies that their Postman can verify sinister, and grab judiciary declarations from people at their homes.

* Diversify: Start something completely new. In any case is the customer who will validate this value proposition. Do something completely different. Amazon is an example of that. 🗺️

Digital network business model

In order to do this Business model rethinking👆 Instead of asking what can I do for my clients I could rather ask What can my clients do for me? Your clients are people with capacities and you can involve them in doing tasks that may be taking your time and that they can do instead.

If you want them to engage in participation processes with you they need to believe in the larger vision. They need to believe in your why.

Open Justice has a clear vision and a clear “why”. And thanks to that , they get many people joining their monthly “Meetups”. Those participants they clearly want to help and sometimes they do amazing thing like adding lines of code or paying for lunch in our events🍲.

A digital mind institutionalizes cross-functional collaboration,

Cross-functional collaboration: Teams with different functions (Finances, Comms, legal operations, logistics) must improve the way they communicate.

Important to be transparent (open by default):

Data, information and knowledge should be shared as widely as possible within the Team👆 unless there are legal requirements or clear justifications for access to be restricted.

Tools that help for that

Use of digital tools to share info, engagement, excitement,enthusiasm to share what you know with others. What are you doing today? What are you working on? Share it on those places where informal discussions happen? Slack, Microsoft Teams, Matrix. In Open Justice’s Slack there is always someone saying hi and sharing what they are doing today.

Rethink your hierarchies

You have hierarchies and they are helpful sometimes: finding out who takes a decision on a hierarchical organization it is pretty straight forward. You need to find the person with an allocated company inside the organigram: if this person cannot decide he will pass the responsibility to the upper level.

From recent years another more agile and organic system for taking decision is taking place inside people’s organizations. Holacracy, Organisation Liberee, Meritocracy is the one we are going to talk today because it is a way to flexible hierarchy and it can be put in practice as of today.

Meritocracy: those people who have earned peers respect over time drive decisions: everyone has the right to speak and access to the kinds of tools that ensure your voice is heard but not everyone is listened to equally.To become a leader in a meritocracy you need to attract followers first, not the other way around, First title then followers.

In Open Justice forums there is a say: code talk. Those that produce better code or are better at finding solutions to bugs they are the one who earn inmost influence. The path is that of quality over quantity.

If you are high in hierarchy in an organization the key for you is to identify those “de facto” leaders and get them to support your decisions.

Data

A digital organization is one that understands the value of the data they are managing and generating.

One of the big opportunity coming from this, is a better knowledge about your client. In order to be more relevant your are going to need to be more targeted. You are going to need to be able to be able to capture, organize and understand all this data in order to turn it into information about the needs of your client at the right time and in a very targeted way.

Technology: APIS are everywhere

A smart use of technology plays an essential role in the digital transformation process

What is happening is that computers are getting more powerful. The costs of data storage are going down and also the costs of developing software.

Sometimes this innovation does not need to come from your own team. But you can look for resources outside: you put your data , applications or devices outside and open it up to teams outside to improve it. You can create or join an application network and let others to build on top.

A good example of how open justice is using technology is by creating an API, An API is a set of code that has been written to ensure interoperability with other systems. Omdat has an API at the core, this means that any outside developper can use the case law database from OMdat and create a different web app with this data.

People: Never put them last 🙂

The flexible workspace

Trust your people to work wherever they want and give them resources and facilities to excel.

The human workspace

Define and communicate a culture inside your team that is based on common values.

Conclusion

In this article I wanted to point out some areas organizations may be working on if they would like to become more digitally mature. I am really looking forward to the atelier to discuss these and other points with participants. I will be taking part on Atelier Tech (Room 5 at 11:30 ) and the title of the workshop is Culture, practices and tools of the Digital Transformation of the Belgian Justice System. Don’t hesitate to come and say Hi😀✋.

Let’s get SEOrious : why law firms should consider SEO to grow their client portfolio and build a better legal Internet

Manuel Pueyo · Oct 25, 2021 ·

I want to convince you that if you are a law firm with at least 10 lawyers in your team, you need to be doing SEO right now💎.

I’m not going to give you a definition of SEO because there are many out there ( you should check SEO gurus like ahrefs, yoast, moz, screaming frog) .

For me, doing SEO is like dancing with Google🕺🏼: You are creating content and helping Google achieve it’s mission. If you do that, Google is going to treat you well and give you rewards🎁.

What is Google’s mission? At it’s core, they have to understand language. Their job is to figure out what people are searching for and surface helpful information from the web, no matter how they spell or combine the words in their query.

The E in SEO stands for Experience

Originally SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. For me doing SEO is less about search “Engine” and more about search “Experience”. That places the focus less on pleasing the machine and more on pleasing the human who is searching for information. The closest your piece of content is to you user’s human needs and their context, the higher your chances are of getting good results.

Doing SEO is using “digital” to accomplish part of your mission as a lawyer

According to the UN basic principles on the role of lawyers, one of their key roles is advising clients as to their legal rights and obligations, and as to the working of the legal system. Yes! One big part of the mission of the lawyer is to clarify information, to give information.. and now guess where are people looking for information today🤔? It’s Bing, DuckDuck, Yandex, and of course the big Google.

I was yesterday talking to an “artist” friend of mine who did not know if she had to declare their income coming from an airbnb listing to the tax authorities in Belgium. She clearly had a legal question but she was lost and did not know who she was supposed to ask. I said, why don’t you “Google it”? She said she did, but she got different pages saying different things about it. No page in the search results was tailored enough with an answer adapted to her life situation. This could be a content creation opportunity for law firms.

Let’s face it. It’s year 2021, if not you, somebody else is going to be doing it, somebody else is going to try to disrupt your market. The risk of not doing this as a lawyer is that there is an increasing number of actors with commercial interests (startups) that are not registered in a Bar, they don’t have same ethical standards as lawyers do, and they are writing content on the web solving legal issues. I know from direct sources that Bar registered lawyers are very worried about their market being disrupted by actors outside the Bar. I would advice them to stop worrying and start using digital to accomplish their mission as a lawyer.

Doing SEO as a lawyer who writes for the web

Web is a different medium. When you write your texts for the web you need to plan them, write them and display them in a different way.

Doing SEO is breaking up long texts and writing only what your user needs. Think about “micro questions” or “micro moments”, somebody out there has a burning legal question:

Is it legal to make vaccines a workplace obligation?

Think about my friend Ana who is an unemployed artist and does not know if she has to pay taxes for her Airbnb listing.

I know this is difficult because you have been trained to write differently but try to write a post that answers only that. And remove superfluous words or ideas that do not serve that purpose.

I am going to show you a bad example, but not to blame the author. On the contrary, I recognize the great work this law firm is doing with their content:

I think this article in french is a bad example for SEO, what they say is comprehensive and probably right in their analysis, but looks more like a report or memo: there are too many questions answered in this post. basically you need to break this article in 5 or 6 mini articles that answer smaller questions.

Doing SEO strengthen some good muscles💪

User centric muscles

It forces you to question if your service is good and to change adapt it to what your users need at each moment. More on this in this article

Mind clarity & information organization muscles

SEO forces you to think about having a clear mission for your website’s content and, as a side effect, also your law firm mission.

But you also need to have a structured website, with good schema markup language that makes sense to robots who are trying to understand what your website is about.

Collaboration muscles

Another good “thing” coming from SEO is that is will improve your collaboration skills. You need to go out there and connect with other legal actors that have websites in your semantic area. You need to find ways so that they link to your site. Those are “back links” and they will improve your SEO results.

I hope I managed to give you some good reasons on why should start being a much more SEOrious lawyer.

Get in touch with us if you would like to start creating SEO optimized content for your website ➡️ Sign up to our newsletter and you will get an email every month on things around the legal transformation of the legal sector.