Thought leadership can be an effective way to showcase your capabilities to a curated audience and build your brand in a specific service area or industry. Bylined articles, tip sheets, blog entries, and speaking engagements can also provide mentorship opportunities for less experienced attorneys to collaborate with a more seasoned attorney and build their credentialing in a legal specialty area. With all the benefits of thought leadership, why aren’t more attorneys leaning into writing or speaking as a business development and branding tool? Time, for some (that’s an article for a different day … ). For many others, it’s the “where do I start” conundrum.

Direct invitations to meaningfully contribute thought leadership to and in forums ripe for business development don’t typically find their way to attorney inboxes on a regular cadence. Sure, some discrete invitations might come to you through a colleague or client contact, but in those situations your thought leadership topic is usually already finalized (and unfortunately, not always in a specialty area you are interested in or have a desire to be known for). Honestly, there isn’t a trick or workaround in attracting and identifying thought leadership opportunities on the right topic for the right audience. Those opportunities—the truly worthwhile ones— come to those that proactively research opportunities and regularly practice proactiveness and persistence. My tried and true approaches to identifying and securing thought leadership opportunities include: