What Do Lawyers Care About - Weekly Result

So - a whole week of analysing the news page of "The Lawyer" (on the principle that this will reflect the things that lawyers care about) and what can we say. Well - let's first look at the charts.

The split of topics discussed (and I immediately admit that my categories are completely arbitrary) is as follows (click on the picture for an enlarged version:

I then further grouped my categories into "About Lawyers" and "About Clients":

So - after a week of looking at the news topics aimed at lawyers, it would appear that most of the discussion (90% in fact) concerns lawyers themselves rather than anything at all about their clients. Given that "The Lawyer" is a public forum, I'm a little surprised to see that lawyers are apparently so little concerned about their clients. Surely the best advertisement about the quality of a firm or a lawyer is success on behalf of their clients - and yet stories about "Client Success" occupied only 3.3% of the news. Maybe it was a quiet week...

Less surprising to me was the fact that a third of the stories were to do with lawyers moving firms and that a further 16.7% were about the money that lawyers earn. Together these made up a very neat 50% of the news - and therefore, arguably, what lawyers care about.

So what?

Well - even if lawyers really do care so little about their clients, I'd suggest that their PR people work harder on positive stories about the work done for clients. We do look at these sort of news pages, you know. And if lawyers really do care about their clients - and lets say that most of them do - then they should be talking about that more, and about how much they and their firms earn a great deal less.