What Do Lawyers Care About?

As someone who works with lawyers, it is important that I should understand the people I need to communicate with - and so I need to understand what lawyers themselves care about. One way of finding this out, I assume, is to read the news that lawyers read. My thinking is that news outlets which service lawyers ("The Lawyer" for example) will be sure that they are addressing their core audience and so providing news that lawyers care about.

On this assumption, I decided to analyse the main news section of "The Lawyer" for a week. I used the on-line version and took the headlines as they were at about 9am. I should like to point out that this is far from a scientific survey - I will only be doing an analysis for five days, I will be checking at some point between 9am and 10am, and will be assigning news to categories myself, as I see fit. Nevertheless, I hope it will prove instructive.

To get things going, my analysis of the news at 9am today is as follows:

So, with the caveats above and noting that this is one morning and so may not be representative, it would appear that lawyers care most about news about themselves rather than news about their clients.

This may not be a surprise since this is a journal aimed at lawyers not their clients. I should, however, be concerned if this pattern remains. It is all very well to be interested in who is working where and how much they earn - but this is a public forum and, as a potential client, I should like to see that client success was at the forefront of concern for any lawyer. Most firms will say something similar on their publications - but the news from "The Lawyer" would suggest something else.

Watch this space for some (slightly) more reliable data.