WRITING THE ARTICLE

There is a fact that lawyers who consistently put out articles know that those who aspire to , who hope to or who dismiss article writing as useless and ineffective.

The hard part is not the actual writing, the transmitting of your ideas , your opinions and your expertise onto the paper or MS Word. The hard part is actually sitting down to do it.

Don't believe me? Examine your day and tell me what specific time and place you set for writing about by your expertise or whatever issue matters to your client. Probably nothing.
And this is why you do not regularly think about your expertise or how it can be applied cleverly, its level of development or what direction you are headed. The drama of practice is conspiring against you and you allow it.

THE SCHEDULE IS THE SYSTEM

You make appearances in court because there is a fixed time and place so it always happens. Following from this anything that has no fixed time and place will not get done frequently enough for you to get good at it or become expert at it.

Let's say you have a 1hr commute to the office because of traffic, decide to fit your writing onto that 1hr, five days a week and you will produce a lot of lousy writing at first but as you get to the end of the fourth week you will begin to get reasonably passable at it and see ways your ideas can help out your practice and your client industry, its regulators.

Ideas are very interesting.

They expand with use and are limited only by the mind that applies them.
This idea of a schedule works for almost everything else because anything will give way to a consistent attack.

Writing articles is on one level about practice development without a doubt, even blatant self promotion. On other levels it is about trying to offer your explanation on how things work in legal and for your client's industry, it is about making a contribution that takes legal services one step closer to being useful to your clients industry and it is very much about exploring your intellectual capital: the resource you sell as a legal professional.

So , get to it.

Check out James Clear on THE SCHEDULE IS THE SYSTEM and STEVEN PRESSFIELD'S WAR OF ART on SITTING DOWN TO DO THE WORK.