It’s not always easy to develop a steady stream of strong content to engage with your clients, prospects and other target audiences, especially when there’s so much competition out there from other firms that are content powerhouses and so little time to capture the attention of your audience.

You also don’t want to be the firm that posts content just for the sake of posting content – you always want your articles and posts to be meaningful, targeted and client-focused – remember, always think quality over quantity. You can also use what you do have more efficiently to give you much more bang for your buck.

Your professional biography is one of the most important pieces of copy you’ll ever write about yourself. It’s your opportunity to showcase your work, capabilities, areas of expertise and what makes you stand out from your competitors.

Many in-house counsel cite lawyer bios as one of the most important sources of information regarding researching outside lawyers (yes, everyone is Googling you and your bio is usually the number one search result of your name). In addition, lawyer bios are among the most trafficked pages on law firm web sites.

Your bio can serve as an important business development tool if it is well-crafted. Yet within the legal industry, so many bios are still lackluster, outdated, not client-focused or just plain poorly written.

Given the power of bios, it has always baffled me that many lawyers do not update theirs at least several times a year or write them with a client focus. Any down time you have or right before a pitch or a speaking engagement are all great reasons to take a fresh look at your bio and them more engaging and client-focused. Now let’s get to work! 

Content marketers now have a new way of reaching their target audiences on LinkedIn using live video.

Recently, LinkedIn, the most powerful social network for professionals, added a livestreaming option in beta to a select group of users.

Called “LinkedIn Live,”  the platform will provide its 600 million plus members and businesses the option to share and stream live video content such as  Q&As, events, conferences, earnings calls, award ceremonies, company announcements and more.

According to Social Media Today, it makes perfect sense for LinkedIn to put increased emphasis on video content because its users are 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post (wow!). To further support video on its platform, LinkedIn also launched video sponsored content and video for company pages early last year. The addition of LinkedIn Live will also enable LinkedIn to build on the ‘record levels’ of engagement that it says it is currently seeing on the platform.

LinkedIn has lagged behind its competitors when it came to providing users with video content options. This is interesting because because the platform says that video is the fastest-growing format on its platform alongside original written work, shared news and other content, so it seems like it’s in LinkedIn’s best interests to embrace in the technology that will support what its users want.

Launching first in the United States, LinkedIn Live is invite-only for now. In coming weeks, LinkedIn will also post a contact form for others who want to join. It’s not clear when and if LinkedIn will make it possible for everyone to create LinkedIn Live videos, but it is expected that is what will occur given how they rolled out LinkedIn Publisher.

So what can law firms do with LinkedIn Live? Here are some ideas (just keep in mind that your content must have a topical/timely aspect to it in order for it to be worth going live). 

“Be yourself” was one of the most important pieces of advice that I gave to students at Fordham University School of Law when I spoke to them about about how to build a strong professional brand. I told the students that I’ll never be someone who wears conservative black suits to work every day and that’s okay (notice the French bulldog shirt that I’m wearing when I spoke to them – I also often wear my lucky Darth Vader earrings when I’m giving a presentation because they make me feel fearless).

Maybe you love bow ties or have pink hair or wear something signature that speaks to you. It’s important to find ways to express yourself, inject your personality and be unique while also being professional. You CAN do both and still be successful in corporate America and at professional service firms. Find the type of work environment that lets you be YOU. Also, it’s never too early (or late) to build your brand or reinvent yourself. 

Quite possibly the worst thing about dealing with the loss of someone you loved is the anguish when you forget that you just can’t call or text them to tell or ask them something.

On a weekly basis, I think of things – an impossibly funny situation that happened to me on the NYC subway that morning, a question about a family recipe I am about to screw up, general family gossip or advice – that I desperately want to discuss with my mom, and then I painfully realize that I will never be able to do that again with her.

Three years ago today, I lost my mom Lucille to Multiple Myeloma, a rare blood cancer of plasma cells. It causes cancer cells to accumulate in the bone marrow, where they crowd out healthy blood cells and lead to a lot of terrible things, such as irreparable damage to the kidneys, heart, lungs and bones.

My late mom Lucille and me

My mom had this awful cancer for many years and responded well to treatment for many years from the best oncologists in New York City – a cocktail of groundbreaking drugs, chemotherapy, even an auto stem cell transplant – but then just when she thought she was in the clear, it came back with a vengeance.

Then there is a dear friend of mine who lost her husband (who was also a close friend) at the age of 35 last summer. She is now a 32-year-old widow. They were married for less than two years. He was an accomplished law professor who graduated first in his class at law school. He was also an opera singer. For months I have been trying to make sense of his passing, and how life can be so cruel and unfair, and then so wonderful sometimes. I am in awe of my friend’s strength and cannot even imagine what she carries around with her every day.

Lately I feel as if everyone I know has experienced a personal tragedy or profound loss of some sort – the death of parent, a beloved pet, a grandparent, a miscarriage, the diagnosis of a terminal illness – maybe it’s our age. Maybe it’s bad luck. Whatever it is, it just plain sucks.

Here’s the thing though – you can choose to wallow in tragedy, or you can choose to make hardships and the worst times of your life teaching moments and turn them into something good. You’d be surprised just how resilient each of us are if we just believe it.

Also, some of us must choose to be happy at certain points in our lives in order to turn the tide around or just to carry on and not to fall into a dark hole of despair. Happiness doesn’t always come easy to everyone all the time (more on that in a bit). Sometimes a tragedy can serve as the catalyst to cause us to reevaluate what we want from our lives.

Unfortunately, time doesn’t stop just because we are going through a personal tragedy. The sun still rises and sets, and we all still must get up and put on our game faces and go to work, and take care of our families, and just keep going no matter how hard it is.

This article is intended to help those who are facing something profoundly difficult in their personal lives and those around them so that those people can hopefully become more understanding and empathetic toward others, because you just never know what someone else is going though. So many successful people are trying to hold it together when inside they are struggling with loss and grief. I just wanted them to know that it’s okay and that they weren’t alone in this feeling.