Podcast Ep. 7 Thought Leadership Success With Mark Cohen

Noted legal industry speaker and columnist shares his story of how he achieved thought leadership success using content and social media and how you can, too.

Mark is the CEO of LegalMosaic, a business legal consultancy; a Distinguished Lecturer of Law at Georgetown; a weekly columnist for Forbes; and a noted speaker on the global legal marketplace. He was a co-Founder of Clearspire, a revolutionary law firm/legal service company. He was previously an internationally known civil trial lawyer, as well as a BigLaw partner, national litigation boutique founder, and highly-decorated Assistant United States Attorney. Website: Legal Mosaic; Twitter: @legalmosaic

Podcast shownotes

First a little background on Mark’s journey before digging in to how he used writing and social media to develop a thought leadership platform.

Mark was a trial lawyer for almost 30 years. He started out as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, became a big law partner, then left to start a national boutique firm where he learned how technology could be used more effectively to manage legal services,

After a conversation with Thomas L. Friedman, author of the book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, about whether some of what was in the book would apply to the legal vertical, Mark started Clearspire, a virtual law firm and legal services company that upended the traditional law firm business model.

After closing shop, Mark founded Legal Mosaic, which brings us to this Legal Marketing 2.0 podcast episode, and where the thought leadership story built around writing and social media, starts.

Mark shares some of the lessons he learned along the way:

• It’s all about finding your voice and getting it out there.
• Twitter allows you to connect with other like minded people and participate in a global community in a way that’s very helpful for building relationships and for one’s career. 
• It’s important to be patient. You don’t create a social media presence and brand overnight. It takes time and thoughtfulness and effort
• Social media is a two-way street. It’s not all about you. You have to participate in the community. Seek out those who have interesting ideas and engage with them and promote them. 
• You don’t need a tremendous amount of content to develop a brand or thought leadership platform. You can become a thoughtful aggregator by summarizing useful articles in a post and giving it a spin of your own with some interesting commentary.
• You have to be authentic in what your message is and how you’re getting it across. Don’t put on airs.
• Stick with it. Social media is a long-term play.

And, some of the results: 

• Mark’s development of a thought leadership platform led to being a columnist on Forbes, publishing a popular blog, and speaking opportunities around the world.
• What’s gratifying to Mark, is not the numbers – followers and likes and connections – but the dialog that the content has generated.

See: Thought Leadership for Lawyers: 10 Tips on How to Build Your Personal Brand.