Twenty lawyers agree to contribute to the firm's LinkedIn calendar. Five actually do. Here's why the ask itself is the problem, and six ideas that worked for Belgian and Dutch law firms.
Why the usual ask fails
You built the calendar. Every lawyer agreed to their share of it, in the meeting where it got decided, and everyone nodded along like it was settled. Then the date arrives, and it's you sending the reminder, then the second reminder, then the one that doesn't quite say "this is now overdue" but means it.
That's because a lawyer's day is a queue of things with a deadline and a rate attached, and "write something for the firm's LinkedIn page" has neither. It isn't billed to a client, it isn't due by Tuesday, and nobody has said whether it should be 100 words or 500, about a case or just a trend they noticed.
So against a stack of client work, an open-ended unpaid task loses every single time, and it has nothing to do with how much the lawyer cares about the firm's page.
And chasing harder doesn't fix that. You can send the reminder earlier, offer a template, promise it'll only take ten minutes, and none of it changes the actual shape of the ask: still unbillable, still vague, still nobody's job this week. What works is changing what you ask for, not how often you ask for it. Here are six ideas that worked.
1. Shrink the ask to a topic, not a text
A topic takes fifteen seconds. A post takes an hour nobody has, and that gap is the whole problem. The usual failure mode looks like this: AI-generated drafts go stale and generic once nothing new is feeding them, and the lawyers get blamed for not caring enough to fix it. But nobody actually asked them for anything that fit inside their week, so of course the drafts went stale.
So shrink the ask until it fits. Each legal department gives one or two topics during the weekly meeting it already runs anyway. Two minutes, inside a meeting that happens whether or not anyone posts on LinkedIn that week.
Whoever manages the firm's content turns those lines into an 80%-ready draft, text and visuals included, and sends it back for a quick edit and a yes. That's the whole shift: the lawyer's job goes from "write a post" to "say one sentence out loud in a meeting you're already sitting in", and that's a request that can actually win against a full inbox, which the old one never could.
2. Harvest what already happened, don't commission something new
Nobody has to invent a topic. It already happened this week:
- A client's thank-you that actually meant something, even paraphrased.
- A seminar or webinar a partner just gave, or just sat through.
- A question two different clients asked in the same month. If two asked, twenty more are wondering.
- A new hire or a promotion that's already public knowledge inside the firm.
- A ruling or article someone read, and had a real opinion about.
Some firms hit the same block from a different angle: nobody lacked the willingness, they lacked the time, staring at a blank page for niche topics (construction law, permits, that sort of thing) nobody could write up from scratch between client meetings. So instead of asking harder, they routed what already existed: a shared drive where the firm drops articles, case summaries and topic ideas the moment they come up, and someone else turns that into drafts ready for a look.
Neither approach commissions anything new. Both just stop throwing away what already happened.
3. Make it a slot, not a request
A request has to win a fight for attention. A slot skips the fight entirely, because nobody has to decide to show up.
Give it five minutes on the agenda that already exists, at the same time every week, with whoever owns the firm's social media actually sitting in the room. Don't send an email afterward asking what came up: catch it live, in the meeting, while it's still fresh.
That's why a one-off request only ever works once, if you're lucky, while a slot works every week. Showing up to a meeting that's already on the calendar takes no extra decision from anyone.
4. Approvals kill more content than writing does
More drafts die in review than are ever left unwritten, and it's always the same pattern: a draft goes out to three people for a look, nobody says no, nobody says yes either, and it just sits there. Three inboxes, slowly losing relevance, until the news it was about is three weeks old and posting it feels worse than not posting at all.
So make it procedural instead of motivational. Name one reviewer, never a committee, and set a deadline after which the draft ships as it is. Forty-eight hours gives anyone real time to flag an actual problem, without giving a draft enough time to quietly die of politeness.
5. Publish around the partner who won't play
Some partners will never hand you two sentences, and chasing them harder won't change that. So stop waiting on them.
Publish around them instead. The firm page doesn't need every partner's input to keep moving, just enough of it. One 34-person firm we work with runs on a mix that never depends on universal participation: a weekly colleague profile pulled from a rotating list of the whole team, a weekly expertise topic, and a monthly video series that started this summer. Nobody has to wait on the one partner who never replies.
That number won't go viral, but it holds steady month after month, in a firm where plenty of people still don't personally contribute a word. That's the proof that the page doesn't need everyone, just enough people willing to show up.
6. Tie it to something with teeth, treat the bonus as a last resort
A gift card will never outbid an hourly rate, and that's the real reason bonuses don't work on lawyers. Whatever you offer to pay for a topic is trivial next to what an hour of billable time is worth, so the bonus loses the exact same competition described at the start of this list. Worse, it recasts something that should just happen as something optional: pay for it once, and it becomes a thing a partner can opt out of instead of a thing that's simply part of the job.
What has teeth instead is putting social media on the agenda of the firm's strategic days, the sessions where partners already set direction and priorities for the year. Raised there, next to the goals the firm actually takes seriously, everyone in the room hears why it matters, not just the people who happen to enjoy writing.
Every one of these has worked for a law firm in Belgium or the Netherlands, and none of them depend on each other: shrink the ask, harvest instead of commission, give it a slot, ship on a deadline, publish around the holdouts, or put it on the strategic-day agenda instead of reaching for a bonus. Pick whichever fits your firm this quarter. None of it asks a single lawyer to write.