Settle in. It’s a long one.
I reckon there are three types of lawyers on LinkedIn right now.
The first built their following back when LinkedIn was less crowded, when just showing up on here as the human beyond the lawyer was enough, because not many lawyers were doing it. They grew real audiences, generated real referrals, and LinkedIn felt almost effortless. Then, somewhere in the last 18 months, their LinkedIn world changed. That seductive impression count dropped, engagement felt less frantic. And maybe they are thinking they have lost their knack. Which of course, they haven’t. The game just changed.
The second group never started. LinkedIn is still a virtual Rolodex to them, something they log into to accept connection requests and occasionally congratulate a colleague, or post a picture of an event. They know they should be doing more with it. They have been meaning to for years now, but now they are wondering whether it is all too late (it is never too late to make a start on your visibility!).
The third group is somewhere in the middle. They are posting and active, but without a clear strategy, they are throwing content at a wall and hoping something sticks. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s a fast route to exhaustion and falling out of love with LinkedIn.
If you recognise yourself in any of those three, this article is for you.
This piece draws on the insights of Richard van der Blom, one of the most respected LinkedIn algorithm researchers, whose annual algorithm reports are required reading for anyone serious about LinkedIn strategy. His latest research confirms something I have been seeing in my work with lawyers and law firms for a while: the rules have changed but the opportunity on LinkedIn is still significant for the lawyers who work with this and adapt their strategy.
From Relationship Graph to Interest Graph: The Shift That Changes The Game
For more than a decade, LinkedIn operated on what is called a relationship graph. Your reach was determined by who you knew. The bigger your network, the wider your distribution. It rewarded popularity and connection count.
That logic has been replaced. LinkedIn now operates on an interest graph. Rather than asking “who do you know”, the algorithm is asking “what do you engage with”. It is taking inspiration from TikTok and Instagram, because it has recognised that people do not just want to hear from people they are connected to, they want to hear from people who talk about things they are interested in.
What does this mean in practice? Richard van der Blom’s data shows that connections now account for only 31% of your LinkedIn feed. Second and third-degree connections represent 25%, and suggested posts have doubled to 10%. More than a third of what you see in your LinkedIn feed now comes from people you have never connected with or followed.
For lawyers, this is a significant opportunity. Your potential audience is no longer limited to your network. If you post with topical clarity and expertise, you can appear in the feeds of people who have never heard of you but are actively interested in what you know.
The old LinkedIn game rewarded popularity. The new LinkedIn game rewards relevance. And relevance, as we will come to, is something lawyers are well placed to demonstrate.
Topic Clarity: The Prerequisite for Distribution
LinkedIn cannot recommend what it cannot categorise. If your content does not have a clear topic cluster, it will not travel.
The algorithm builds what van der Blom calls a “topic fingerprint” for every user. Every post you stop to read, every comment you leave, every search you make, every piece of content you save contributes to this picture. LinkedIn then places you inside interest clusters, pools of members built around shared professional themes. When your content performs well within one of those clusters, it is distributed to adjacent ones. That is how reach grows.
But if LinkedIn cannot easily put your content in a bucket, it will not route it anywhere.
The ‘How Do I Make My Legal Subject Interesting?’ Dilemma
I am asked a version of this question regularly. How do I make PFI interesting? How do I make commercial property engaging? How do I bring conveyancing to life on LinkedIn?
This is the wrong question. The right question is: how do I make my perspective on this area of law interesting?
Let’s be real for a moment. Not many people are logging into LinkedIn hoping to read about PFI legislation. And if your content strategy is “I will post technical updates about my area of law and hope people engage,” then yes, it is going to be pretty dry, and no, people are not going to engage, although they may silently consume.
But you are confusing the topic with your take on it. People do care about why a recent case should make their finance director nervous. They care about an assumption that keeps costing businesses money that nobody is talking about. They care about the thing you have seen go wrong three times this year that could have been avoided. That is not a content strategy. That is just having an opinion in public. Which, if you have been practising law for any length of time, you absolutely have. The question is whether you are willing to share it.
The challenge for many lawyers is also structural. Those who are posting on behalf of their firm, amplifying brand messages across a wide range of topics, are often working against themselves algorithmically. If your content covers employment law one week, corporate governance the next, and firm sponsorship of a golf tournament the week after, LinkedIn does not know what you stand for. Neither does your audience.
Van der Blom’s recommendation is clear: two to three anchor topics, maximum. For lawyers, I would pick one to two areas of deep expertise and one audience you can really serve with what you post about. Make sure at least one post a week speaks directly to that audience with something useful. If you are a lawyer who works with tech SMEs, what does that audience need to hear from you this week? Start there.
Niching down does not mean turning away work. It means being known for something. And being known for something is how clients find you.
The Four Systems Evaluating Every Post You Publish
One of the most useful things van der Blom clarifies is that there is no single LinkedIn algorithm. There are multiple simultaneous systems, each optimising for different objectives, and every post you publish is evaluated against all of them simultaneously.
Understanding what each system rewards and penalises will change how you think about content.
The News Team
Focused on being first and being credible. It rewards breaking news and commentary on timely developments. It penalises late takes on stories that have already been widely covered. For lawyers, this means that when there is a significant legal development in your area, being quick with a considered view matters.
The Engagement Team
Focused on quality over quantity. It rewards authentic discussion and penalises shallow reactions or posts that generate no conversation. A post that gets 50 thoughtful comments will outperform one that gets 200 likes. This matters for how you write your posts and how you respond to comments.
Trust and Safety
Focused on human content and authenticity. It penalises spam and AI-generated content. LinkedIn’s detection systems are sophisticated. They identify semantic duplication, predictable sentence patterns, generic positivity, and lack of contextual specificity.
Design and UX
Focused on keeping people on the platform. It penalises external links and off-platform redirects. If your goal for a post is reach or awareness, avoid external links in the body copy or route through a native LinkedIn destination such as a newsletter or article. If your goal is conversion, you can include a link, but accept that your reach will take a hit.
The posts that travel furthest are the ones that score well across all four systems. Worth keeping in mind every time you sit down to write.
Comments Are a Reach Strategy
This is one of the most significant mindset shifts required for lawyers on LinkedIn, and one of the most liberating – huzzah!
Posting is how you build authority.
Commenting is how you build reach, relationships, and pipeline.
Van der Blom’s data on this is striking. Five substantive comments per day generates over 18,000 impressions for a creator with 10,000 followers. And 93% of those impressions come from the author’s network, not yours. That is borrowed reach you cannot replicate with a post.
He recommends spending 30 to 50% of your active LinkedIn time commenting rather than publishing. The recommended commenting cadence is daily. The recommended posting cadence is two to three times per week, not more.
For lawyers who have been posting daily in an attempt to stay visible, this will feel counterintuitive. But daily posting can actually hurt your reach per post. Van der Blom’s data shows that moving from one or two posts per week to daily posting increases total reach by 18%, but decreases reach per post by 26%. You are working harder for less return.
The dopamine of posting, of putting something out and watching the likes come in, is real. Believe me I know! But the habit of posting for the sake of posting, which was always exhausting and unsustainable, is also now actively counterproductive.
Keep the time you have allocated to LinkedIn. Just use it differently. Yesterday morning I did not post. I spent that time connecting with and messaging people in a community who needed some support. That activity is not public or performative, but it matters.
When you do comment, treat it as micro content. A great comment has its own hook, adds a data point or a counterexample or a genuine experience, invites dialogue, and remains skimmable. ‘Great post’ tells the algorithm nothing and does nothing for your reputation. A comment that adds real value does both.
Build a list of 20 to 40 accounts whose work genuinely overlaps with yours. Aim for 10 of those to be ideal client profiles. Engage with them consistently and with substance. That is where the pipeline comes from.
Publishing Is Just The Start
Most lawyers hit publish and start thinking about the next post. That is leaving a significant amount of performance on the table.
Richard van der Blom’s research identifies what he calls the golden window for post nurturing – the period in which strategic engagement has the most direct impact on algorithmic distribution. It used to be 60 minutes. It has now extended to four hours. Which means when you publish, you need to be around.
The single highest leverage action in that window is how quickly you respond to comments. Posts where the author replies within 30 minutes of receiving a comment see deeper threads, longer dwell time, and a stronger signal to the algorithm that an active conversation is happening – which pushes the post to a larger second distribution batch. Reply with substance. Add something that extends the conversation rather than just acknowledging it.
Van der Blom also recommends leaving two of your own comments on your post in the first hours – follow-up insights that did not fit the original, or a question that pulls people in.
And then keep checking back. Posts can remain active in the feed for two to three weeks. Re-enter on days two and three. Respond to late comments. The post lifespan is extended or shortened by what happens in the days that follow, not just the first 48 hours.
Not All LinkedIn Posts Age The Same Way
This is a really useful frameworks in van der Blom’s research, and one that changes how you think about your posts – as posts perform and behave differently.
The Rocket – around 45% of posts – comes out strong, burns fast, and is largely done by day five. If you have a rocket on your hands, nurture hard in the first four hours and ride it.
The Builder – around 30% of posts – starts modestly but climbs steadily, sustaining through to around day eight. Do not write it off early. Re-enter the thread on days two and three and keep the conversation going.
The Grower – around 20% of posts – is slow to start but runs long, pulsing across two weeks driven by saves and interest cluster resurfacing. These are often your best authority content pieces. Do not abandon them because the first 48 hours looked quiet.
The Afterburner – a rare 5% – underperforms and then ignites, sometimes days later. If a post suddenly picks up momentum after a slow start, double down immediately.
The practical implication of all of this: stop measuring post performance at 48 hours (guilty). Check back at day three, day seven, day ten. Keep dipping into older posts rather than only ever looking forward to the next one.
Use AI Smartly or It Will Work Against You
LinkedIn’s detection systems are now actively identifying and down-ranking AI-generated content. The platform flags semantic duplication, synthetic tone, predictable sentence patterns, generic positivity, and a lack of contextual specificity. Fully AI-generated posts can see a 40% reduction in reach. That is not a minor penalty.
The answer is not to avoid AI. The answer is to use it as a drafting tool, not publishing.
Set up a Claude project specifically for your LinkedIn content. Train it with examples of your writing, posts that have felt genuine and authentic to you, and feedback on what it gets right and wrong about your voice. Then use the voice function to download your raw thoughts and let it structure a first draft. Sometimes it will get you 70% of the way there. Sometimes less. But it does significant heavy lifting.
The step that cannot be skipped is the human layer. The specific example from your own experience. The opinion that is yours. The turn of phrase that sounds like you and not like a prompt. That is what the algorithm is looking for. That is also what your human readers are looking for.
Setting up a project and expecting it to generate polished posts without your input will read badly, both to LinkedIn’s systems and to the people in your network who know what you sound like.
What Content Actually Works Right Now
Van der Blom categorises content into four types, and understanding the weighting is useful for planning.
Authority Content (40-50% weighting)
This is the primary pillar. Frameworks, how-to breakdowns, your take on industry news and trends with a clear opinion. This is what signals expertise to LinkedIn’s classification system and drives saves and reach into non-follower audiences. If you post authority content consistently, LinkedIn learns to route you to audiences interested in those themes. For lawyers, this is your natural territory.
Affinity Content (around 20-25%)
This is what makes people like you, and what differentiates human content from AI. But van der Blom is clear that vague vulnerability is not working. It needs to be specific, personal, and professionally relevant. Stories from your career, moments that anchor back to your core topics. Not confessional posts for their own sake, but human insight that builds connection and trust.
Proof Content (15-20%)
Client wins, case studies, testimonials contextualised so they read as authority content. Specificity beats vague authenticity here. A real client outcome with a concrete detail will always outperform the generic.
A Note On Formats
Images remain a reliable format and should accompany posts. Article posts have seen a significant positive shift over the last 12 months and are recovering their position as a credibility and authority format. Text-only posts, counterintuitively, have also seen reach recover when they are very well written – but they have to be expertly written, so be honest with yourself about whether you can achieve that consistently. Video has fallen as a general reach format, though it still works for creators who use it with clear intent.
Newsletters deserve a specific mention. LinkedIn newsletter open rates sit at 25 to 35%, significantly higher than feed posts. Van der Blom describes newsletters as a mid-funnel trust accelerator. Content in a subscriber’s inbox carries more weight than the same content in the feed because it is expected, opted into, and consumed with more attention. Building a newsletter subscriber list is a commercial infrastructure decision – and yes, I am aware this means I need to finally launch mine.
The 18-Month Reach Drought: What Happened?
If you are a lawyer who has seen significant reach decline over the last 18 months, there is a direct explanation. LinkedIn has been deliberately compressing organic reach to force content through a new distribution filter built around topic relevance, interest clusters, and engagement quality rather than connection proximity.
The platform changed its fundamental logic. And it was brutal for a lot of creators who had built their visibility on the old rules.
If you are in that first group – the early adopters who did everything right and built something real – I want to be clear that the drop in your reach is not a verdict on your content or your expertise. LinkedIn ran a deliberate compression exercise to force its distribution system to rebuild around topic relevance rather than connection proximity. A lot of genuinely good creators got caught in that. The platform essentially hit reset. What you built still matters. The audience you have is real. But the way you reach them, and the way you find new ones, now works differently.
The reframe: reach is the old metric. It is no longer the right thing to optimise for. If your impression numbers are flat but you are getting engagement, and that engagement is converting into conversations, DMs, profile visits, and new followers, your content is performing better, not worse. It is reaching fewer people overall, but the right ones are responding.
Van der Blom is explicit on this: track DMs per impression and qualified conversations per post, not likes and not follower growth. Optimise for the metrics that pay.
Your LinkedIn Strategy for the Interest Graph Era: Practical Starting Points
None of this works without a clear strategy. If you know your goals from this platform, understand your audience, are consistent in turning up and providing genuine value to that audience, and support your posting with proactive outreach, commenting, and engaging with other people’s content, you will stay the course.
If you have been showing up on LinkedIn sharing pictures of your lunch for likes, Houston, we may have a problem.
On a platform now saturated with content, showing up without a clear sense of who you are talking to and what you want them to take away is not authentic – it is just unstrategic. The good news is that strategy and personality are not opposites. The most effective LinkedIn presences are both.
Here is where to start:
Choose your anchor topics. Two to three maximum. They should sit at the intersection of your deepest expertise and your audience’s most pressing concerns. Ask yourself: can someone look at my last ten posts and immediately identify what I stand for? If not, that is the first thing to fix.
Audit your engagement before your posting. Look at your last ten posts. Do they share a clear theme? Are you commenting with substance on other people’s content in your niche, or are you just publishing and hoping?
Shift your time allocation. Spend 30 to 50% of your active LinkedIn time commenting. Build your list of accounts to engage with consistently, prioritising ideal clients and adjacent professionals.
Post two to three times per week on your anchor topics. Focus on authority content primarily, with affinity and proof content woven in. End posts with a specific question rather than a generic call to action.
Respond to every comment within the first four hours. This is the golden window for algorithmic momentum. Reply with substance that extends the conversation.
Track the right metrics. Qualified conversations, DMs, profile visits, follower growth from relevant people.
The Algorithm Is Not Your Enemy. Honestly.
In the words of van der Blom, “the algorithm is an easy villain.” It changes without warning, rewards people you disagree with, and occasionally punishes posts you are proud of. All of that is true.
It is also true that the lawyers and legal professionals consistently generating commercial outcomes from LinkedIn are not the ones with the best algorithmic luck – they are the ones who stopped blaming it.
They turned up with clarity about what they stand for. They spoke to a defined audience with expertise and consistency. They treated the platform as a professional development and business development tool, not a broadcasting channel for vanity metrics.
The platform has changed. The fundamentals have not. Show up with purpose, speak with clarity, be useful to the people you want to work with, and do it consistently.
The algorithm will follow.
Oh and PS: Pictures of cats and photos of Zammo from Grange Hill? They always win algorithmically.
Sources and Credits
This article draws on insights from the Algorithm InSights Report 2026 by Richard van der Blom and Just Connecting, published April 2026. Richard is one of the most authoritative voices on LinkedIn strategy and algorithm research. His annual reports are essential reading for serious LinkedIn creators and strategists.