What lawyers put in bios versus what clients want

Kevin O’Keefe shared this image on Twitter that was originally shared by Sam Glover.

I retweeted this on Twitter (which means that when I saw it on Twitter, I hit the “retweet” button) and it was passed along to all of my followers.

Then over a dozen of my followers retweeted it to their networks. This is an example of a piece of content that resonates. Why is it so funny? Because it is so incredibly close to the truth.

But why are lawyers so terribly bad at bios? It is kind of like a species of animal that is born in captivity, it never has the chance to learn how to behave properly—no good model. Lawyers are modeling their behave after the older lawyers that simply created something that looked like what their partners before them had.

The sad truth is, they didn’t create bios with the client in mind. They just created bios in an attempt to be consistent with others.

I asked a new partner at a firm how he came up with the format for his bio and he told me “I just looked at someone else’s bio and did the exact same thing.” And the blind continue leading the blind.