Hellerman
(L-R) Ryan Evans,
John Hellerman

There’s a moment in most law firms when someone, usually a skeptical partner, asks a fair question: what exactly does communications do?

It’s a reasonable challenge. Much of what a marketing and communications team produces can feel intangible. A post here. A quote there. A byline that circulates for a few days and disappears. But that framing misses the point. An earned media hit is not an outcome. It’s part of a life cycle. And when that life cycle is understood—and engineered—it becomes one of the most efficient business development tools a firm can deploy.

At Jones Walker, a national firm with more than 350 lawyers, that goal was not to build a “media machine.” The firm set out to solve a simpler problem: how to make better use of the thinking its attorneys are already doing. What emerged was something powerful—a repeatable pipeline where a single idea can move from internal insight to external authority to client opportunity.

The life cycle of an earned media hit

An insight rarely starts with the media. It starts with an attorney noticing something before everyone else does. A regulatory shift. A court decision. A market signal. Something that matters but hasn’t yet been fully explained. Historically, that insight might live in a client alert, a presentation, or a conference panel. Valuable but often fleeting, it does its job once and then disappears.

Jones Walker took a different approach. Through short-form thought leadership (developed on platforms like Passle), attorneys were given a structured, low-friction way to capture their insights quickly. Instead of producing law review articles or polished drafts, they could present a clear, timely articulation of what’s happening and why it matters. That’s the first transformation: from idea to asset. From there, the life cycle accelerates.

That same post becomes a media pitch. Sometimes the firm uses it as a precise excerpt paired with a news hook. The key is that the thinking is already done, already articulated in the attorney’s voice, already grounded in substance. This eliminates one of the biggest inefficiencies in legal PR: the “telephone game,” where an idea moves from attorney to business development to marketing to PR to reporter—and loses precision along the way.

This allows the communications life cycle to move directly from insight to outreach. And that’s where the second transformation happens: from asset to attention. Sometimes the result is a bylined article; sometimes it’s an interview. Sometimes, though more rarely, when the timing and distribution align, the content is picked up organically without any outreach. But in every case, the original idea has now entered the market, and once it does, it doesn’t just sit there.

The compounding effect

One of the most misunderstood aspects of earned media is its duration. A post may take 45 minutes to write. A pitch may take an afternoon. But the impact unfolds over weeks, months, sometimes longer. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly.

A construction partner writes a short piece on steel tariffs. It’s shared on LinkedIn. It’s picked up through aggregation. It becomes a targeted pitch. That pitch results in a Newsweek quote alongside major industry voices. That article reaches hundreds of thousands (now approaching a million) readers across platforms. At the same time, the original post sparks a conversation with a CEO in the industry. That conversation turns into meetings. Those meetings turn into work. One idea. Multiple outcomes.

In another case, a post written months earlier is cited—without any outreach—in a national financial publication, generating tens of thousands of views long after the original insight was published.

This is the third transformation: from attention to authority. The attorney is no longer just sharing an opinion. They are being cited, quoted and referenced. They are part of the narrative, and that changes how clients and prospects perceive them.

Why this matters for business development

For partners who ask “What does comms do?,” this is the answer: Communications takes non-billable thinking and turns it into billable opportunity. It does this not by creating something from nothing, but by extracting, shaping and amplifying what already exists inside the firm. The efficiency is the point.

An attorney spends 40–60 minutes capturing an insight. That insight becomes:

  • A branded piece of thought leadership
  • A media pitch asset
  • A quoted source in a national publication
  • A credential in future pitches and proposals
  • A trigger for client and prospect conversations

No additional drafting cycles. No reinvention. Just leverage.

There is another dimension that is often overlooked, and it may be the most practical for partners focused on business development: the act of creating content for earned media is itself a reason to engage clients and prospects. Instead of starting from a blank page, the process can begin with simple but substantive outreach: “I’m being interviewed [for my experience] by the Journal [!!!] later on an issue that’s important to you. How is the issue affecting you? Help me develop my message.” (Or, like in the situation that led to this article: “How’d you like to co-author an article using the firm’s success stories to explain how earned media can be best used for business development?”)

That conversation becomes the raw material for the content and ultimately the coverage. More important, it becomes a meaningful touchpoint. The attorney isn’t “checking in”—they’re gathering insight, pressure-testing a perspective, and reflecting the client’s world into the market. In that sense, the business development from a media opportunity can start well before the coverage appears, which, when it does, rewards the winning collaboration that was already valuable.

And importantly, this is not theoretical. We’ve seen attorneys generate more interest than they can reasonably handle from a handful of well-timed placements. We’ve seen initially skeptical practice group leaders become some of the most active participants after seeing the results within their own teams. Success, in this context, is contagious.

The role of process and partnership

None of this happens by accident. The difference between sporadic media hits and a true pipeline is process. That process needs to be tightly integrated across business development, internal communications, and a firm's external PR team. Every piece of content is evaluated against active priorities. Every insight is mapped to potential outlets, audiences, and opportunities.

Jones Walker works in close coordination with Hellerman Communications, which plays a central role in translating these insights into targeted, effective media outreach. The key for that legal firm/PR firm partnership is precision. Not broad, generic pitching but highly tailored engagement with the right reporters, at the right time, with the right angle. It’s the difference between sending content out and placing it where it matters.

That’s the fourth transformation: from authority to outcomes. Without that layer, content remains content. With it, content becomes coverage and coverage becomes credibility.

The AI factor: why earned media means more now

There is an additional layer to this strategy that firms are only beginning to fully appreciate. As AI-driven search-and-answer engines become primary discovery tools, the sources they rely on matter. Increasingly, those systems prioritize authoritative, third-party, earned media content (i.e., credible journalism from established publications).

In practical terms, this means that a quote in a respected outlet is no longer just a moment of visibility; it’s also a durable signal of authority that can surface repeatedly in AI-generated responses. In this new reality, earned media is not just influencing human readers; it’s also shaping how these “machines” understand authentic insight. For firms thinking about long-term visibility, this is not a secondary consideration—it is central.

Closing the loop

The final stage of the life cycle is often overlooked. Once a media hit is secured, the work is not done. When possible—and it’s usually possible—that coverage is repurposed and shared across networks, integrated into proposals, referenced in client conversations, and used to reinforce a firm’s positioning in the market.

The life cycle comes full circle: from idea to asset to attention to authority and back into business development.

And then it starts again. A new idea. A new post. A new opportunity. Not every piece lands, not every pitch converts, but over time the system compounds. So what begins as a question (i.e., What does communications do?) ends with a valuable answer: communications builds authority that leads to credibility that leads to opportunity — one earned media placement at a time.

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Ryan Evans is director of PR and communications at Jones Walker, where he plays a lead role in developing and implementing strategies to raise the firm’s profile and support its business development goals. John Hellerman is president of Hellerman Communications, a corporate communications agency specializing in positioning professionals to win business and navigate crises.