Write for Lawyerist

We encourage all practicing lawyers and law professors with something meaningful to say about law practice to submit pitches for us to review using the form below. But please read this page before you do so.

Please think through your pitch before submitting it. We want to see a well-thought-out pitch for a specific article, not a one-sentence summary of an idea. Do not submit a one-sentence idea — or a list of one-sentence ideas — for a post.

We will respond to every pitch as soon as we can.

What we are looking for

Lawyerist is a blog about law practice. We publish things useful or interesting to practicing lawyers. This is most certainly not limited to technology and marketing, although those are popular subjects on our pages. We also frequently cover things like ethics, legal writing, practice management, law school, and other subjects relevant to law practice.

We do assume you will be familiar with Lawyerist before you submit a pitch. This should give you an idea of the sort of articles and topics we are looking for.

As for the pitch itself, you should give us a detailed summary of the article you intend to write. A thesis plus an outline of your post would be helpful, for example. Or a syllabus similar to what you might find on an academic paper. In other words, give us a fairly detailed summary of the article you intend to write.

If we accept your pitch, the finished product will need to be about 1,800 to 3,600 words, although it can be longer if the subject merits it. This means your article will be a fairly in-depth treatment of its subject matter — though not exhaustive by any means.

What we are not looking for

• While we welcome real lawyers’ thoughts on marketing (occasionally, anyway), we are most definitely not interested in posts from people who are trying to sell marketing services, lawyers or not.
• We do not need any more posts on search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (including Google AdWords), web design, or similar topics. We have two regular writers who cover these topics quite well and thoroughly.
• We do not accept posts that are commercial or promotional in any way. Visit our advertising page for information about sponsored posts if that is what you have in mind.
• We are not looking for recycled content or “spec” work. If you have already written something, we may consider it, but we strongly prefer to get a pitch, not an already-finished article.

Finally, we are not looking for pitches that make it obvious you have not read this page.

What we pay and what we require in exchange

We pay $30 per guest post. (If we decide to break your draft into multiple posts, we will pay $30 for each.)

We require an exclusive license to publish your article online, so that the only place it will be available online and in full will be on Lawyerist. We also require a non-exclusive license to publish your article anywhere else. This allows you to distribute it by email or bundle it with CLE materials, or do whatever else you like with it (except publish it online).

If we accept your pitch, we will send you a copy of our contract to review.

If we ultimately decide not to publish your post after signing a contract with you, we will pay you a “kill fee” of $16.