No Sh*t: Four Things Your Thought Leadership Content Should Actually Do

But that’s the wrong query. The right one is whether anyone did anything because of it.

The Wrong Scoreboard

Most lawyers measure the success of the blog posts, alerts, articles, and other thought leadership content they write by visibility — pageviews, clicks, downloads, likes, mentions at a cocktail party, etc. But none of that generates business from your next best client. Your thought leadership isn’t a brochure in the lobby. It has to be more than memorable; it has to instill trust and prompt action.

The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that 73% of B2B decision-makers consider thought leadership a more trustworthy basis for assessing a firm’s capabilities than its marketing materials. Similarly, the Hinge Research Institute’s Visible Expert study found that 56.5% of professional services buyers cite reputation among friends and colleagues as the top factor when choosing an expert. That isn’t memory. That’s transmission.

Four Responses That Actually Matter

Your thought leadership piece works when it produces at least one of four reader behaviors.

They contact you. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. This is the strongest signal. Something in your piece named a problem they were sitting on, and they reached out. The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn data found that 75% of decision-makers say thought leadership has prompted them to research a vendor they hadn’t previously considered.

They take action on their own. Motivation and movement. Maybe it was a tip you offered or a suggestion you made. Something in your piece caused the reader enough pain or gave them enough push to act. Most lawyers count this as a loss because there’s no loop back to them, but you can’t look at it that way. That tip or suggestion met its objective. The person DIY’d a solution, and you became their advisor, someone they’ll likely call in the future.

They save it, or they forward it to a colleague. Again, many lawyers see this as “kissing your sister,” but it’s not. When a general counsel forwards your piece to her CFO with a “thought you’d want to see this,” she gets to be the hero for thinking of that person, often with the intention that the CFO should take action. The forward handoff isn’t passive. The GC is putting her name on the recommendation and vouching for you to someone else who’s never heard of you.

That’s how outside lawyers get championed inside groups of decision-makers they may never meet. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report backs this up: 79% of “hidden buyers,” the ones inside a company who shape the decision but never appear on a call, are more likely to advocate for a proposal when the vendor consistently produces high-quality thought leadership.

They come back for more of your work. Repeat readers have long fuses. Your first thought leadership piece may not produce a call. Or the second, third, or fourth. But the fifth one might. That’s the long game. Keep showing up.

Do you see what’s missing from this list? Being remembered. That and 78 cents gets you a postage stamp. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go find a Boomer or Gen Z’er.)

The “No S**t” Test

The bar that reliably produces any of those four behaviors is what I call the “no s**t” test. At the end of a piece, the reader should think “no s**t” and be moved to do something about it.

S**t happens in three ways.

Information: “No s**t, I didn’t know that.” Your content was useful, but the reader’s reaction fades quickly.

Reframe: “No s**t, I never thought about it that way.” Your content sticks in the reader’s brain longer because it changes how they think about future situations. Once the person incorporates that frame in their thinking, it points back to you every time they apply it.

Recognition: “No s**t, that’s exactly my problem.” Booyah. This is the strongest reaction. Like a patient with an undetermined illness, the reader feels diagnosed. They’ve been carrying this weight around without a name for it, and you just gave them one.

Reframe and recognition punch hardest with that audience. Pure information lands as one more thing to remember. Again, the 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn report drives this home, finding that 81% of hidden buyers say high-quality thought leadership helps them understand previously unrecognized challenges or opportunities. That’s reframe and recognition, measured.

How to Score Your Work

Before you publish, identify the outcome. Which of the four behaviors do you want your piece to elicit? If you can’t name one, you’re writing for recall, and you’ve failed the test before anyone reads what you wrote.

Lawyers need proof. First, dig through your content library and find a piece that a client brought up in a meeting with you. Not the one with the most views or likes; the one a real human being mentioned to you personally. That piece hit one of the four marks above. Now, reverse-engineer it and repeat the framework in your next piece.

Second, ask yourself whether what you’ve written takes a position someone could disagree with. Recall doesn’t require risk. Reframe and recognition do. You have to plant a stake in the ground that a smart reader could push back on. If your last article didn’t have a stake, it didn’t move anyone.