The five family law questions below are the highest return content a practice can publish, and the reason almost nobody does is worth understanding. Sit in enough first consultations and the variety quietly disappears. The people are different every single time and the circumstances are always entirely their own, with the emotional temperature running anywhere from numb to frantic, but the family law questions sitting underneath all of it are remarkably stable, and there are roughly five of them.
The five family law questions
What happens to the house is usually the first thing out of somebody’s mouth, because it is the most concrete fear available in an otherwise formless situation, and it arrives as some version of where will I live, will I be forced to sell, and can I be made to leave.
What happens with the children comes next, covering how arrangements actually get made, whether one parent has more rights than the other, which almost everybody believes and is usually wrong about, and what happens if the other parent will not agree to anything.
What will this cost me is rarely asked directly, because asking about money feels crass while your life is falling apart, so people skirt it, or ask it at the door with their coat already on, or never ask at all and simply worry about it privately for weeks.
How long will this take sounds procedural and is not, because underneath it sits a completely different question, which is how long am I going to have to feel like this.
And what happens first, which is not a request for the legal process in the abstract but for the actual next step, this week, for this person, in this situation.
Why nobody publishes the family law questions
You have answered every one of those hundreds of times and you could do it half asleep in a car park mid sentence, which is exactly the reason it has never occurred to you that the answers are valuable. Familiarity makes expertise invisible to the expert, so this feels like the basic material you get through before the real legal work starts.
For the person asking, those five answers are the most important information in their life that week.
Why these five family law questions outperform everything
else
They are the most searched of any family law questions, because a frightened person searches their situation rather than your practice area, and nobody types property settlement law Queensland into Google at eleven at night. They are the most useful, because they replace fear with understanding at the exact moment the fear is at its worst. And they are the most trust building, because somebody who reads your answer and feels their heart rate drop has just had an experience of you rather than a claim about you, which means that when they eventually ring they are not shopping around, they are continuing something that started weeks earlier.
Authoritative general answers already exist, and the court publishes its own general guidance, but a national resource cannot know your suburb or sit across a desk from a frightened person, and that gap between the general answer and the local expert is exactly where your firm should be living.
How to answer them properly
Write for the person rather than the profession, which means assuming no legal knowledge and no appetite whatsoever for qualifications, and leading with the answer before the reasoning, because legal training pushes you to build the framework first and a frightened reader will have left before you arrive at the conclusion. Use the words your clients actually use, so the house rather than the former matrimonial home, since every translation from their word into yours quietly signals that the page was not written for them. Acknowledge the fear once, plainly, and then get on with being useful. And be helpful even to the people who will never hire you, because that generosity is the entire mechanism by which strangers eventually become clients.
This is where almost every content plan I build starts, and it is the reason I keep saying the same thing about content for law firms. Five published answers is not a content strategy in any grand sense, it is five pages, but those five pages sit directly on top of the five things every one of your future clients is searching for, they work every night without you, and almost none of your competitors have published theirs.
If you want to know which of the five your firm currently answers and where you sit against the firms who have published theirs, that is part of the Law Firm Visibility Audit.
$1000 + GST, conducted personally, and credited against a monthly plan if you move to one within sixty days. Details at ngcreative.au/law-firm-visibility-audit, or start with the free webinar at ngcreative.au/webinar.
