Weekly. Monthly is the floor for email newsletters, quarterly is the same as not having a list at all, and almost every firm that asks us this question is hoping we’ll say something gentler. We won’t, and the reason reminds us of a famous shortstop from Baltimore.
The Iron Man math
On May 30, 1982, Cal Ripken Jr. played a baseball game. Then he played the next one. He kept doing that until September 20, 1998, by which point he had played 2,632 consecutive games and passed Lou Gehrig’s record of 2,130, a number that had stood untouched for 56 years.
There’s a lot law firms can take away from the baseball legend. Ripken was a genuinely good player (two MVP awards, nineteen All-Star selections) but he was not the best shortstop of his era, and nobody seriously argues he was. What he was, for sixteen straight years, was there.
That is the whole business case for your law firm’s weekly email newsletter. But we sure do love using a sports analogy to make the case.
Fifty-two, twelve, or four emails?
Weekly puts your name in front of somebody fifty-two times a year. Monthly, twelve. Quarterly, four.
The math is stark. Not Stark, like the beheaded Ned from Game of Thrones. Stark as in it really stands out. The jump from monthly to weekly is more than 4X-ing your contact with your list.
At four touches, you’re a firm somebody hired once, back when the thing happened. At twelve, you’re there… sort of. It’s the standard-level email marketing practice. Doesn’t really excite anyone and pretty easy to ignore (in our experience). At fifty-two, you’re part of the week… you become part of the routine. Something seems strange when you don’t show up in their email inbox on Wednesday.
Getting referrals from your email list isn’t a “be polite and hope minimalism pays off.” They’re won across the months and even years of accumulated familiarity that decide whose name surfaces first, and whether it’s yours. Frequency is how you build the relationship.
“But won’t I annoy people?”
Another question we hear all the time. On an email strategy call with a law firm it usually arrives as “I don’t want to be one of those firms that’s always in somebody’s inbox”, and it deserves a straight answer.
Yes. You’ll annoy some people. A few of them will unsubscribe, possibly with a note explaining exactly how they feel about it. We’d rather say that plainly than promise otherwise, because the firms who get promised zero unsubscribes are the firms who quit in week three when Bethany and Eric from the 2019 estate planning sessions clicks the link.
Here’s what changed how we think about it. A list that produces no unsubscribes isn’t a loyal list. It’s an unread one. An unsubscribe means your email arrived, got opened, and provoked a decision by an actual human being. The alternative isn’t affection… it’s a Promotions tab nobody has scrolled since March.
The person who leaves was never going to refer you anyway. You’ve lost a number on a dashboard and kept a list that reads what you send.
Of course, we’re not shooting for unsubscribes in the newsletters we send for your law firm. But experience proves to us that email newsletters at a higher frequency actually lowers the unsubscribe rate over time. Again, you’re a habit for the reader. And for them, it’s easy enough to just ignore this week’s email before coming back to the next week’s message.
It’s almost never the frequency
When somebody unsubscribes from a weekly newsletter, the cadence is rarely the culprit on its own. The newsletters you read every Tuesday without a flicker of resentment arrive at exactly the same frequency as the ones you abandoned in disgust.
What drives people off is boredom. An email that reads like a firm bulletin is unbearable weekly and (at best) forgettable monthly, so the firm concludes it was sending too often, drops to quarterly, and just makes email a worthless distraction they “deal with” once every three months. And then they just start to forget. It stays sitting in some Google Doc, unsent.
Sending less is how a firm avoids fixing a boring newsletter. If the email is worth reading, weekly emails build a powerful connection. If it isn’t, quarterly is still four annoyances a year, just spaced out enough that nobody has to confront it. The cadence question and the what-goes-in-it question turn out to be the same question in a different hat.
Weekly email is easier than monthly (no, really)
Sound backwards? We disagree.
A monthly newsletter carries a month of expectation. It has to be substantial, because it’s the only one. So it gets scheduled, then rescheduled, then over-edited, then held until there’s something significant enough to justify it… and then it’s the 14th and you’ve missed the month. We have watched far more monthly newsletters die of ambition than of workload.
A weekly email carries far less weight. If this one underperforms, you get another shot in seven days. That lowered stake is what makes the habit easier to keep. It brings down the pressure, giving you more room to explore topics. You can stay in rhythm, whether you batch write your emails in sets of four (like your writer would if you work with us) or sit down once a week for a writing block.
Just remember, Ripken didn’t get to 2,632 by finding the perfect day to start. Pick a day. Send something this week. You can fix everything else while it’s running.
Or, even better, get us to take over the email newsletter process for you. 😉
Frequently asked questions
How often should a law firm send an email newsletter?
Weekly is the target. Every two weeks is a respectable start. Monthly is the minimum that keeps you in mind at all, and anything less frequent means the list isn’t really doing anything for the firm.
Will emailing weekly increase unsubscribes?
A bit, early on, as people who were never going to engage remove themselves. It settles. A modest ongoing unsubscribe rate is a sign of life, and the readers who stay are worth considerably more than the ones who left.
What day should a law firm send its newsletter?
Far less important than sending on the same day every week. Tuesday through Thursday mornings are conventional and perfectly fine. Consistency is what trains the habit, and a day you can defend against your own calendar beats a day chosen from somebody’s send-time study.
Can I email a list that hasn’t heard from me in two years?
Yes, carefully. Acknowledge the gap in the first line instead of pretending it away, expect a larger unsubscribe wave than usual, and watch your deliverability across the first few sends. The list is still worth reviving, and the rules give you more room to do it than most firms assume.
How do I keep up with a weekly newsletter?
Capture ideas as they happen instead of manufacturing them on send day, keep each issue short, and use a repeatable structure so no week starts from a blank page. If that still isn’t realistic alongside running a firm… well, that’s the whole reason we exist. We do it for our clients in about twenty minutes of their time a month.