Sophie Lechner | Leverage the Power of LinkedIn with The Magnet Model

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It’s Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and your host here at The Lawyer’s Edge Podcast. Welcome back for another episode.

We are going to be talking today about practical strategies to make LinkedIn less of a black hole and a mystery and more of a powerful engine for you to get known by your audience.

Before we dive in, today’s episode is brought to you by the coaching team at The Lawyer’s Edge, a training and coaching firm that has been focused exclusively on lawyers and law firms since 2008. Each member of The Lawyer’s Edge coaching team is a trained, certified, and experienced professional coach and either a former practicing attorney or a former law firm marketing and business development professional. Whatever your professional objectives, our coaches can help you achieve your goals more quickly, more easily, and with significantly less stress. To get connected with your coach, just email the team at hello@thelawyersedge.com.

I am so excited to welcome today’s guest, who I’ve gotten to know a little bit lately, and I’m very happy to have done that. Her name is Sophie Lechner, and she’s a former practicing lawyer turned speaker, author, and business coach.

She helps mission-driven entrepreneurs turn marketing from a chore into a joy—wouldn’t we all love that?—so they can attract clients like a magnet instead of chasing them. With 20 years of LinkedIn expertise, she teaches business owners how to build authentic relationships, amplify their message, and grow their business without feeling salesy.

Her strategies have led to global speaking engagements, including Oxford University, podcast features, and media recognition in Forbes magazine. After 25 years in the corporate world at BP, Pfizer, and Bayer, she is in her second entrepreneurial venture, where she created The MAGNET Model—and we’re going to talk about that—a powerful framework for client attraction.

Sophie works with clients one-on-one and via courses and group programs. She shares The MAGNET Model in her new book, Unlock Your Impact, which has just come out this month.

She holds a degree from King’s College in London, law degrees from the Sorbonne in Paris, and an MBA from Columbia University. She lives in the great state of New Jersey—not that I’m biased—with her family.

Sophie, welcome to The Lawyer’s Edge.

Sophie Lechner: Thank you for having me, Elise. I’m excited.

Elise Holtzman: I’m excited too. We’ve got a lot to talk about today, Sophie, so let’s dive in. First of all, most of my guests cannot say that they studied in London, France, and the U.S. So how did it come to pass that you have degrees from very well-respected institutions in all three of those countries?

Sophie Lechner: So, my dad was Pakistani and my mom was French, so there was some international element in my upbringing. My parents wanted to make sure that I kept that global exposure, so they put me in an international school.

When it came time to graduate from high school, there were a lot of multinational programs that came and spoke to our school. One of them was this English and French law degree, it was a collaboration between the Sorbonne and King’s College. They had this thing where you could get the French four-year degree and the English three-year degree, so both the LLB and the maîtrise, in a total of four years. It was English and French law.

It was a very small group of students, 24 each year were accepted, 12 from the UK, 12 from Paris. I applied, and I was selected. So I studied both English and French law in that program. Then after that, I did another master’s at the Sorbonne, and then I went to work.

I was working as a lawyer, and after a few years, I decided to leave the law. I didn’t know anything else other than the law, so I needed to study, and I wanted to go into business. Business school seemed to make sense.

It’s funny because I was working in France, and sort of the iconic place to learn business seemed to be the U.S. So I said, “Okay, I’ll do an MBA in the U.S.” It seemed like a logical thing to do.

I applied to 12 colleges—crazy—and Columbia was a great place for me and my husband. In the meantime, I had married an American who was in Paris. So Columbia was great because it was in New York City, it would be easier to find a job, and it’s a pretty good school.

Elise Holtzman: What made you decide to leave the law? Because you had all of that legal education, again, from fantastic institutions, and you were working at a well-respected company. What made you decide to say, “You know what? This isn’t for me. I need to go pursue a business degree”?

Sophie Lechner: So, there were two key components. One was that sometimes I felt I wasn’t on the right side of the issue. I was put in a couple of situations where I had to defend, if you will, the interests of my company that I represented, but I didn’t feel that they were in the right. That created a conflict in my mind. It was very troublesome for me, and I didn’t know how to reconcile a potential career in the law with that problem. I’m sure I could have, but I didn’t have anybody to advise me on that at the time.

Then the other thing was that in France, lawyers don’t have the same prestige, credibility, or authority that they have here. People always came to us only when everything had gone wrong. There was absolutely no concept—where I worked anyway—of using the legal team to protect yourself, and to prepare, and to be doing things properly. So they created very messy contracts, and they always came in to clean up.

That carried its own frustrations, and I tried to bring in a proactive role for the legal team inside the company. My internal clients were liking it, and it was working, but my legal bosses did not like the fact that it was creating more work in the short term. They came down on me and told me to stop doing that. So that was frustrating. So I just left.

Elise Holtzman: You've done a couple of things after, obviously going to Columbia and getting your MBA, and now you are focusing on helping professionals with their marketing. Why is it that you think professionals, including lawyers—because we know this is true of lawyers—dislike marketing so much or shy away from marketing? Because I think you and I agree that that happens frequently. What's getting in their way?

Sophie Lechner: So I think what happens is that, and we're talking about experts who have gained a lot of experience, degrees, qualifications, and life experience, they're very knowledgeable, very wise, and they have a very generous streak. That's why they're in the profession that they're in. That includes lawyers. A lot of lawyers are in it to help people.

I think this combination of traits leads to—or is connected to—people just not liking to put themselves forward. I don't know if we could call them introverts, but more people who are like, "I don't want to talk about myself. I want to talk about my clients. I don't want to be doing this thing." That's the other thing. A lot of people think that marketing is about self-promotion. It is self-promotion. You ask a lot of people, "No, it's not self-promotion." What do you mean it's not self-promotion? Of course it is.

All of a sudden, all these barriers come up. The way we've been brought up like, "You shouldn't talk about yourself. You shouldn't brag," all those things come up. This combination creates a huge amount of discomfort, and it causes people to avoid it, to walk away, to just do anything they could to avoid doing it.

Elise Holtzman: I see that a lot too. People say, "I don't want to be pushing myself on other people. I don't want to beat my chest and tell people how great I am. I don't want to sell myself." I think you're right that they're kind of missing the point. And it's not a criticism, it's understandable that they would be missing the point. I think a lot of people feel that way.

You focus much of your business on guiding people to use LinkedIn specifically for maximum impact. Why are you so focused on LinkedIn? Why concentrate on that?

Sophie Lechner: LinkedIn came when I was working in corporate, I was at Pfizer, and it was a huge discovery for me because it was suddenly a way for me to continue all the international connections that I had been making my whole life. My parents were traveling when I was a kid. They traveled with me, and we would meet friends, family, all over the place, all the time. I loved that.

Then when I started working, it was like, okay, so there's a lot less of that going on. So when LinkedIn came up, I was connecting with people around the world, not only all the people I knew, but new people. I would meet new people. So it was a different way of doing something I had loved doing all my life.

So I just used it for fun, for a hobby. I played around, I met people, had discussions about all kinds of topics. I didn't really use it for work at all. Then when I left corporate and I started my own company, it was a huge realization for me that this whole network I had built—several thousand professionals, interesting people all around the world—all of a sudden became what led me to create this company. It allowed me to have partnerships, a faculty of 150 experts around the world to come and bolster my offerings for my clients.

And the public speaking that you mentioned, the Forbes article, all those things. Realizing the power of LinkedIn eventually, after a few twists and turns, I could see how it could help so many people who did not know it, did not understand it, did not realize how powerful it can be. So then the teacher in me came out, and I said, "I've got to teach this."

Elise Holtzman: And so you're focused primarily on LinkedIn and not any other social media platforms. What's different about LinkedIn that you think makes it the place to be as opposed to Facebook or all the other things that are out there that my children probably know about that I don't even know about?

Sophie Lechner: So it's a yes-and answer because yes, I recommend LinkedIn. I think it's a fantastic platform. I also now speak more broadly about marketing, and that could be in whatever platforms somebody wants to use.

I believe LinkedIn is the best place to have real, substantial, substantive conversations with people. I feel that Facebook is very superficial, Instagram even more so, and then more and more as you go to the other platforms. Those are really places where entrepreneurs will feel more that they have to spew things out. They have to create content for the sake of creating content. That is a phenomenon that carries over into LinkedIn, but I think there are a lot more substantive conversations that happen on LinkedIn and real relationships that are built. It's more thoughtful, more professional. Yeah, I think it’s a much better platform for that.

Elise Holtzman: To your point, at least in my view, that's where professionals are hanging out online to get that sort of information and to share information with one another. So for most lawyers—and that's who we're talking to today—that's where their clients, prospective clients, and referral sources are spending their online time. So you want to be in the community that makes sense for you.

Sophie Lechner: Yeah, absolutely. And you can talk about the types of problems your clients have. You can tell stories about problems you've helped resolve. You can talk about your work in so many different ways that will attract your clients to you.

Elise Holtzman: Sophie, what about the time factor? I do surveys of lawyers primarily around topics related to business development. There are many obstacles that lawyers will cite in terms of why they don't want to do business development, as we talked about earlier, why they don't want to engage in marketing activities. There's no doubt that the number one obstacle that is cited over and over again for not consistently engaging in those activities is time.

What is your advice when it comes to devoting time to engagement on LinkedIn?

Sophie Lechner: You have to consider two aspects. One is the creation of content to engage with or to have people engage with, and then the engagement itself. So I like the way you phrase the question.

What I believe you can do is spend maybe two hours or three once a month creating the content. And of course, I have ideas and the formula and the whole thing to create it. Then you split it up into pieces in a specific, strategic way and post it. But you can have help with that. You can get ChatGPT to help you after you've given it the right thinking process to feed it. You can have a VA post and things like that.

Then engagement, I believe you can give it 15 minutes a day. I don't know if you would consider that a lot or not. I don't. But for engagement, that could be quite sufficient to have very healthy, consistent interactions on LinkedIn and bring you business.

Elise Holtzman: So just to put a finer point on that, you're talking about essentially two things, if I got this right. One is creating content, so that people see the things that you're thinking about. You mentioned it could be sharing stories, sharing advice, sharing tips, whatever it may be, or just information about what you're doing that might be of value to someone else.

Then you're also talking about getting on there and engaging with other people's content, right? So when you say engagement, presumably you're talking about commenting on other people's stuff or sharing it and talking about it.

Sophie Lechner: Yes, and going back to your own content and interacting with the people who have commented and interacted.

Now, I say this, but there is also the possibility of not creating your own content but only engaging. What I would recommend, if that's the strategy, is to do searches to find content that is aligned with what you do and support it by commenting. Once a day—but no more than that—share a post of interest and leave your own perspective.

So that's curation. It's also valuable, though not as powerful as posting your own content. But if somebody really doesn't want to be writing anything or doing videos—you could do videos as well—if you don't want to put out content, you still can have a strong presence with curating.

My first, I would say, three to four years on LinkedIn, I didn’t post my own content at all. I was curating, pulling together really interesting stuff, commenting, and sharing commentary about why something was interesting. I shared it with specific people I knew it would interest. It’s another strategy.

Elise Holtzman: I was thinking about two things when you were talking about this. One, I love this example of you starting out—even as the expert you are now—starting out posting your own stuff. Because I think for some people, when they think about LinkedIn activity, they go, "Oh my God, I can’t do all of that."

And so maybe if you just start engaging and commenting on other people's posts, curating content like you say, sharing something, and then putting your own spin on it, that’s a really great place to start. That does not take the same amount of time as, you and I both know because we both create content, content creation can be really time-consuming.

Certainly, the ChatGPTs and Claudes of the world can help with that if you're using them properly and vetting everything that they say. But maybe a good place to start is with the engagement.

You also mentioned just a quick tip that I like. I haven't done much of it myself, but I saw someone else do it recently, which is you can share something with specific individuals. So instead of just sharing it widely—or maybe in addition to sharing it widely in your feed—you can say, "Hey, there are five people that I really think would be interested in this," and reach out to them specifically.

I know somebody that has done that with surveys. He puts the survey out there, doesn’t get a lot of responses, and then he starts individually sending the survey to all these people that he suspects might be interested in the survey results, and they respond to it. So that’s a good tip.

Sophie Lechner: Yeah, there's another thing you can do, which is to tag someone who you think will be interested in the post you're sharing. You can tag them in the commentary you put at the top when you share the post. You can also tag them in the comments.

That can really help a conversation spread. The people who posted initially are going to be very grateful that you've given their posts more visibility. They'll be grateful, and then they'll share your content or the things you've shared.

Elise Holtzman: It also helps you nurture the relationship with the person you're tagging because now they’re thinking, "Oh, Sophie thinks I would be interested in this. She's thinking of me." And so that helps develop the relationship.

Sophie Lechner: Yeah, and if you have a roster of either potential clients or past clients that you want to continue nurturing, as you said, you can keep them top of mind. Then, when you see things that relate to their industry or their concerns, you can either share it publicly and tag them, or if there’s a confidentiality issue, just send them the post as a message.

I do this all the time. I'm always sending posts specifically as a message. There's a little function for that on LinkedIn, privately to someone who I think will be interested.

Then the other thing you can also do is, particularly if you're in a firm and you want to promote the firm as well as yourself, you can create a message thread with a whole bunch of people in the firm. Then when you post something, everybody on that list can, when they're sharing a post, put the link to it in that thread. Then everybody is alerted to it, and they can go and share it or comment on it.

Elise Holtzman: I think there’s a law firm I know that uses that function because they want to make sure that all of the attorneys in their firm are aware that they're posting. Because the firm could be posting things, and if the attorneys aren’t on there, they don’t get tagged in it. They don’t know it’s there.

I don’t know, you know better how to use that function. But the idea is that way, a firm with a number of attorneys can let them know that this stuff is being posted. If the attorney thinks it’s valuable for his or her connections, then they have the opportunity to go ahead and repost that, either without comment or preferably with their own comment.

Sophie Lechner: Yeah, my clients are mostly solopreneurs, but I’ve had small businesses and law firms and different types of clients that are companies, and we’ve implemented that strategy very successfully.

Elise Holtzman: Sophie, we're talking about some concrete tips that people can use to engage on LinkedIn and post their content on LinkedIn. Let’s go back to the big picture for a minute.

What are some of the top things that you advise lawyers to do to stand out on LinkedIn? Because we know there are a lot of lawyers out there. There are a lot of lawyers on LinkedIn. You and I have a lot of lawyers in our contacts for sure, and I think most of our listeners do as well.

So what are some things that you would advise them to do that maybe are a little bit at a higher level, a little more of the 30,000-foot view than the tactics we’ve been talking about for the last few minutes?

Sophie Lechner: I think one of the things that is important and underestimated is having to differentiate yourself. As you said, there are a lot of lawyers. So just putting "lawyer" on your LinkedIn profile is not going to exactly differentiate you.

One thing that's not thought of automatically is sharing why you are passionate about this work. Particularly in this arena, it’s going to stand out if you share from the heart why you’re passionate about this, what your overarching vision and mission are for your work.

Then sharing your story—what is it that made you passionate about this? A lot of us, if we go back, I mean, there are a million professions we could have taken, a million turns we could have taken, what is it that started us thinking, "I could do this"? Why is this the one thing that you decided to dedicate your life to?

Sharing that is going to be really, really important in creating that emotional resonance with your clients and making you stand apart because that’s not something that’s done much in the legal profession.

Elise Holtzman: Some people might be saying, "Well, where am I putting that? Am I putting that in my summary section? Am I weaving that into the content that I’m posting? How do I get that across without sounding sort of goopy and mushy—things that maybe lawyers are not so excited about sharing?"

Sophie Lechner: Yeah. So I usually suggest having a paragraph in your About section, about four or five paragraphs down from the beginning, which would be who you help, how, your methodology, whatever. So I recommend having a short paragraph about your mission and vision, and one about your story and how you became passionate.

Then exactly as you said, I would weave it into the content that you share, even if you’re just curating, as we said. The other thing you can do is actually write an article about it.

So if there’s a story in your life—something that happened, a divorce that went wrong, whatever it is that triggered you to go into this, if there’s more of a story to be told, then go ahead and share that story and all the lessons learned and how you navigated your way into being a lawyer. Then you can feature that in your Featured section.

Back to the tactics, a lot of people don’t have a Featured section, and that is such a lost opportunity. So just create an additional section in your profile for that.

Elise Holtzman: I mentioned in the introduction that you recently published a new book called Unlock Your Impact and that in that book, you talk about a model that you created called The MAGNET Model, which you describe as a powerful framework for client attraction.

Can you tell me a little bit about The MAGNET Model? What is it? And what are a couple of practical takeaways from The MAGNET Model that you think our listeners could start using today?

Sophie Lechner: I’ve actually already shared a few of the things that came out of the model, but the model came about as I was showing entrepreneurs how to use LinkedIn, and they started telling me, "Oh, you’re sharing so much more than just how to use LinkedIn."

So I went back and—took a little while—but I figured out what it was that I was actually sharing with them and helping them with, and I codified it into this model. The MAGNET Model is basically three circles that interact like a Venn diagram.

In the center is what we want to achieve: impact, income, and independence. The independence is mostly about doing things the way we want to do them, aligned with our values. In order to get to that, we need to find our ideal clients, get referrals of our ideal clients, and constantly expand our reach.

If you can imagine petals coming from the center, those are the overlaps between the circles. The key drivers are mission, message, and movement. Those are the three big drivers.

I’ve talked a little bit about mission already; figuring out what your mission is and then sharing that with the world. Figuring out what your story is and sharing that.

Message is about really understanding your customers and, not only that, but their journey, their customer journey in the sense of, are they aware of the problem they have? I could see how lawyers would have a lot to say about different situations where their potential clients are not aware that they could be helped by a lawyer.

So how do you change the beliefs of people who are not seeking your services right now? They may be thinking all kinds of things that get in the way. That’s another piece of message.

Then movement is more about really embracing the scale and the importance of the mission that you have in the world. So that’s kind of a way to get out of your own way, so to speak, and to really embody that mission so you can get out there, either on bigger stages, with a book, or just in your mindset.

Those are the three key things, and then for each of them, there are three strategies. Those are the nine strategies that I describe in the book, along with how to implement them.

Elise Holtzman: In your view, if there is one, what is the most challenging part of that model for lawyers?

Because it strikes me that the movement piece may be the hardest, right? It’s like, "Oh, I know I do this thing and I have a mission and I think it’s really great, but most people are going to think I’m just grinding out documents or handling disputes."

I’m thinking about this in the context of my own business. I know there are certain things that I do—teaching people business development, leadership skills, helping them execute on their goals, and all that sort of thing—but when they describe the impact, they’re not necessarily talking about those pieces. They’re talking about how it makes them feel and how it’s changed their lives.

Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about when you talk about movement?

Sophie Lechner: It could be. That’s the interesting thing about this third piece, the movement. It can be someone like you who has a podcast, who teaches, you’re really creating this ripple effect for your work by having champions for it, by developing messaging that goes beyond your own client interaction.

So that can be the outward expression of movement. But even without going that far, you can just embody the movement. It can be internal—it’s not just internal, it’s a huge thing—but it can be an internal stance that you take.

You’re really embodying that mission, and it helps you create content, share content, and get over that hump of not wanting to be visible. Because now you’re taking your mission and vision, and how you can help your clients, and putting that forward. You’re leaning on the generosity rather than the discomfort.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, it goes beyond you, right? It’s outside of you. It’s not just what you’re doing and trying to make a living, and all that sort of thing. I talk about this a lot in the work I do too, it’s about giving to your community and the value that you deliver in the marketplace.

It may not just be in the marketplace. As you say, it may go well beyond that in terms of a ripple effect or how people feel about what’s going on in their own lives. So I love that.

Sophie Lechner: Yeah. So it brings on a different way of thinking and being that then allows the rest of the model to work for you?

Elise Holtzman: I think a lot of lawyers don’t automatically go to that sort of thing. They’re very focused—understandably so, because this is their strength for many lawyers—on the here and now, the practical, driving things across the finish line.

I think that—and I fall into that category for sure—I like the idea of opening ourselves up a little bit more to this idea that each one of us has an impact. And what does that look like? I think that can be very, very motivating for all of us.

So, Sophie, as we start to wrap up our time here together, there’s a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. There’s a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge, where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others.

When it comes to standing out as an expert on LinkedIn—really enabling you to reach your clients, prospects, and community—what’s a principle or piece of advice that may seem extremely obvious to you at this point but is important for people to hear?

Sophie Lechner: I think it’s this whole idea, especially for lawyers, where there are so many of us—of them—is this idea of “I am different because I am who I am.” So really digging deep into who am I, why am I here, and why am I doing this will become your differentiation.

It’s not about the degrees you have. It’s not about the specific skills you have. It’s the passion that you bring. Especially when you think about clients choosing a lawyer, how do you choose a lawyer? That’s a tough question.

When there’s trust, when that connection is created, that’s when you find the clients come to you. So that’s what I would really encourage lawyers to lean into a lot. I can see how that would be uncomfortable at first or how they wouldn’t believe it. But I’ve had so many people come to me and say, "Listen, since I’ve started sharing this, everything’s different."

Elise Holtzman: I think there is a lot of reluctance, and I do agree with you that when people are open to it and willing to lean into it a little bit, the results can really be remarkable.

Sophie, thank you so much for being here today. It’s been wonderful talking to you. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in.

If you’ve enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We’ll see you next time.