Mandy & Disability, SEND Law
Mandy Aulak is the co-founder of Talem Law, an award-winning law firm specialising in employment law, special educational needs, and Disability (SEN) Law.
Her inspiring personal story has had a tremendous impact on the way she lives and breathes her practice.
Mandy Aulak, Co-founder of Talem Law
About Mandy’s legal career
Mandy started her legal career in private practice (with a training contract in Linklaters and 6 years as an associate in Pinsent Masons). She then went in-house, joining the employment team of the Royal Mail Group for 4 years.
She finally co-founded Talem Law in 2017 with a focus on certain practice areas.
Before joining the program
Mandy experienced the following issues with growing her social media presence.
She:
Was struggling to be consistent with her social media usage
Found it hard to target the right audience for her practice area and needed direction as to how to build a qualified audience
Was lacking the time to make the best use out of social media and build habits
Did not know how to purposefully build an audience of potential customers
Wanted to share thought leadership pieces about her practice area in a way that was engaging and novel
Wanted to link her own personal story of being the mum of an autistic child to how it led her to build her practice and build authenticity in her message
Knew her posts on LinkedIn did not get a lot of traction (a few hundreds per post on average)
Business objectives when joining
We listed Mandy’s business objectives ahead of starting:
Have more employers clients’ relation to disability in the workplace related issues
Productising an offering about reasonable adjustments in the workplace
Having impact in disability and disrupt the vision of how employers make reasonable adjustments through the Talem Law template
Create an authentic voice and develop a quality network
The Program
Defining the niche
We defined the niche and content strategy that Mandy was going to focus on as part of the program.
We figured that Mandy’s uniqueness was in the ability to be a personal advocate for disability and educational needs based on her own personal story of raising an autistic child.
We decided to split the content strategy into two pillars:
80% focus on disability in the workplace: targeting primarily an audience of HR, DE&I officers, and in-house employment teams
20% SEN law: discrimination in the classroom due to disability - primarily targeting an audience of parents of children with SEN needs
Getting Started
Mandy had a strong start with implementing an immediate framework that paid off in the long term:
She introduced a myth busting post about reasonable adjustments
She repurposed her Monday myth busters and Friday fiction or fact posts as personal posts instead of company page posts
She used the comic as a key medium and differentiator to talk about her practice area
The three elements combined triggered:
An immediate spike in the engagement rate
Habit building in her audience (because the audience knew that at least Mondays and Fridays they would get something from her)
Mandy had a great start - which ultimately gave her the confidence and strength to double down on her content.
She started to post 4-5 a week on average and continuously build up momentum and diversify visual content beyond her signature comics.
Results
Within month 1 of the program, Mandy had already:
Reached 76K views
Collected 957 likes and shares and 359 comments
Landed a new instruction on a contentious matter
Was invited to be a guest in two different podcasts
Generated two leads to work with big organisations
Landed a speaking opportunity in a European conference
Grown her audience by almost 20%
Mandy’s results in month 1
In month 2 of the program, Mandy had:
Dramatically increased the performance of each post (reaching 2K-3K per post on average VS a few hundreds previously)
Kept generating other opportunities
Grown her audience by an extra 20%
By the end, Mandy had:
Doubled her audience size (from 1,666 to 3,000)
Established her profile as a strong advocate and legal voice for SEN law
Being listed for her practice in the Women Who Will 2022 Report for her inspirational work in employment law
Realised her superpower in niching down her content for her practice area without further need to branch out to general employment law
Extract from the Women Who Will 2022 Report
Mandy is the primary example of what practicing with purpose and creating an instantly recognisable signature content can lead to.
Generating business opportunities, growing an audience, and building recognition in a specific practice area
Mandy’s full review
“In short, fantastic! Everything and more that I wanted”
“I have been following Sarah on social media, namely Instagram for a few years and have been watching her creativity unfold. I was always so impressed by her posts and how she made complex legal ideas more memorable and easy to take on board.
So when I saw that she was running a legal design coaching programme, I jumped at the chance as it was the perfect time for me in my own creative and business journey and I was keen to learn from Sarah.
Her coaching programme has been everything and more that I wanted and in short, it was fantastic! I learnt so much from Sarah. She is generous with her time and knowledge and is always cheering her clients on. I was so motivated during her coaching programme and continue to be.
I am now posting with purpose and a strategic plan and producing some content that I am very proud of even if I say so myself! I absolutely loved her programme. Sarah is a smart, intelligent person and she is so ahead of the game, recognising early on the power of social media for lawyers in not only marketing, building their brand but in training and teaching too.
I really don’t think any lawyer can ignore social media and this is why in my opinion, her coaching programme is a must for legal professionals. It was a great investment for me and I can not praise Sarah enough.
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