You’re a thought leader. Here’s how you lose your position of authority.

By Wayne Pollock on October 12, 2026

Attorneys and other professional services providers who don’t put in the work to maintain their authority through ongoing thought leadership risk losing it.

Think about a professional athlete at the top of their game. They didn’t get there by accident, and they don’t stay there by accident either. The day they stop training, their conditioning and skills slip.

Slowly at first—so slowly that they might not even notice. But soon, that slippage picks up. Their competitors notice, their coaches notice, and you can be sure the scoreboard notices too.

I recently spoke with an attorney who worked hard to build his reputation in a niche. He published thought leadership regularly, spoke at conferences, and became well-known in his niche. Then he got busy with his practice, and his writing and speaking ground to a halt.

When he inquired about my firm’s thought leadership strategy and ghostwriting services, I asked him, “Why are you looking to get help with your thought leadership production? You’re at the top of your niche.”

“Because I want to stay there,” he said.

He recognized a phenomenon that, based on my experience, few attorneys and other professionals do: Unfortunately for those who achieve it, prominence, authority, and market leadership aren’t forever. They can be fleeting if you don’t work to maintain them.

And this attorney knew consistently producing thought leadership was the most effective way to maintain his prominence, authority, and market leadership.

When you achieve a position of authority but take your foot off the pedal and don’t put in the work to maintain it, you’ll face four consequences—some with implications beyond hampering your marketing and business development efforts.

Consequence #1: You’ll lose mindshare

Your target audience is busy. In-house counsel, referral sources, reporters, conference organizers, and just anybody else you’re trying to reach with your thought leadership are buried in information every day. When a legal or business issue pops up, they’re more likely to think of attorneys they’ve seen publish articles, videos, and LinkedIn posts recently than those who last published something 18 months ago.

Mindshare is rented, not owned, and the rent comes due every month. When you stop showing up in the marketplace because you’re not producing thought leadership regularly, nobody sends you a heads-up that they’ve noticed you’re not publishing thought leadership as much as you used to. You just stop getting as many calls and emails from past, current, and prospective clients and referral sources as you once did.

Consequence #2: You’ll have fewer opportunities to think about and communicate developments in your field

Regularly writing about developments in your practice area or the industry you serve forces you to keep up with new case law, regulatory changes, trends, and shifts in how your clients think about risk, among other topics that keep you sharp and knowledgeable.

When you produce thought leadership regularly, you’re forced to stay apprised of these developments and to regularly distill your thoughts so you can communicate them through your articles, videos, podcasts, and other forms of content.

When you stop consistently producing thought leadership, you forfeit opportunities to survey developments in your practice areas/industry served, think about them, and communicate those thoughts.

Of course, by handling client matters, you’ll still stay abreast of developments that could affect those matters and your clients and communicate them to your clients. But you won’t dig deeper to find material for regularly produced thought leadership because you won’t have to, and you certainly won’t get reps thinking through those topics, forming opinions, and expressing them to your target audiences outside of those you get when you’re speaking with clients.

Consequence #3: Your analytical and communication muscles will atrophy

On a related note, there’s an old saying that you don’t really know what you think until you write it down. Writing about an issue affecting your clients forces you to understand it better. It also gives you a chance to organize your reasoning, anticipate counterarguments, connect the dots to uncover larger themes, take a position, and see trends emerge.

Keeping these muscles in shape pays dividends outside the thought leadership realm because it helps you stay sharp and think on your feet in client meetings, new business presentations, negotiations with opposing counsel, and the courtroom. When you stop writing, you lose opportunities to get these reps, just like an athlete loses reps hitting baseballs or shooting threes when they stop practicing.

Your thinking skills and your analytical abilities won’t magically disappear when you slow your thought leadership production, but they may become less sharp.

Consequence #4: You open yourself up to other people claiming the authority mantle

When you slow your thought leadership production, you practically invite a competitor to nudge you out of the position of authority you hold in the marketplace.

You see this play out with professional athletes. Normally, when a starter sits out because of an injury, the backup gets a chance. Most of the time, the backup plays decent at best, and the starter gets their position back when they’re healthy again.

But sometimes the backup plays well enough that the starter never gets their job back. Tom Brady, anybody? He’s one of the greatest NFL quarterbacks of all time, if not the greatest. He started as a backup for the New England Patriots early in his career in the early 2000s and became the starter only when the Patriots’ starting quarterback, Drew Bledsoe, got injured. He never gave up that position again and became a transcendent player.

The marketplace works the same way. Another attorney—probably dozens—is always ready to become the go-to person in your practice areas or the industries you serve. If you slow down or go dark with your thought leadership, you’re inviting them to grab your spot on the authority mantle. Once general counsel, would-be referrers, or reporters call them instead of you, you’re likely losing your position of authority and will have to work to regain it and displace them.

The long road back to the top of the hill

Ironically, you’ll almost certainly have to work harder to regain your position as an authority in your practice areas/industries than you would to maintain it.

You don’t have to be an athlete who takes six months off because of an injury to understand this. Anyone who’s taken a few weeks off from the gym—or, let’s be honest, a few months or years off—knows how hard it is to return to the peak shape you were in before you stepped away. But take a few days off, or even a week or two, and it’s easy to get back into the groove.

Thought leadership is no different. When you take a hiatus, your writing habits fade. You lose the efficiency you’ve developed when thinking through topics and putting them on paper. Your relationships with editors go cold. Your pipeline of ideas dries up. And more importantly, your audience moves on.

Restarting your thought leadership efforts after a long break takes far more time and energy than keeping a steady pace. Consistent thought leadership is never as time-intensive as starting and stopping, which forces you to play catch-up—and may cost you revenue while you’re out of sight.

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The importance of maintaining your authority through thought leadership

Many attorneys think they don’t have enough time to consistently produce thought leadership. Client work always comes first, and demands on their time keep coming, whether it’s additional marketing and business development efforts or life outside the office.

But maintaining a position of authority in the marketplace doesn’t require the same intensity as building one. A realistic pace to maintain your authority status is likely one substantive article in a third-party media outlet every four to eight weeks, with maybe a few shorter pieces in between, such as a LinkedIn post, a client alert, or a blog post.

To build your position of authority, I’d recommend producing one substantive article in a third-party media outlet every two to four weeks, with shorter pieces in between.

(Remember, one good idea can often become several pieces of content. Once you’ve created content on a topic, you can ask a colleague to help repurpose it into different formats. And of course, you can collaborate with an internal colleague or external partner to strategize your thought leadership and even ghostwrite it, minimizing the time you spend building or maintaining your authority and making consistent thought leadership easier and more sustainable.)

Going back to the athlete analogy I started with above, the most successful athletes with the longest careers don’t train hard for one season and then coast. They never really stop training and improving their skill set. Conditioning, practice, and skill improvement are all part of their job.

Your reputation in the marketplace and your quest to position yourself as a thought leader and an authority work the same way. If you’ve reached the top of the mountain, or you’re just about there, you’ve already done the hard work of getting from zero to one.

Ongoing thought leadership is how you maintain that position. If you slow down or stop, you’re likely to roll down that mountain, losing mindshare, falling behind on developments in your field, causing your analytical and communication muscles to atrophy, and perhaps worst of all, giving competitors the opportunity to claim for themselves the position of being the leading authority in your field.

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