Does your law practice have an Internet presence? According to a National survey last year, only 61% of readers' practices had Web sites, and of those who didn't, only 27% intended to create one. This, even though legal marketers and business consultants have been saying for years that a Website is an absolute necessity for a modern law practice.
What this means is that if you don't have a Web site, you're already behind thousands of your colleagues who have an active, 24-hour marketing effort underway on the Net. But there's no need to despair: there's still time for you to play catch-up, and with some effort and some assistance, you can be up and running on the Internet in less time than you think.
If you do have a Web site already, that's great - and there's even more good news: few of your competitors have really distinguished themselves online yet. Canadian lawyer Web sites are still in their relative infancy, so you can move to the front of the pack with ingenuity, perseverance, and a dedication to make yourself known to the type of clients you want.
We've spoken to three experts in law firm technology and marketing, and with their help we've assembled a must-read checklist for how to create a dynamic Web site - or to transform your current site into a sure-fire client hit. Not many Web sites meet all the criteria set out below - yours could be one of them.
Your Web site Checklist
1. Be careful with graphics.
First and foremost, your Web site must be useable, say the experts. This means lawyer sites should avoid unnecessary graphics and flashes. "Graphics that don't click through to anything should be ditched," notes Keely Dunn, president of legaltech.ca in Calgary and a legal technology consultant for small- to mid- size firms and sole practitioners. If your clients are clicking on "Skip Intro," it probably means you should do the same. Drop the intro altogether.
Dunn adds that since pictures of gavels and courthouse columns have been so overplayed, they no longer hold any meaning, so lose them too. And don't even mention these bells and whistles to Chicago's Larry Bodine, a marketing and Web consultant. "Flash and animation are appropriate for an amusement park Web site, but on a law firm site, they just slow down research."
Now, all this doesn't mean you can't use graphics at all. Just make sure they reinforce the written word, and remember that some clients might not be able to access them at all. Bodine likes Winston the Bulldog, mascot of the Womble, Carlyle Web site (www.wcsr.com). Winston's story is recounted on the site; he's part of a consistent marketing package. And he's very cute.
2. Provide the basics.
You and your staff know what questions clients usually telephone your firm to ask: what's your postal code? Where can I park? How late is your office open? Ask your receptionist to provide the ten most common questions asked at the front desk, says Ottawa-based lawyer and legal technology consultant Lewis Eisen. Then put that information on your site, under a "Contact Us" or "Frequently Asked Question" banner.
In fact, he says, your Web site should be "a virtual receptionist." A client should be able to go to the site and find out the best way to get in touch with you at that moment (e.g., office phone, cellphone, email) But this means that you need to follow through on those contacts as soon as you can. Not answering e-mails is as offensive to potential and existing clients as not answering telephone calls.
Use this approach with substantive law too. In immigration law, as Eisen points out, "lawyers have to invest a lot of up-front work with clients' questions. Do I qualify? What will it cost?" The same holds true for copyright and trademark law, he adds. In areas such as these, clients can access a great deal of the preliminary information they need from Websites. Then they become educated consumers of your legal services.
3. Strut your stuff.
Clients are looking for information pertinent to their affairs, says Bodine, so provide it to them on your Website. "An executive or in-house counsel wants to see the law firm is familiar with their industry," he notes, so list your representative clients in these areas and provide specific examples of successful transactions and court decisions.
And make sure you relate these examples as interesting business stories, not dry legal events. At www.osler.com, Oslers provides a very effective summary "Representative Work." At www.torys.com, Torys lists brief descriptions of its successes in a "What's Up" section, along with links to "More Transactions" or "Cases."
4. Structure for clients.
Bear in mind a client's perspective, not a lawyer's. Organize the information on your site according to people's problems and their solutions, says Dunn, not around your internal structure or practice groups. For instance, a prospective client who loses her job when she becomes pregnant will come to your site thinking about "discrimination," "pregnancy" and "fired." If your site simply tells her that you have experience in front of employment-related administrative tribunals, she'll move on.
Be careful not to overload your clients either. Don't let yourself be talked into a convoluted site design that looks pretty but impedes clients' ability to get the information they need. This is tougher than you might think: lawyers' intuitive instinct is never to leave anything out. Link wherever you can instead.
5. Design for clients, too.
Select fonts that are easy to read (Arial, Universal, Times). Go easy on bold and italics, and be careful with fancy typefaces, says Dunn. "They tend to make information more difficult to read. Ask yourself if your mother could read it easily." This may sound like a small point, but online readers to have short attention spans; if the reading isn't easy, they'll leave your site and find one that is.
Keep your users' hardware limitations in mind, too. Not everyone has 17-inch screens on their monitors, says Eisen, yet many lawyer Websites are designed to be viewed on them. Make sure your site resizes automatically to fit the display area. And if you're targeting clients outside North America and parts of Europe and Asia, he adds, your intended audience is using earlier and slower technology.
6. Avoid legalese.
This should be self-evident, but there are still some lawyer sites that speak to clients as if they had a law degree and five years' experience in court. And while you're at it, resist the inherent lawyers' problem of long-windedness: the attention span factor also means you need to use plain language. "Written content should be concise and to the point," reminds Dunn.
7. Be a content provider.
The days of Web sites serving simply as law firm brochures are over. The modern lawyer Web site must provide useful data. To strengthen relationships with existing and potential clients, provide legal information or published articles in order to interact with clients, maybe even through a secure client extranet (see #9, below).
Some lawyers are reluctant to provide this level of information for fear their clients will simply take the knowledge they want and stop consulting them. But Dunn points out that information itself is no longer the commodity lawyers are selling, "What we are selling is our ability to work with the information that is out there."
8. It's a marketing tool.
Make your Website part of your marketing arsenal, or put your firm's marketing partner in charge of it, because as Dunn and Bodine both concur, it's a marketing tool. Certainly, involve your IT people if have them: they're familiar with the technology and they can provide solutions to specific concerns. But the central responsibility should lie on the marketing side. Bodine puts it bluntly: "The worst sites are where the IT department runs them."
9. Grow your Web site
"Most firms have moved past the brochure format; they're no longer trying to put a display ad in a multi-page Web site," says Eisen. So if online brochures are yesterday's Web site, what are tomorrow's?
Lawyers' online presence is evolving right now to include full-scale client interactivity. Extranets (client-specific sub-sites containing file information clients can securely access) and Webinars (client seminars conducted over the Internet) are two portents of the future for lawyer Web sites. Forward-thinking law firms are planning theirs now.
Remember, more and more of the clients you want are on the Web, searching for a good lawyer, looking at lawyer sites. Having a good Web site doesn't guarantee they'll contact you – but without a good site, you can be guaranteed they won't.
Jean Cumming is a freelance writer in Toronto.