"Marketing Your Firm on the Net: The Next Step"
ABA Techshow 2000: Chicago, Illinois
Some 10,000 law firms have Web sites now. Your law firm web site needs to stand out. Two Internet marketing geniuses (and LawMarketing Members) discerned trends and offered marketing tips to help.
The speakers were:
- Peter Krakaur of Glasser LegalWorks In San Francisco. The former Director of Strategic Alliances of Findlaw.Com, Peter also operates Legal Ethics.Com web site, at http://www.legalethics.com.
- Greg Siskind, a lawyer with Siskind, Susser, Haas & Devine in Cordova. He was one of the first lawyers in the country to set up a web site for his practice. His VisaLaw immigration web site at gets 97,000 "hits" per week.
New Purposes for Law Firm Web Sites: Krakaur observed that the initial aim of law firm web sites was to attract new clients. But a trend has emerged in which firms are putting their Web sites to different purposes, such as:
- Attracting recruits, because law firms are finding that most of their traffic comes from law schools.
- Serving existing clients by using Extranets to allow secure document exchange.
- Reaching out to the media by placing statistics about the firm and newsworthy content on the Web.
- Branding the firm by setting out unique graphics, content and attorney bios online.
"You may not attract clients with a brochure-like Web site," Siskind said. "Instead, you should focus on specific areas of law, as VisaLaw focuses on immigration, or focus your site on recruiting." Siskind said that the Chicago law firm D'Ancona & Pflaum does an excellent job of promoting its summer associate program, spinning recruiting information to a separate site. See http://www.dancona.com.
Move to a database environment on your Web site. Most law firm web pages are coded in static HTML, so that every page appears the same whenever it is viewed. In contrast, with a database-driven site, the pages are created "on the fly" every time their content is updated. Information like lawyer bios can be updated easily without the need to know any HTML coding. "This saves a lot of time when you are updating the site," Siskind said. However, he noted that it is initially very costly and time-consuming to transfer static information into a Web database. Siskind said that the Wilson Sonsini web site athttp://www.wsgr.com was a good example of a database-driven site. For the techies, Krakaur recommend Web database software called Cold Fusion by Allaire Corporation (see http://www.allaire.com)
Turn Your Web Site into a Portal. Most law firm web site content is propaganda about the firm. But in a new trend, law firms are expanding into information portals, and offering content on a particular area of law. Siskind said the Wilson Sonsini site is a one-stop site for entrepreneurs, for example. Siskind's site is an immigration law portal. "We will see more of that as law firms target a particular industry," Siskind said.
Make Web content viewable on Palm Pilots. Millions of marketers are using these handheld organizers (I have a wireless Palm VII myself). Last February Siskind's law firm became the first law firm to make their web content available for downloading to Palm OS and Windows CE devices. Users of these devices can now receive Siskind's Immigration Bulletin automatically every time they sync the device. They created a specially-formatted version of the newsletter that can be easily read on a Palm-size screen.
The newsletter already has 26,000 subscribers. The Palm version is stripped down to plain text and no graphics. The newsletter then can be downloaded from his Web site "just as you would download a news story."
Put your firm's content on OTHER web sites. Some law firms have taken the first step to do this, by establishing links to the firm site on other web sites. Siskind suggested law firms should now figure out ways to put the content itself on other sites, especially non-law sites. "It's a great way to pair up lawyers with non-lawyers," he said.
For example, Siskind is the immigration expert on Monster.Com. He sends the site a package of articles regularly. Also, every Wednesday at 1 PM, he participates in an online chat where he answers general questions about immigration law. However, "when they want answers on their individual case, I recommend they hire a lawyer," he said.
He also sends a package of immigration articles to the Silicon Valley Bank web site. This bank has 6,000 customers and focuses on startup tech companies. He noted that 1/3 of the Silicon Valley work force is foreign-born and they need immigration advice.
Krakaur said the some law firms guard their Web content, and require visitors to request an article by E-mail. This is a mistake and makes it too hard to get. "These law firms are behind the times," he said. "They will miss the Internet opportunities. You want to get your information in front of as many eyeballs as possible." For example, when he was at Findlaw.Com, he created the FindLaw Library, https://library.findlaw.com. FindLaw collects copies of articles from law firm web sites and makes them available on Findlaw.com, which gets an incredible 30 million page views a month. Law firms can set out their articles on the FindLaw for free. "Think of your content distribution strategy more broadly," Krakaur said. "You want clients to find you and your content on other people's sites."
Get Publicity by Making Reprint Permission Easy. Print publications are turning to Web sites to find articles to reprint. When Siskind gets a call from an editor, he freely gives them reprint permission supplies a credit line. "They can reprint anything they want from my web site and they will have a constant source of content," he said. He gives blanket reprint permission so the editor doesn't need to ask permission every time he wants an article. As a result, Siskind's content is all over the Web.
Check the Statistics about your Site and Boost Your Traffic. Krakaur said law firms can find out what sites are linking TO them, by going to the AltaVista.Com search page and typing in "links [your Web URL]". "This will identify the audience that is interested in your site," he said. He said you should use this technique to see who's linking to your competitor's sites.
Marketers should use a good Web site traffic report program, like Web Trends or Live Stats, to measure visits to your site. These programs read the Web site's log and report the results as "page views" and "unique visitors," which are the true measure of traffic. The reports will also show where visitors are coming from so that if your visitors are mainly from law schools, you can tweak your recruiting information.
Once you have identified your primary visitors, then you should check out other sites that visitors use. For example, "if you use your site for recruiting, then you should visit sites where the recruits are going" -- like Infirmation.Com and the Greedy Associates message board. "All you need is one bad post on the Greedy Associates board, and it'll counteract your $100,000 recruiting campaign," Krakaur said.
Search Engines. Krakaurer said law firms should use services like Submit-It to make sure they are registered with the search engines. Marketers should be sure to follow up, by checking the Web traffic reports to see which search engines are sending the most visitors to the law firm site.
Siskind reminded the audience to insert Metatags in their Web pages. Metatags are key words that use HTML coding to make them visible to search engines but invisible to regular visitors. He added that updating your Web pages frequently will also improve your results in search engine reports, because the search engines rank recently-modified pages higher.
Put Your Calendar Online. Siskind keeps his appointments on the Web using Yahoo's online calendar at http://calendar.yahoo.com. Only he can see the details of his appointments, but the public view of the calendar shows blocks of time of when he is "busy." It coordinates with his Palm Pilot so he only puts in information once. "Clients love it," he said. "By viewing my calendar, clients can see when I'm free for appointments and can plan accordingly. Marketing is all about relationships and making clients feel good about hiring you."
Mind-It Buttons. Siskind said law firms can increase return visits by putting these buttons on their sites. For a sample, see the LawMarketing Portal at http://www.lfmi.com/best/bestindex.html Here's how it works: if a visitor wants to be notified about when a particular web page has changed, they simply type their E-mail address in the Mind-It Button. Mind-It automatically monitors that page and when it changes, it sends out an e-mail notice.
Ethics. State bars are becoming overwhelmed by trying to regulate law firm Web sites. Krakaur said the strictest states from an ethical standpoint are Florida and Texas. Marketers who have specific questions can find a collection of state advertising rules and opinions at http://www.legalethics.com.
Finally, Siskind and Krakaur said smart marketers should join the LawMarketing Listserv and visit the LawMarketing Portal.