Technology

Why Attorney Websites Are A Waste Of Time For Most Law Firms

How can you better spend money on marketing and client development? Not with a website.

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Let’s assume there are three firms: a solo, a mid-sized firm, and a 700-attorney firm. Each has $100,000 to spend on marketing/client development. Let’s further assume that none of these firms has a website. They could build a cheap one for about $2,000 or they could build a $100,000 monster, or anything in between. Let’s also assume that each firm wants to maximize its return on investment by putting its time and resources into something that will yield the most client return.

Here is generally what types of webpages each firm can get:

A Cheap One:

This website has a couple of stock photos of people sitting at desks, maybe some pictures of the attorneys in front of some legal books. It has an About page, some bios, and a contact page. It’s more of an online résumé.

A Medium-Priced One:

This one might have some more thought put into the design. It looks more professional and includes more pages about Practice Areas, and maybe some Recent Success or Recent News pages. Maybe it has a Media page with some links to some videos. It’s more of an online brochure.

A Monster:

Sponsored

On top of details about the firm and its attorneys, this website has several whitepapers and articles, awards, representative clients, etc. It is also fully SEO loaded and optimized. It’s a big online bragging post.

Now, let’s look at how investing in a website affects each firm.

The Biglaw Firm:

The Biglaw Firm only wants big clients — the Fortune 500 companies, the high-profile client, etc. The type of client who does not make business decisions for their company based on website content. In order for that to be true, there has to exist a conversation like this somewhere:

Hey, CEO, are you done choosing a law firm to handle our legal matters?

Hold on, I’m almost done reading and comparing the whitepapers these two law firms have and preparing a matrix on which firm the most Superlawyers.

Why don’t you just Google each firm to see what others are saying about them or call someone you trust to get a recommendation?

Sponsored

The Mid-Sized Firm:

The mid-sized firm might actually benefit from a website because it is large enough to handle some larger cases, but its lawyers might not have the same reputation as those in a large firm.

Solo Firm:

Solos might also benefit from a good website for the same reason the mid-sized firm would.

Remember though that the original question posed was how to best allocate your resources, not whether websites offer any benefit at all. So, how do you better spend that $100,000 if you want a maximum ROI? The answer is networking events and trying to get referrals.

I should also qualify this by stating that websites are more effective depending on your area of practice. If you do simple wills and trusts or corporate formation, a website might help you. If you are a litigator where your success depends on being better than the litigators on the other side, you should look into more aggressive marketing tools to showcase your qualifications.

Case Study

Now, I’m not really one to call out people’s horrible websites, but not only is this one so bad that it begs to be called out, but I’ve contacted this guy and got no answer for months. So it’s fair game. Let’s assume you are an e-discovery guru or you want to be some kind of legal technology consultant, and you want to pick a really good piece of internet real estate. How about www.lawtech.com? Sounds like a good place to set up a virtual presence. Revel in the Windows 95-ness of that website. Although there is no link to other pages from the home page, check out this page about WinDraft. It makes me immediately want to scroll to the bottom to look for a spinning gif that links to his guestbook.

So, is this guy dead or does he just really like Office 97? Actually, he’s quite alive, and has apparently continued to evolve with the legal technology community. I know because I found this article here on Law Technology News about predictive coding (archived, but referenced also here). He has apparently moved on from hoping people will find his corner of the web and now reaches people by putting himself out as an authority through other marketing efforts.

Conclusion

Websites are great passive marketing tools, but that is all they are. Lawyers should not rely or even focus on passive marketing. Get out into the community. Teach CLE classes. Write for legal websites. There are a lot more opportunities to use the web than having a website, and attorneys should take advantage of all of them and focus their attention on what brings in the greatest ROI.

Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner from San Diego. When not handling his own cases, he’s consulting lawyers on how to use technology to not be boring in trial or managing e-discovery projects in mass torts/complex litigation cases. If you want to be disappointed in a lack of posts, you can follow him on Twitter or on Facebook. If you have any ideas of things you want him to cover, email Jeff at jeff@trial.technology.

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