In November 2009, the American Bar Association put together its Law Firm Marketing Strategies Conference. The conference featured AboveTheLaw founder David Lat, and included interviews and presentations by several law firm marketing professionals including:
While there is a wealth of information from these presentations and interviews, I was particularly impressed by Avvo's Mark Britton's presentation:
Ranking the Raters/Rating the Rankers, Avvo from THELAW.TV on Vimeo.
While I'm not taking a position on Avvo's lawyer rating model, Mark's understanding of the evolution of consumers' use of the web, and specifically legal consumers' use of the web, is on the leading-edge.
As the web, and more specifically search engines, move in the direction of trust, localization, and real-time, the value of participation in platforms like Avvo will continue to grow rapidly. Claiming, optimizing, and participating on Avvo, LawFirms.com, and other profile-based online-legal-social sites is a proven way to market law firm online.
While a year can sometimes be an eternity when it comes to web technology, the information presented at the ABA's 2009 Strategy Conference is even more relevant today than it was a year ago. The key messages of:
Are more and more important to developing a successful web presence for yourself as a legal professional. Unfortunately, many legal professionals are still behind when it comes to growing their practices through web strategy. Whether it be a lack of understanding, a resistance to change, or merely a lack of time, there really is no legitimate excuse for not taking advantage of the benefits that law firm Internet marketing strategies provide.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
