For Lawyers
Community Is The New Marketing

Smart lawyers realize that the decision to hire them is stressful, and, depending on the case and the stakes, may be the single biggest bet of that client’s life. Sophisticated clients know that hiring the right lawyer can drastically sway the odds in their favor, but hire the wrong lawyer and the consequences can devastate the rest of their lives.

Community-building is the most efficient form of law-practice building.

There is nothing that a lawyer can say to give a would-be client ultimate confidence in his or her decision. But there are many things that law firms can do to stack the deck in their favor and create a bond of trust early on.

Most lawyers think of marketing and advertising as the same thing. In many ways they are, and although both terms are in common usage today, I argue that both concepts are outdated.

In a local legal environment, if all lawyers market and advertise and do nothing else, then the lawyer with the best overall advertising should have the best flow of business.

The Third Element

There is, however, a third element that is much more powerful than simply delivering a one-way message about you and your firm. It’s creating a community into which you weave yourself and your firm as a trusted expert and advisor.

Sites like avvo.com and yelp have helped the legal profession take a big step forward towards community. Unlike advertising, on review sites like these, professionals can’t directly control the messages about them. While bar associations have historically been ineffective at weeding out predatory practitioners and incompetents, the online community is not.

The Times Have Changed

Until recently, maintaining a good reputation required little more than having a “decent” web presence and burying negative reviews (using a practice commonly referred to as “reputation management”). I submit that the above is no longer enough to survive and thrive online. In fact, it’s only a beginning.

Your potential clients want to know you and trust you before they ever see you in person and shake your hand. They know that you can say anything about yourself that you want on websites that you control, and they are right to be skeptical about the lies that lawyers commit, or information they omit, when their web presence is the equivalent of a one-way megaphone.

Your potential clients what to read what you write. They want to understand you. Not only must they be sure that you know what you are doing, but they also must be sure that they like you as a person on some level. They want to see how you treat people. They want to hear you argue and defend a position. They want to feel your passion. And if they don’t feel all this, then no matter how many visitors your website attracts (or how much traffic you buy), they will not take the most important step of reaching out and making contact with you.

How do you create community? There are a number of ways, but as a start, you must be a part of one.

Find like-minded practitioners and start engaging them in public conversations and debate. You might limit your practice to San Francsico, for example, and this is great because it leaves you with a huge pool of other lawyers with which to form your community.

Who Is Your Legal Community?

Legal Marketing Doesn't Have To Be Painful

Every law firm that is outside of the geographic area where you practice is a potential collaborator and community member. Every law firm in your local area that doesn’t compete for the same clients in the same practice specialties is also a potential community member.

Once you have formed your community, you need to start talking, sharing and commenting. You, the lawyer, must take an active role in this. While most attorneys think of advertising and marketing as something that they outsource to professionals, community building is different. To successfully grow your practice you need not possess any technical skills beyond being able to type or dictate in English. Here are the basic steps to successful community building once you have located your network:

1. Write interesting stuff. Which requires point number 2, which is;
2. Read what other lawyers are saying. Understand them. Engage them. You are not in a bubble, and you must read/listen more than you write/talk.

These are the basics. In the coming months, we will be unveiling our LawLytics application, which will make building a top-quality legal community easy, intuitive and fun. For more information on how LawLytics will change the way lawyers think and talk about their practices, and to receive infrequent updates, use the box to the right to subscribe to our newsletter, and check back often.

If you are like me, you probably get at least one cold call a day from somebody trying to sell you “SEO.” They claim to have a relationship with google. They claim to know Google’s algorithm. Some even try to claim that their own excrement doesn’t smell… and that’s all just in the first breath before you get to say anything. Sound familiar?

There have been an alarming number of companies recently, when questioned during these calls (yes, sometimes I don’t just hang up), who either admit or even use as a selling point the fact that they have “relationships with thousands of websites that have high page rang where they will buy links back to your site.”

BIG RED FLAG!

First problem: I seriously doubt there are “thousands” of high-page-ranked URLs that are relevant to a DUI practice. Even if there were thousands, I can’t imagine that there are thousands selling links and still able to maintain their high page rank.

Second problem: Assuming problem number one above, then it appears that they would be purchasing links on pages that aren’t directly relevant. Ever seen a children’s learning toys site with a link to a DUI attorney? It just looks and smells suspicious, right? It’s an irrelevant link.

Third problem: Paid links are blatant attempts to manipulate the results of the search engines. Do you like it when your client’s or prosecutors try to manipulate you? Of course not! What makes you think that the search companies like it when you try to manipulate them?

The probability is, buying links to try to artificially influence the ranking of your website can spell big trouble. It may even get you demoted or banned by some search engines. And rightfully so, I might add.

A quick case study on how to waste your money on useless or short term website manipulation:

I have a client who is engaged in a reputation management battle that is so serious it threatens to hobble his ability to attract and keep educated clients if not solved. He has suffered a multi prong attack on his reputation through the use of complaints websites. He engaged a rep management firm who has set up a series of splogs (spam blogs that essentially steal or duplicate content across the web) to propagate articles containing his name and his firm’s name. Sometimes, the exact article will appear on thousands of splogs, all with no or low page rank, and all of a general nature.

For example, an article about this DUI attorney might appear right before an article on a laundromat and right after an article touting the fact that the kids working in a local pizzeria have stopped humping the pizza dough. All of the articles are obviously damage control.

No surprise, this firm’s reputation management campaign is not working as promised. Instead of realizing that they may be using a bad strategy, the lead attorney decided to lean harder on the firm, who continued to promise great things. For just a little more money, the would buy hundreds of links and “drizzle” them in. Of course, it would cost the firm even more for the links. In my opinion, it will end up costing the firm more than just the cash they will be out for the useless or sleazy links.

If you want to build something good, you must start with a good foundation.

If good search engine optimization were truly that easy, everybody would just buy links. If everybody did it, everybody would benefit proportionally, and nobody would get ahead.

Firms looking for a quick short term gain may be able to profit for a little while by black hat tactics such as buying links, but in the end the progress will be backwards. It has to be. The search engines will continue to improve, and part of that improvement necessarily means eliminating or demoting sites that seek to manipulate.

Did you earn your law degree overnight? Was it cheap? Was there a trick to passing the bar that was so easy anybody could do it with a little money and the help of a cold-caller? Of course not! Why do you think the guy that cold-calls you about your web marketing can offer you such a thing. You are a lawyer, so what makes you so blind or dumb to buy into promises on the level which would get you disbarred if you made them about your clients’ cases?

Let me tell you two things they apparently missed at most law schools:

1) There is no free lunch. It might seem free for a while, but eventually it will make you sick, and then your medical bills will end up costing you more than the sensible and reasonably priced lunch would have.

2) Everything worth doing takes patience and time.

That’s it. Demand of the person or company that is doing internet marketing for you what you demand of yourself in you practice. Excellence. No short cuts. In the mad dash to compete online, don’t lose your cool, and don’t fall victim to anybody trying to sell you paid links.

Sincerely,

Dan Jaffe