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 In many ways they are, and although both terms are in common usage today, I argue that both concepts are outdated.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.

Nearly every potential client that contacts you attempts to find you on the internet before they make the call. If they don’t before they make the call, then they do before they come to your office. If not before they come to your office, then certainly before they hire you.

Your website is like you office. Once a potential client visits it, they feel like they have already met you, or at least they should.

For all of the above reasons, you need a web presence. If you don’t, some other lawyer in your jurisdiction will take good care of the clients that should have been yours.

But what kind of web presence do you need? Do you need a website? Do you need a blog? What is the difference?

The answers are yes, yes, and a lot.

A DUI lawyer website, in its conventional sense, is a collection of one or more pages that rarely change. They might talk about your firm, your lawyers, your defense philosophy, and even explain a little bit about the law.

A DUI lawyer blog on the other hand is a dynamic and ever-changing publication that talks about anything and everything that might interest your clients and potential clients, and even other lawyers.

If you rely on a non-attorney to update your website content and/or blog that appears to be in your voice, you best check yourself before you wreck yourself. Why? Your clients and potential clients want to know who you are. When they go to your firm’s website, it is as if they visited the four walls of your office. They have looked at your diplomas. They have seen your collection of certificates, framed bar admissions, and seen that you have an extensive library of law books. But they don’t know you… at least not in your own voice.

Your blog posts should be in your voice, talking to your audience. You wouldn’t let your best paralegal address a judge on a phone conference while pretending to be you. Why would you ever allow somebody else to write something that will be seen by everybody who looks for you, and put your name on it? Not a great writer? Don’t have time? It bores you? It’s beneath you? Your time is far too valuable?

To all of those excuses, I say you can’t afford not to. If you don’t have time now, you will later as your flow of new cases starts to dry up. If writing in your own voice bores you, what can you do to make yourself more interesting to yourself? There are few greater uses of your time when it comes to marketing that writing content for the Internet. This is because the content is always there, always accessible.

You may spend twenty hours preparing a speech to a CLE or a rotary meeting, but once given, will anybody really hear it again? With a blog, users can access it at 3am when their pending DUI case is keeping them up. Your voice and your words can give them comfort and hope. Write a good article on a good blog, and I guarantee that more people will see it than even the most attended DUI CLE in the history of the universe.

You don’t have to blog like crazy. In fact you don’t have to even call it blogging. But if you aren’t contributing fresh content on a regular basis to the online conversation about DUI law (at a minimum of twice a month), people are going to start to wonder why. It may not bother some people, but others, particularly younger ones, are going to think that you are either out of touch or that you are too busy. Being too busy in the eyes of the younger demographic is not a good thing, and you don’t want your potential clients to mistakenly believe that you are spread too thin before they even contact you.

My thoughts about ghost-bloggers: Many attorneys use the practice of hiring ghost writers to do their blogging for them. I’m in no way suggesting that you get rid of any inside or outside copywriters that you have. What I do suggest is to redefine their role. Instead of writing in your voice as if by you, why not give them their own voice? Let them write under their own by-line or blog account. Then the things that they say that are nice about you will be better received. Your blogger will probably appreciate getting the credit. You will never get stuck with something attributed to you that you didn’t mean to say. And your readers will love it. They want to hear from you once they get to know you, but they are open to good information regardless of its source.

Have a receptionist who likes to write? Let her blog about things that she can observe that make you and your office look good. Perhaps there was a time when you were running a little late coming back from court, and you didn’t want to keep your valued client waiting, so you skipped lunch, ran up the stairs and burst into the office right on time. There’s no legal value to such a story, but trust me, your clients and potential clients will love it. They will feel like they are getting to know you and your staff. The more familiar they are with everybody in your office, the more comfortable they will feel and the more likely they are to hire you, and to have good feelings about your firm long after their case is done.

In a future post, I will discuss the various types of blogging platforms. Blogging is easy and for the most part free, but how you set yourself up can make a huge difference in the long-term.