2012

anirbanc

eDynamic

8/9/2012

Website Considerations for Law Firms

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Table of Contents

Introduction----------------------------------------------------Page 3

User Experience-----------------------------------------------Page 3

Biographies-----------------------------------------------------Page 8

Search------------------------------------------------------------Page 11

Client Acquisition---------------------------------------------Page 15

Microsites-------------------------------------------------------Page 17

Mobile------------------------------------------------------------Page 20

Conclusion------------------------------------------------------Page 24

Abstract The legal industry is changing—global mergers and consolidation, new web, email and social

technologies are evolving dynamically along with new expectations from clients as well as employees.

Digital capabilities, particularly a firm’s website, provide the first tool to engage existing clients, new

clients and employees. But for more than a decade, law firms have considered their websites as just

another brochure, not as a way for clients to interact with the firm. Law firms must establish an online

presence to promote their brand, facilitate better engagement between the brand and the consumer,

recruit new talent and ultimately, acquire new clients.

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INTRODUCTION When we talk about “Marketing the Law Firm”, there are many aspects to it. The days of relying purely

on “word of mouth” to grow your practice has faded into inconspicuous obscurity. The Internet has now

become the new yellow page and so much more. Digital Marketing has added a whole new dimension to

Law Firm Marketing, it has revolutionized the way you reach your audience - when they need you, and

show them the value you can provide.

The website is probably the most important component of the overall digital experience, others being

email, mobile, social media and many more. Website is typically the first thing that people would like to

take a look at when they are considering some sort of engagement with your brand. In a recent survey

of general counsel, 100% of respondents indicated that they always review a firm's website when

evaluating and purchasing legal services, while 90% of respondents reported that lawyer biographies are

the most important section of a law firm's website. Amidst the big buzz about social media, websites still

remains the mainstay of a Law Firm’s online presence. Whether via Google, word of mouth referrals or

any other source prospective clients come to your website to know about the Firm’s experience, track

record and determine whether your attorneys have the required expertise to meet their needs.

This white paper will explore some of the key focus areas, points to remember, some quick fixes and

tangible things that a Law Firm marketer can do on a short term basis, which are essential and can add

considerable value to your Law Firms website from a strategic point of view.

USER EXPERIENCE User Experience has a huge impact on how people perceive your organization, how they perceive your

brand and how they are able to engage with it because as already mentioned in most of the cases

website provides the first impression or the first engagement that people have with the brand.

Recently Forrester did a survey research which involved reviewing 15000 websites to determine how

these websites will meet the baseline requirements form a user experience perspective. The result

shows only 3 % (45) earned a passing score. This ascertains the fact that while most websites are

remaining static the expectation of clients and customers are moving forward very quickly.

User experience is the combination of a variety of things. It encompasses a broad range of disciplines

like branding, usability, design and Information Architecture with an objective of delivering satisfying

and engaging experience. Usability basically means how people get to use the website, Information

Architecture refers to how the content is structured and presented in the pages and Design helps us to

provide the window dressing around all that information and provides something compelling from a

visual and aesthetics perspective. All of these ultimately result in the satisfaction people get when they

come to the website.

What are the Culprits of Poor User Experience? “Problems with text legibility, task flow, links to privacy and security policies, and use of space have

dominated the top failure list since 2005” - Forrester, 2012

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Things regularly found are:

Crowded page—lack of white space around elements

Misaligned site map—menus do not reflect the importance and relevance of information

Hierarchical menus—difficult to use multi-tier navigation

Deep site navigation—visitors click 3-4 levels to get to the information they seek

Search—overwhelming, irrelevant search results

Sitemap:

From a Sitemap’s perspective, which is about the organization of the structure of your website, the

things that are important are:

Does the order of the main menu reflect what is important to visitors?

Does information hierarchy align with expectations?

The most prominent thing in the site structure should be the thing which is perceived as most important

to the target audience. If you look at the figure above, the high level menu highlights people, practices,

publications & news etc. According to research,” people” – attorneys, law professionals, etc is the

number one place that people go to when they visit a Law firm website second is practices. So “people”

comes right up first in the menu and then comes “practices” and then “publications & news” and so on.

Thus creating the proper order that promotes correct engagement can make it convenient, natural and

bring in the feel good factor.

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Navigation:

From the perspective of Navigation, the things that are important are:

How deep must visitors go to get to what they need?

Do menus support a “first glance” overview of navigation options?

The above figure(a non law website) illustrates the concept of a mega menu, it solves a specific problem

around exposing people to all the options they have without having to go down to each one of those

middle drop downs. You might have experienced sites which have two or more additional dropdown

links where you have to go back and forth to find specific information and this makes the experience

similar to going through a maze in a corn field. Thus the objective of the mega menu is to bring in a flat

structure by exposing all the options and provide a better usability and experience.

Page Structure and Typography It is a combination of a variety of things which involves taking chunks of information and properly

structuring them so that they make the perfect sense. From the perspective of page structure &

typography the things that are important are:

Is the information structured in order as is followed by people’s eyes?

Does it have sufficient white space to make the information stand out?

Is there an appropriate use of font size, type & color and line height to guide the eye?

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The above figure illustrates a bio page from a law firm website. This is basically an example of what not

to do. There is too much information on the page making it difficult to read, it is not aesthetically

pleasing, and in addition to that the main information is surrounded by a lot of details which confuses

the reader in terms of where to start and how you want the eye to follow (or be guided)

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The above figure illustrates another bio page from a different Law firm website here the structure of the

page, the amount of content and even the use of color and type of font insinuates a subtle hint about

where you want to draw your eyes. In this page right below the name you have the key contact

information i,e the phone number. Instead of providing the email address in words they have icons.

Moreover another very important aspect of this page compared to other bio pages (where you may find

a list of links that take you to accolades, affiliations, etc and eventually you get lost amidst a whole lot of

information) is that in here they have provided the overview and some basic tabs on the top specific to

affiliation, honors and speeches. This really provides a much cleaner experience. Then to the right is the

photo which is clear and matches the theme of the page in terms of background, clarity and focus. And

finally below the photo they have given information about education, employment, etc in a compact

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way. All these elements make it a perfect example of a very well executed site in terms of page structure

and typography.

BIOGRAPHIES Biographies are the key thing when it comes to your Law firm websites, it is what that lures the

prospects to your website.

“45 percent of current in-house counsel (current clients) review their attorney’s biography

periodically” - BTI Study, 2011

"56% of website traffic goes to attorney biographies" - The Great Jakes Blog, 2010

The figure above talks about the thought process of clients and customers when they buy/avail the

services of a Law Firm/Lawyer. This can be considered as a scenario when buyers start looking for

different law firms or change the law firm they are doing business with. They initially begin by taking

referrals, they google and research information over the internet, they visit the visit the respective

lawyers websites & biographies and compare the short listed lawyers bios side by side. They may call a

few of them before finally selecting a lawyer over the others because the references where strong and

the experience that the biography presented was current and relevant.

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Thus it is important to get your attorney out there from a find-ability perspective. This essentially means

being easily found in google and making that happen is not very difficult but it does require some

efforts. Given below are a few things that we need to keep in mind for enabling and enhancing the

chances of your attorney’s biographies being found in google.

Another important aspect which is critical when it comes to merchandizing your attorneys is getting

your message delivered – this can be done by the following ways:

Make it personal—start with a great image that engages

Make it convenient—organize information from most commonly viewed to least

Make obvious—the most popular information, like contact details should be at the top

The image or the Photo of the attorney plays a crucial role in the overall look and feel of the biographies,

the pointers given below are essential while considering the best fit image of the your key asset:

Formality is opening up to personality—let your people shine through

Reflect the culture of the firm, while letting the person be the focus

Consider stance, dress, color and overall tone

Do not sacrifice on quality or size—this may be the attorney’s first impression

Show up on Google

Google typically pulls the

first 150 characters in a

lawyer's bio for the search

results

Use the right words

Be descriptive and

differentiating—what

makes you different

Do not forget the links

In-bound and out-

bound links

determine

relevancy

Link to pages

within your sites,

or external articles,

accolades and

news

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Are Ratings and reviews next? – A lot of Law Firms are considering this or having discussions

regarding this. At the present moment this may be somewhat controversial as a topic but it is still

something to be aware of and worth keeping in mind. The phenomenon may be termed as Amazon

Attorneys – only from the stand point that Amazon has really set the bar for this notion of ratings.

All of us have probably gone to Amazon to purchase something and in the process we might have

sorted the listed items on the basis of number of starts or read the reviews to judge the value of the

product. This may be the direction in which the attorney biographies are heading in the near future

as it is going that way for doctors, dentists and other professionals. So more of it may be possible in

future and there is no doubt about the fact that it will definitely provide an opportunity to connect

to your audience. Moreover it can be considered as a differentiator if your law firm decides to step

up and implement it. The first mover advantage is up there for grabbing as very few firms are

actually doing it in a big way.

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SEARCH: Search is the functionality which will allow your readers to search the site for information. This utility

encourages engagement with your web visitors. However it can be one of those prickly areas for a lot of

firms who have older search technologies and did not feel the need to upgrade it. The facts given below

ascertain the importance of search when it comes to site navigation.

"90 percent of companies report that search is the No.1 means of navigation on their site" - Search

Technology: Resurrecting the Web’s Workhorse, Jupiter Media Metrix

"82 percent of visitors use site search to find the information they need" - Specialize Your Site’s Search,

Forrester Research

The figure on the left shows a law firm

website with search in it. They have

made the search appearance obvious

as it is where most people expect

search to be. This is a good example of

implementing search in your Law firm

website.

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A few things which can add value from a search perspective are:

Make it obvious

Put it where people expect

Make it look like a search box

Make it large

Make it large enough hold the longest attorney name or practice

Make it consistent

Same place on every page

Same behavior on every page

In order to make search more effective we need to think from a content perspective as well. This

essentially means – different search for different content. Things like practices & services and general

information like about us, contact us, etc are generally said to be hierarchical content. Then there are

things like biographies, publications, news, events etc these are referred to as flat content. In a typical

firm 20% would be hierarchical content where as rest 80% are flat content.

The website in this figure (not a law

firm) has done a better job when it

comes to search because it is huge

and you cannot miss it. It can

accommodate larger search terms,

names, phrases etc.

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For hierarchical content people prefer using the menu, sub-menu, mega menu, etc which are a part of

the information architecture. In the case of flat contents it is difficult to find the exact information and

narrow down your search. Thus we need to apply filters and use faceted search. Flat contents constitute

large volumes of data and they are associated with many attributes, so filtering by attributes can narrow

the search quickly. Moreover the structure of the advanced search or search by filters should be

consistent as this makes it easier to show specific details in search results.

Another interesting fact which is associated with search is that:

"49 percent of visitors do not bother to reformulate their search queries after the first failed results" -

Jakob Nielsen, 2011

Each successive required search query will lose more visitors and it is evident that getting a first-time

satisfactory search results in greater engagement.

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The key capabilities to get the first-time search results right:

Auto-Suggest

Recommend content that does exist in your website

Synonyms

Make smart substitutions

Auto-correct

Fix misspellings on-the-fly

Avoid “No Results”

Phrase-based searches

Deliver relevant results around multi-word searches

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CLIENT ACQUISITION As far as the Law industry is concerned they have not always considered digital to be the way to acquire

clients. However recent trends show that – this is changing

"80 Percent of executives aged 50 or below will use the internet daily to seek business information

(that figure is still over 60% for those aged over 50)" - Forbes, 2010 - So there is no reason why they

shouldn’t come to your website to seek business information and thus you should bolster your brand

and highlight your attorney’s expertise around some problem solving areas.

"2 million regular readers of the McKinsey quarterly, over 40,000 Facebook fans, and around 40,000

followers on Twitter" - SRC Associates, 2010 - Mckinsey is a great example of a professional services

organization doing a fantastic job of growing their base of fans and readers around their thought

leadership approach.

Your website is the ideal vehicle for thought leadership marketing (TLM) to drive client Acquisition

through engagement. The figure below illustrates how to go about TLM:

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According to Gartner Thought Leadership Marketing (TLM) is:

"The principle of TLM is simple enough: You give away a little valuable intellectual property to

establish your potential usefulness to the client, in the expectation that the client will use your

expertise and services" - Rolf Jester, VP, Gartner, 2010

Practically this means, when you create valuable information in terms of white papers, webinars, blogs,

etc that provides the stimulus for people come to the website and download that white paper or

register for that webinar. Then people will provide you some information about themselves like their

contact information, organization, industry, problem areas etc. (explicitly or implicitly) through these

information we can profile the individual prospects and nurture them accordingly.

In terms of making thought leadership matter to the client the figure given below provides some of the

key takeaways:

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Another thing which is crucial for the thought leadership is the find-ability aspect of it. Given below are a

few considerations for engaging and enticing the audience in terms of thought leadership marketing:

Find-ability (SEO)—prospects use Google search to find solutions to problems

Use industry vernacular that people would use to describe their problem

Use tools like Google Insight and Trends to confirm your key word relevance to a market

Gate the content—require registration before access—they give to get

Follow-up with email to create a closed-loop marketing cycle—create nurturing relationship

MICROSITES Microsites are typically used to add a specialized group of information. The main distinction of a

microsite is its purpose and specific cohesiveness as compared to the broader overall parent website.

The typical characteristic of a microsite is given below:

Small task and message-focused websites

Landing pages (1-2 pages) support lead capture, typically from email or PPC campaigns

Larger micro-sites support branding and SEO campaigns with targeted messaging

Typically are stand-alone with their own URL

The Attorney Microsite - How can Attorneys use them?

Complements the main website biography

Provide greater detail about themselves personally, their matters and documents

Becomes blogging platform to communicate and interact with the public

Each attorney can personalize the experience

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The Practice Microsite - How can Practice use them?

Deliver industry or problem-specific messages to a targeted audience

Build a following around the thought leadership first, firm brand second

Host a moderated forum to support the overall targeted discussion to establish credibility and

trust

Develop deep SEO to drive acquisition in the target market

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Key considerations for Microsites Create unique content

Content duplication (copying) between the main website and the microsites will lower page

rankings within Google for all sites

Inventory obsolete microsites to understand their content when compared to the main site—

these forgotten sites can damage rankings

Keep it focused, keep it simple

Targeted content results in targeted visitors—maintain tight, guided editorial control to reach

the right audience through search

Drive people to take action—register for an event, download a white paper or to call you to

discuss their concerns

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MOBILE It is a big part of the overall strategy for most of the firms.

"The number of SMARTphone users exceeds 100 million within the first three months of 2012" -

comScore, Inc. 2012

"Nearly one in four smartphone owners (or 24%) also using tablets during the first three months in

2012" - comScore, Inc. 2012

Thus it’s evident that Mobile devices have drastically impacted the online landscape. However when it

comes to mobile apps, it has pros and cons and 90% of the times it’s observed there is no particular

need for mobile apps.

Do law firms need Mobile Apps? – Consider this:

Apps are expensive: Must be written for iPhone, Droid, Blackberry

Apps are task-centric: Ideally suited for repetitive tasks people need to perform while mobile

Apps are hard to find: Apps are only found in a market

Apps are cool: They position your firm as future facing

People really need to focus on a mobile optimized site and there are certain ways of accomplishing that

so that the effort that goes on in building this can also be leveraged for other platforms. Figure given

below is a great example of a mobile optimized site. This is a firm base out of Vancouver, Canada and

you can see how beautifully they have organized it through simple menus, clean appearance and with

core functionalities.

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However we really need to ask ourselves – Do we really need the core functionalities in the mobile

optimized sites. As a most of the folks when they have a phone in hand they are primarily looking for

information like address, map, phone number and name.

Adopting a Mobile-first Strategy The Mobile-first strategy is more of thinking about your website from a mobile perspective first and

growing it out from there so that we don’t have to put the cart before the horse – which most of us have

been doing and now with all these tablets, smart phones and other mobile devices coming up we are

scratching our heads figuring out how this is going to work.

This strategy provides us with the mindset that sky is the limit and as more and more new devices come

out, new formats come out – the website is designed to be responsive and adaptive to all these

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“We really need to shift now to start thinking about building mobile first. This is an even bigger shift

than the PC revolution.” - Kevin Lynch, CTO Adobe

“We're just now starting to think about mobile first and desktop second for a lot of our products” - Kate

Aronowitz, Design Director Facebook

Thus we need to think about the website as MOBILE site first and start with mobile as the premise for

our site.

Opportunity: A growing use of tablets and smartphones

Constraints: Screen size, Network speed, Modes of use

Capabilities: Location (GPS), Visual input, Gesturing

Responsive Design All these point us to the notion of Responsive design, where we think of one website instead of separate

mobile and desktop sites. This is a new technology that has come up over the last year or so and is being

adapted very quickly.

One website: Not a separate mobile and desktop site

HTML5 & CSS3: New technologies to create sites that respond to screen sizes and orientation

Future proofing: Do you know what is next?

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The figure above show the example of responsive web design for Boston Globe website – here you can

actually take your browser window and shrink it to see how beautifully it can really change the size into

something that fits into a tablet and also a smart phone.

The above figure illustrates the responsive web design for a Law firm website - Thorsteinssons LLP based

out of Vancouver, Canada. This is a great example of a law firm website changing its size to fit as per the

device requirements.

Finally the figure below provides you with a comparison in terms of separate mobile site vs. Responsive

Web design as per your business needs.

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CONCLUTION An engaging website is a key asset of your overall digital strategy. In order to maximize the contributions

of a website to the Law Firm’s overall marketing, business development and promotional efforts, it is

essential that law firm websites are transformed into best-in-class engaging websites. As the dynamics

of the legal industry is changing it emphasizes the fact that Law firm’s websites have to come out of the

enigma of being static depositories of information. The focus on the key areas mentioned in this white

paper can significantly add enormous value to extract the best out of a law firm website and channelize

the overall digital marketing approach from a strategic point of view.