Alyn-Weiss and Associates Blog

Many law firms upgrading their Web sites are surprised to learn they do not own their online assets. They are forced to pay their original designer and hosting company substantial additional (often nonnegotiable) fees when they want to make a change in who hosts, designs and optimizes a new Web site. The expensive alternative for many has been to start over from scratch with only their content salvageable from their original site. Law firms are not alone in discovering this. Friends of ours in construction, accounting and other professional services firms have run into this problem. In each case, the firms had decided to use new designers to replace sites functioning passively as online brochures (so-called Web 1.0 sites.) The new sites are to generate leads and compete for viewership on the Internet (so-called Web 2.0 sites). In short, you want to make sure your firm owns all of its digital assets. This helps you manage costs and gives you maximum control of your law firm marketing. You want to have a site with programming code that is "open source", not custom, one supported by a large, active and public development community. This allows you to hire anyone you want to work on the site-- not just your original designer and programmer. Examples of open source are Drupal and Joomla. Here's a great article listing the questions to ask anyone you are hiring to create a Web site, and give details of why you should. The shift away traditional media and advertising is inexorable (and is confirmed by our latest national marketing effectiveness survey of law firms). As firms make ever larger investments of time and money in their digital assets the proper handling these transactions is increasingly critical.

Labels: law firm marketing, law firm web sites, online marketing for law firms

Another surprising statistic has appeared as we analyze the results of our latest bi-annual survey of law firm marketing effectiveness-- 77% of the 120 corporate, transactional and defense firms reporting to us say they have received work directly through their Web site. The consumer bar-- PI, bankruptcy, whistleblower and family-- years ago figured out the Web could be a source of desirable cases. It appears the remainder of the bar is now embracing and seeing results from their online marketing. Online marketing strategy and tactics are an integral part of every law firm marketing plan. What we need to learn next is how many of these firms have gone beyond implementing basic technical search engine optimization to garner their cases.

Labels: law firm Web site marketing, online marketing for law firms

We're compiling the results from our latest bi-annual National Marketing Effectiveness Survey of Corporate, Transactional and Defense Firms. As trends emerge from the data, we'll be issuing alerts. Here's our first: Nearly half of all firms-- a dramatic increase from two years ago-- report they are using formal search engine optimization (SEO) in an attempt to generate cases directly and by referral. And, 24% percent of the firms using SEO say they are getting desirable cases from their SEO. Online marketing, long ago effectively adopted and today considered a must by most all personal injury, consumer bankruptcy and family law practices, is now proven to be an effective tactic for business lawyers and commerical litigators, as well. SEO must be considered for the mix of tactics when writing or evaluating any law firm marketing plan.

Labels: best marketing tactics for lawyers, law firm marketing effectiveness survey, marketing trends for law firms, online marketing for law firms