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Internet lawyer directories work?

It's hard for me to believe that online lawyer directories like FindLaw's do much for lawyers paying to be listed by city and practice area. Have any lawyers who have paid for listings in FindLaw had good results in procuring new clients as a result of the listing? Please let me know. If you've paid for listings and not gotten results, let me know as well. I'll share the results here.

I saw lawyer Bill Portanova, a friend from law school, on the Abrams Report on MSNBC last night and wanted to drop him an email. Knowing he practiced federal criminal defense law in Sacramento, I thought I may be able to find him listed in the FindLaw directory. Forget it.

FindLaw has five pages of one line listings of law firms. At the top of the list are two sponsored listings from national outfits. I assume those companies paid big bucks to FindLaw to get top listings for large metro areas when FindLaw was unable to sell the spots to local law firms. There were then nine law firm listings in bold slightly larger one line listings with firm name, phone number and links to View Profile and Visit Web Site. Finally there was a random list of hundreds of firm one line listings by name and a link to View Profile beginning at the bottom of the first page and continuing for five more pages.

There is no way to distinguish these lawyers by the type of criminal work they do or if they even do that much criminal defense work. Remember the days when we just checked boxes on the Martindale-Hubbell listing to make certain we covered everything the firm ever conceivably did. I expect that same shot gun approach goes on here.

For sophisticated Internet users, which now comprises the majority of people, this type of a yellow pages 2.0 is not going to cut it. Folks don't have the time to go in and out of Web sites for hours. In addition many of those law firm Web sites are indistinguishable 'brochure-ware' anyway. People looking for a lawyer are going to do searches on the search engines directly and find law firm Web sites or blog sites of lawyers who have criminal defense experience and which have legal information about the legal situation they face.

Are consumers warming up to this type of FindLaw directory of lawyers as a way to select a lawyer? I would be surprised to hear so. But let me know if I am wrong.

If lawyers are not getting great results, could it be that FindLaw will make a lot of sales as they have sales people on the road, just like the yellow pages people do, and most lawyers do not really understand Internet marketing? That's entirely possible.

  • David

    Kevin,
    Am not sure “For sophisticated Internet users, which now comprises the majority of people” that the majority of people are sophisticated Internet users. Am not even sure the sophisticated users are all that 'sophisticated'.
    I do agree that FindLaw and other Yellow Pages type advertising are not the most effective means of advertising, but they are part of the mix and will continue to be so.
    I just ran 'criminal defense' on Google. There are 3.9M hits. The first 3 screens are links to various associations and law firms..no blog listings.
    Getting back to the 'sophisticated internet user'…the inclusion of 'blog' with criminal defense narrows the hits to 136K.

  • Tom Young

    What's up Kevin?
    The glut of conventional online cookie cutter legal directories is laughable. As such, many lawyers are being bamboozled into paying high dollar for worthless listings. Unfortunately, these inevitable negative experiences will result in lawyers becoming so skeptical of Internet marketing that they will turn a blind eye to the whole field. There are quality products out there, but separating the wheat from the chaff is becoming increasingly difficult for time pressed attorneys.
    More and more attorneys have come to the realization that they need to have some presence online, but how do they achieve that? Typically, some high pressure sales tactic employed by a slick web marketer results in the lawyer making a bad Internet marketing purchase. From this one bad experience, many lawyers will crawl back into their cocoons and revert to the industry's typical ways, eventually ending up again 10 years behind the rest of the world.
    I know you're familiar with InjuryBoard.com, but you might not be familiar with the site's lawyer search engine. While the site caters strictly to plaintiff firms, and it does contain a conventional directory, InjuryBoard's real power is the ability to allow for keyword searches of law firm web sites. InjuryBoard indexes entire law firm sites, and search queries are run against that index. This differs greatly from the typical “searchable” directory which usually only allows searching based on a very narrow index of perhaps a one paragraph description field.

  • http://lexblog.com Kevin O'Keefe

    Thanks for the comment David. Good point as to who is a sophisticated Internet user and who is not. Probably no good measure of that.
    I do think though a fair number of folks go to search engines and key in a local search like Sacramento Criminal Defense Lawyer. Does not matter if 58,000 results come up – folks are only going to look at first couple pages. Because there are not many individual law firms that come up, I think there is some low hanging fruit there.
    A Sacramento criminal defense lawyer publishing relevant content on criminal law to a site or blog (blog as practical matter allows lawyer to do this as Web sites generally do not) is going to find themselves in the first couple pages. Plus when people click to the site the personable approach of helping people with info sets them apart from others. I see that as good opportunity to get clients.
    FindLaw and other directories may be part of the mix but my only question is why. The lawyers who pay to get listed in these directories usually tell me they have never gotten a client as a result of the listing.
    I assume you are not serious that when you mention a searcher using the term blog. That would make as much sense as someone doing a search and adding the term Web site. People find blogs the same way they find sites – they just tend to show up higher in search engines.