Martindale's lawyers.com responds to my criticism with facts on growth
I made a comment or two on the Legal Marketing Association listserv questioning the value of a lawyers.com listing for a plaintiff's trial lawyer. My point was that in larger metro areas a search for a personal injury lawyer may generate a random listing of 50 or 60 law firms, some of which do as much family law and defense work as plaintiff's personal injury work.
Without a way to distinguish the lawyers in the list without going in and out of the law firm's linked Web sites I questioned how well that worked for consumers and at the end of the day the lawyers who paid for those listings.
Following the sale of my previous company to LexisNexis' Martindale-Hubbell, I served as a VP of Business Development at Martindale. I had the good fortune to work with Joe Douress, then and current VP of Business Development for the small and medium firm segment. Joe's a great guy and heads up Martindale's lawyers.com. To his credit, he dropped me an email responding to my comments on the LMA listserv.
Here's the facts on lawyers.com growth per Martindale
- Lawyers.com alone attracted more than 8.8 million visitors in 2004.
- 2004 traffic is up more than 50%.
- Nielsen NetRatings and ComScore rank Martindale's website traffic as #1 in lawyer directories on the web.
- Martindale's websites attract more monthly lawyer searches than any other source on the web-this includes all search engines (based on share of voice analysis by Comscore and Nielsen)
- Martindale's websites drive more than 50 million lawyer searches per year (Findlaw's lawyer directory gets less than 15 million)
- Lawyers.com alone generates more than 1.4 million attorney profile views each month. Martindale.com gets 3x that number.
- 65% of visitors to lawyers.com say they plan to hire a lawyer within a week; 80% plan to hire within 4 weeks.
- Martindale just signed deals with NetZero and Juno and now have Lawyer Locator links on both of their homepages. This is driving thousands of searches.
- Martindale will be announcing some new alliances within the next few weeks that will drive even more traffic.
- The content and community area of lawyers.com is continuing to grow. Lawyers.com just launched paid sponsorships from this area and the demand was unbelievable from firms wanting to buy placement.
I still believe lawyers must do more than have a listing in the lawyers.com directory to achieve an effective Internet presence to grow their business. However, a listing in lawyers.com linking out to your own search optimized Web site may still be a worthwhile buy as one part of a lawyers Internet marketing plan.
Thanks for responding Joe. There are an awful lot of corporate executives who would not get out and mix it up with some yahoo like me.
Joe and I are continuing to exchange notes so expect more to come folks. Maybe we can get FindLaw to share some information like this as well.
What is the best way to start a law blog ie set it up on the web.
There are free and low cost services available for a lawyer to start a blog with such as Blogger and TypePad. Problem is that the designs are not good enough for leading law firms, the features are lacking and learning how to harness the marketing benefits of blogs can take a year or more by a lawyer who enjoys the innovative use of technology.
Obviously I am biased being the founder of LexBlog but look at the advantages LexBlog offers over free and low cost blog solutions:
http://www.lexblog.com/cat-lexblog-advantage.html
The best way for a lawyer to start a blog is with LexBlog.
- Kevin
Your original comment questioned the value of a web site listing on lawyers.com for plaintiff's trial lawyers. The response from lawyers.com referred to searches in general and not to searches relating to personal injury plaintiff's trial lawyers. I agree with you.
My web site, www.HURT911.org, receives many thousands of visitors each month including people hurt in an accident, plaintiff lawyers, defense lawyers and insurance company claim representatives. Of the people hurt in an accident, there are basically two groups. Those who come to the web site from a search result or a link from another web site and those who come to the web site after seeing a commercial on television advertising 1-800-HURT-911. Those who come from a search result usually have an older accident and are already represented by a lawyer, while those who come to the web site after seeing a TV commercial are few and usually have soft tissue injuries from a recent accident. People who have been seriously hurt in an accident are usually in a hospital bed or in a bed at home and simply call 1-800-HURT-911 without visiting the web site.
I once paid a lot of money for a listing on one of the larger attorney web directories and the only calls I received were from sales people trying to sell me legal products and services. With regard to personal injury cases, I do not believe it is worth paying expensive fees for listings on attorney web directories. I do believe that personal injury lawyers should have a professional looking web site as an online brochure. Potential and existing clients who look for a lawyer's web site should not find that the lawyer does not have one.
I have written an article entitled Should Your Law Firm Have A Web Site? at http://www.hurt911.org/lawyer-advertising/lawyer-web-site.html
I also wrote an article entitled How a Personal Injury Lawyer Can Get New Clients Without Spending a Lot of Money on Advertising at http://www.hurt911.org/lawyer-advertising/solo-lawyer-advertising.html
Philip L. Franckel, Esq.
President, 1-800-HURT-911, Inc.