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Are we seeing the end of lawyer profiles on websites?

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The day is going to soon come when law firms do away with lawyer profiles on their websites. This from White & Case CMO, Michael Hertz (@MichaelHertz), during our LMA panel discussion last week.

The reason being, per Hertz, is that present traffic to the LinkedIn profiles of the firm’s lawyers is far exceeding the traffic to bio’s on the firm’s website.

This may not be music to the ears of website developers, but a world without website profiles is not without precedent.

Historically, lawyers got their work via relationships and a strong word of mouth reputation.

Martindale-Hubbell, the precursor to website profiles, was founded over 100 years ago solely to complement the relationships/reputation approach. Lawyers were asking someone they knew in the next county over for the name of good lawyer. Martindale wanted to offer a resource that could reach to the next state over.

But for Martindale’s mistake in going “gated garden” in response to the net by blocking Google from indexing the profiles law firms paid Martindale to produce, we may never have seen the proliferaion of website profiles. Why would law firms build lawyer profiles when the Martindale produced profiles would have outranked them on Google?

Today we’re seeing the effects of the open web. LinkedIn’s lawyer profiles usually outrank website profiles.

Imagine if LinkedIn went the Martindale “gated garden” approach. LinkedIn would be out of business – and website profiles would be the primary way people look up lawyer bios.

It’s not just LinkeIn that’s making website profiles increasingly irrelevant.

  • With the explosion of online information, marketing is trusted less and less. When was the last time you relied on a restaurant’s wesbite copy to decide where to dine? What else would they say than they were excellent?
  • People are starved for the real and authentic. Marketing copy of who you are, what you’ve done, and what you do presents a false persona.
  • People want a lawyer like them, not a lawyer like all the other lawyers. They want someone who talks like them and presents themselves in a down to earth fashion. Think lawyer written bios.
  • People expect lawyers to be out where they are. You, as a lawyer, need to be out where people are if you’re looking to build relationships and a reputation. That’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter with a meaningful profile on each.
  • An open web where socializing gives rise to relationships and reputation are making profiles less important. “Profiles” are created by a lawyer’s online social activity. Profiles are how others view you, not how you view yourself.

I don’t expect website profiles to go a away overnight. They’re easy, they’re safe, and they’re what everyone else is doing.

But based on history, where we are headed on the net, and what consumers of legal services expect, website profiles are going to become a thing of the past.

Discussion on this post is continuing on LinkedIn.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Vinegar Hill Project

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