April 29, 2008 by Kevin

Boston Business Journal : Blogs a good way to enhance lawyer's reputation

Nice article in yesterday's Boston Business Journal by Lisa van der Pool. Lisa was reporting on my presentation at the New England Legal Marketing Association's event, "How to Work a Room in the Digital Age: Social Networking for Law Firms."

Lisa's takeaways from my presentation:

  • Blogs are good idea for lawyers. Especially if they want to package their legal musings in a zippy, readable way, shine up their firm's reputation and attract reporters looking for expert sources.
  • While not every individual lawyer has a flair for the conversational writing style that is the mainstay of a popular blog, "every type of practice area and every firm could benefit from blogging."
  • Lawyers should become familiar with social networking sites LinkedIn, Legal On Ramp, YouTube and Facebook.
  • There are 2,000 law blogs today, and every day, four new law blogs are created.
  • 75 percent of reporters scan blogs to find experts for articles -- which in turn could mean pretty valuable exposure to a lawyer and a firm.
  • Law firms are part of the media today. If you don't put information out there where it can be seen by influencers, then you're really missing something.

Thanks for the report Lisa, especially the plug that LexBlog '...[Coaches lawyers on how best to present their blogs in terms of design, marketing and writing style -- so that they enhances their firms' reputations rather than damage them." She added "We're not going to let [law firms] embarrass themselves."

Thanks to the New England Chapter of the Legal Marketing Association and its President, Jeff Scalzi, Director of Marketing at Foley Hoag. First class event attended by what I understand was record crowd of over 80 legal marketing professionals.

Click here for a copy of my PowerPoint presentation . The PowerPoint may not mean too much as the presentation drifted to subjects of keen interest to the audience.

Looks like I am doing encore presentations for Legal Marketing Chapters in Cleveland, Portland, and Seattle. If you need a speaker to cover a fun and what appears to be an in demand topic, give me a call. I'm cheap. ;)

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December 14, 2004 by Kevin

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.
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