Martindale’s lawyers.com launches Spanish version of lawyers.com with MSN

Martindale-Hubbell announced today it has expanded its relationship with MSN to deliver access to Martindale-Hubbell’s lawyers.com attorney database of lawyers and law firms from the MSN Spanish-language.

MSN Latino, currently visited by more than 422,000 unique users monthly, will have link on the home page that reads “Busca un Abogado” (“Locate a Lawyer”). When visitors click on the link, they will go to a new Spanish-language version of the lawyers.com home page.

“The Hispanic market is one of the fastest-growing demographic audiences in the U.S. and, by 2020, Hispanics are projected to represent 21 percent of the total U.S. population,” said Joseph Douress, vice president of business development and marketing for LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. “This is an important audience for our customers because 51 percent of U.S. Hispanic households are online and they spend more time on the Web each day than the general marketplace of Internet users.”

Though Martindale & Douress made the decision for business reasons, I laud them for being the first major legal publisher to take the first step in helping members of the hispanic community select a lawyer. It’s only a first step though as the entire directory may not be translated to Spanish – it may only be the lawyers.com home page. Enough to let the Hispanic community know there is a directory but they will need a translator to effectively use the directory.

Now if we could get lawyers.com to translate the community and content Prairielaw.com sold to Martindale and now incorporated in lawyers.com there would be a heck of a resource for the Hispanic community.