Family law blog success story

By Rob La Gatta, LexBlog Reporter

 Kansas family law and divorce lawyer, Grant Griffiths,  lives in a state with fewer than 3 million residents in a town of under 5,000. He works from an office in his home. And he doesn’t pay for a static website or any other form of marketing.

But that hasn’t placed Griffiths at a disadvantage. Through developing a well-managed family law blog, he has personalized his practice and increased his clientele, while simultaneously maximizing his personal freedom as a self-employed attorney.

Griffiths, who began practicing in April of 1998 after graduating from Washburn University School of Law in Topeka (wikipedia) and working as a legal intern in Washington, Kansas (wikipedia), has already tried and been turned off of the old-fashioned approach to practicing law.

“I did the traditional downtown office, the traditional yellow page ads…wasting money, basically,” Griffiths says. “I did not get results with yellow page ads. I’d bet I didn’t average 10 new clients a year.”

By 2005 it was time for a change, and in January of that year he began working out of his Clay Center (wikipedia) home. By the following month he had launched his first blog, the Kansas Family & Divorce Lawyer Blog.

Unlike many lawyers in the blogosphere who simultaneously operate a static website and a blog, Griffiths – looking for an innovative way to market his services – decided to opt for only the latter.

The choice, he thinks, was simple.

“I recognized, ‘Why do a website if I can do a blog?’” he says. “I could see the benefits of blogging because it is more an education-based marketing deal.”

The marketing gamble made two years ago has paid off for Griffiths, who saw a complete redesign of his original blog go active in 2006 and celebrated its one-year birthday on March 7 this year. While previous marketing yielded him fewer than ten new clients a year, with the blog he says he now sometimes gets as many as two a week.

“If I [were] to average the number of clients I gain each month from the blog, I would have to say at least 6 a month,” Griffiths says. “Some are uncontested flat fee divorces. Others are contested matters.”

The success may stem from his willingness to have information readily available on the blog’s main page. In a process he developed while working on his original blog using TypePad, Griffiths doesn’t only maintain a blog: he also provides a wealth of family law information in the aptly titled Family Law Library.

In the database, essentially an electronic encyclopedic reference, Griffiths has information related to frequently asked questions on legal issues in the state of Kansas. The result is a range of organized, accessible and – most importantly – understandable information on Kansas family law.

Many of the resources Griffiths’ blog has to offer comes from Nolo, the legal information publishers based out the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Most of the information we use for the Family Law Library was acquired from Nolo through an agreement between myself, LexBlog and Nolo,” he said. “Is it worth it? I would have to say it is. […] It certainly helps bring traffic to the blog, and with that information and the posts I do myself, the blog is packed full of information for the consumer.”

To further set himself aside from other legal bloggers, Griffiths discovered early on how he could build his blog to garner as many page hits as possible.

Every night, he would sit down and look at what types of general legal information people were looking for on the Internet; then, he’d take those search questions and would respond to them himself.

“I would do a post,” Griffiths says. “If I saw a pattern in what people were looking for, I would take that pattern and do a series of posts about it.”

This wasn’t rocket science: they were simple questions – on topics like the process of a divorce or child support laws in Kansas – coming from people unfamiliar with the law who turned to the Internet for answers. For Griffiths, it was an opportunity to simultaneously help someone else and to effectively get his own name out.

By seizing on it, he was on page one of Google search results for issues related to Kansas family law within the first two months of his blog’s operation.

The success is evident through the numbers. In the first year of operation, Griffiths’ LexBlog-powered blog averaged 85,000 hits. By early May, it had reached 100,000 hits.

“It’s nothing but good,” he says of his experience working with LexBlog. “Everybody that I’ve worked with there has been great.”

Griffiths has the blog and he has the clients, but above all, he still has control over his life. Many days, his work takes him no farther than his backyard, handling uncontested divorce cases from the privacy of his home and interacting electronically with a telecommuting paralegal. 

Other lawyers – not just in Kansas but also around the country – are going through the motions that previously made a practice successful. But Griffiths, taking advantage of technology, has taken charge of his career.

The next step, he thinks, is showing his colleagues how easy it can be.

“Lawyers are a fickle group,” says Griffiths. “If we were smart, every lawyer in the country would be doing one of these [blogs].”