Internet Newsletter for Lawyers |
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As Delia finished typing her front page piece on the failure of legal marketing sites to
attract work for law firms in the
May/June 2005 issue, I could almost hear her saying to herself
“That should get some response”, and it has, but probably not as much as she might
have thought. Her research is right - the majority of legal marketing sites do not work -
but that is not to say that all legal marketing sites do not work.
Just like any other form of advertising you need to look at what you are actually getting
for your money. You need to look beyond the promises of huge numbers of referrals,
the claims to “millions of hits every week” and the pressure to subscribe now for your
postcode area before someone else does. In short – do your own research! There are
a few legal marketing sites which do actually produce results and have satisfied panel
solicitors and mine is one of them.
LAW on the WEB, www.lawontheweb.co.uk, is 6 years old. Our first panel was for
personal injury and medical negligence claims. We built it up by encouraging firms to
work with us initially at no cost to themselves, and then after 3 months we asked them
if they wanted to stay at a small annual fee. In the second year we increased the fee
and still they all stayed with us, and in the third year one firm approached us and asked
if they could take all our referrals at an agreed monthly fee. That firm have now handled
all our personal injury and medical negligence claims for the last 2 years. Not only do
we produce potential claims for them, but we screen the claims, removing the
time-wasters.
Our second panel was our motoring panel, and just today I was telephoned by a law
firm out of the blue asking if they could become a panel law firm. They had found us at
the top of the search engines for such terms as “motoring law” and “road traffic law”,
and found our panel solicitors details at the top when looking for “motoring solicitor
Bath” or “North West” for example.
We offer our panel solicitors a lot more than just direct referrals. As an established legal
information website with hundreds of pages of free and useful information, our pages
on most topics come close to the top of the search engines. Therefore the individual law
firm profile pages that we offer to our panel solicitors, which link from our site to theirs,
will automatically enhance their own website presence with the search engines, and with
some thought and effort we can also ensure that the individual law firm pages on our
site cover most of the major search terms that people use. This way we can get much
broader and better search engine coverage than an individual law firm’s website. The
bigger and better we become, the better the coverage we get, and the more clients we
get for our panel solicitors. It has taken us 6 years to achieve this enviable position.
We currently attract around 20,000 unique individual users every week, which puts us
at about 1,000,000 readers every year. There are probably no other legal marketing
sites that can offer that sort of verifiable readership.
For the first 6 months we charged our motoring panel solicitors nothing, and then we
set a very modest first year fee, which we doubled in the second year and still all the
panel members stayed with us. We have just set this year’s fees with a small increase
and only one of the 22 firms have indicated they will be leaving us.
Not only do we pass on clients who are looking for legal advice and representation, but
we also offer our panel the chance to earn themselves some direct payments from us
for taking pre-paid telephone enquiries. We obtain payment from the client, plus details
of the exact nature of their query, and then get one of the panel to ring them and give
them up to 20 minutes of advice on that particular problem. In 18 months we have given
panel firms back more than £12,500. In addition, a high percentage of those readers
who are willing to pay for initial telephone advice go on to pay for some form of further
advice and/or representation.
We have been so pleased by the success of the motoring panel, that we have now
started work on a family law panel. We are still in the early stages of this and currently
charge our panel law firms nothing, but we have a similar pre-paid telephone advice
scheme up and running successfully, as well as profiling all the law firms on the site.
We are also talking with our existing law firms and some new firms about expanding our
panels to cover employment, wills & probate, and landlord & tenant, where we think
there is a market for online-led advice.
Our second asset is our readership. We have built up our readership numbers steadily
over the years, and the people who visit our site are all in the market for some kind of
legal advice or guidance.
Thirdly, we offer our panel solicitors a lot more than simple referrals. They are named
and featured on our site, which promotes them and their own website and results in
direct contact often being made; we pay them to answer telephone queries, and, as a
solicitor I can weed out the rubbish and the time-wasters.
And there is the final point. I am a solicitor. I spent a long time in practice and also spent
a lot of time trying to promote the law firms that I worked with, so I know what it is like
from their point of view. We make no rash promises. There is no hard sell. We let our
site do the talking for us.
Martin Davies is Managing Director of LAW on the WEB UK Ltd,
www.lawontheweb.co.uk.
Back to Contents.
Solicitors and Legal Marketing Sites
A response from Martin Davies of LAW on the WEBWhy does it work?
There are several reasons why LAW on the WEB works when other legal marketing
sites do not. The first is that we are not really a legal marketing site. Our panels have
grown out of the need we have to pass our readers on to firms that we can trust to
provide sound legal advice. We provide a huge array of legal information and guidance
both on the site and also by being willing to answer our readers’ questions and queries,
which we do for nothing. This attracts and retains readers, and inspires confidence and
trust in our services and the solicitors that we work with. In the last 5 years we have
answered more than 20,000 general questions and in the last 3 years, over 10,000
motoring questions. In replies we promote our panels and our telephone advice
schemes, where appropriate.
Email martin@lawontheweb.co.uk.