Welcome to LawyerCastingTM, a new blog from eLawMarketing (edited by attorney/Internet marketer Joshua Fruchter) covering "best practices" in online marketing for lawyers and law firms, including websites, blogs, podcasts, webcasts, email marketing and much more!
Read the posts below and in our archives to learn all the latest tips and strategies for using the Internet to market your law firm and develop new business. Enjoy and prosper!
The leading securities class action firm of Glancy Binkow & Goldberg LLP recently launched a new website designed and powered by eLawMarketing.
For nearly 25 years, the Glancy firm has successfully prosecuted class action cases and complex litigation in federal and state courts throughout the country. The firm has recovered billions of dollars for investors, consumers, and entities injured by corporate wrongdoing.
Running on Drupal, the Glancy firm's new website features a number of cutting edge features, including sophisticated "case" pages that contain descriptions of cases that the firm is investigating or litigating, along with copies of related press releases, complaints and other documents, and embedded forms allowing investors to submit their trading history and other relevant information.
We'd like to congratulate the Connecticut litigation law firm of Ryan Ryan Deluca LLP on the launch of their new website earlier this year.
Ryan Ryan Deluca LLP is a litigation law firm with over a 50-year history in Connecticut focused on insurance and business-related litigation. The firm has tried hundreds of court and jury cases to conclusion – averaging 15 to 20 jury verdicts per year.
Running on Drupal, and employing a sleek, Web 2.0 look-and-feel, the website features a number of cutting edge features, including a navigable Javascript slideshow on the homepage with strong visuals highlighting the firm's various litigation specialties, and a regularly updating homepage with "deep links" to further details on recent firm news, successes and publications.
I had the pleasure of speaking last week on a panel presenting on "Growing Your Business Through Internet Marketing" at the 2012 Connecticut Bar Association Annual Meeting.
Among the other speakers on the panel was an employment lawyer, Scott Schaffer, who publishes an email newsletter, Workplace News, that is distributed to human resource professionals and other labor and employment attorneys. Scott shared many valuable tips on how he uses his email newsletter to generate new business.
One strategy that we repeatedly recommend to our own clients is to use your email newsletter or alert campaign "clickthrough" reports to generate leads. For example, if Scott sends his newsletter to 500 subscribers, and 100 subscribers open the email, and of those 100 subscribers, 25 subscribers click a link in the email to read a full article, Scott follows up with each of those 25 subscribers. The logic is that clicking on a link demonstrates interest, and so the subscribers with "clickthroughs" become Scott's "low hanging fruit" to see if he can convert that interest into new business.
But one tip I had never thought of before, but which makes great sense, is Scott's inclusion of links to various online resources within each issue of his newsletter - such as the full opinion of a case, or full text of a new regulation or law. Scott's thinking here is that if he includes a link to the actual text of the case, regulation or law he is discussing, subscribers will retain the email in their inbox (or move it to a folder) so they can easily access the link in the future. That is, Scott thinks in terms of providing his readers with access to online resources that they'll want to keep handy for future reference.
And lo and behold, Scott continues to see clickthroughs on links in his newsletter long after they were distributed. Now that's longevity in a day and age when emails are frequently deleted upon receipt.
In a nutshell, to increase the shelf life of your alerts and newsletters, include links to resources (even if they do not appear on your website) to which your readers will likely wish to refer back to in the future.
For a sample issue of Workplace News, click here.
We're pleased to announce our latest "State of Law Firm Email Marketing" report documenting benchmarks for five key performance metrics (opens, clickthrough, conversions, bounces and unsubscribes) generated by law firm email marketing campaigns aggregating 8,168,215 emails distributed by our top law firm clients between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2011.
Legal marketers can use the report to:
Click here to download your free report.
Should you find that your law firm's email marketing campaigns are falling short of the benchmarks in the report, consider an email marketing audit.
We'd like to congratulate client Carlton Fields on the launch of their new dynamic law firm website. What's special about the site is that it focuses extensively on resources relevant to the business and legal needs of the firm’s clients. From substantive content offering valuable client resources in varied formats, including how-to articles, checklists, client interviews, and guidelines, to a mobile site that makes on-the-go access simple for those with iPads, smartphones and tablets, the new site conveys a clear commitment to meeting clients' needs.
For instance, the "Business Solutions" section of the website addresses such timely client concerns as alternative legal fee arrangements and developing a budget for new legal matters.
A page dedicated to RSS feeds offers the option of instant notification whenever new publications, releases, events or career opportunities are published to the website.
The firm's blogs include coverage of recent Florida Appeals Court decisions and developments related to class actions.
We recommend a visit.
Hope all of our readers had a wonderful holiday season. Over the New Year weekend, had occasion to read an interesting article in MIT's Technology Review concerning the "law of social sharing." Apparently propounded by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, the law predicts that "every year, for the foreseeable future, the amount of information you share on the Web will double." Those familiar with the history of computing will undoubtedly catch the allusion to "Moore's Law" conceived of by Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, who famously predicted that, every two years, the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a chip of any given area, for the same price, will double. No one ever accused Mark Zuckerberg of lacking ambition.
The Web is rapidly being reshaped and redefined by social sharing of content, and Facebook has certainly facilitated that trend with its ubiquitous "Like" buttons, and new technology that allows apps and Web sites to automatically share your activity via Facebook as you browse. Internet titans such as Google and Salesforce.com have jumped on the bandwagon with social sharing features being added to their own applications.
Of course, as the article points out, the exponential growth of social sharing cannot continue forever - people have only a limited number of hours today to devote to social sharing, and will naturally filter out the more inane updates, and focus on those most important to them.
Still, for legal marketers, Zuckerberg's Law merits consideration - does your firm's website, and its blogs and email newsletters, include a social sharing tool? It can be as simple as incorporating an "Add This" icon. If not, that's definitely a feature to add in 2012. To be sure, most people won't care about your latest alert concerning, say, a new IRS regulation addressing some arcane international tax issue. But for the few clients who do, you'd be well advised to give them access to tools that let them share that and other firm content with their like-minded peers.
Click here to read the full MIT article.
Congratulations to Maryland condo lawyer, Raymond Burke, a partner at client Ober Kaler, who was recently cited as an authority on Maryland condominium law by the Maryland Court of Appeals in its recent decision, MRA Property Management, Inc., et al. v. Armstrong, No. 93, Sept. Term 2007 (filed on October 25, 2011), holding that (i) the resale certificate disclosure rules in the Maryland Consumer Protection Act apply to purchases of condominium units, and thus (ii) where a council of unit owners and its property management company violate the resale certificate disclosure obligations imposed by Md. Real. Prop. Code Ann. Sec. 11-135, “they engage in unfair and deceptive trade practices ‘in the sale of consumer realty.’”
The court cited to Ray's publication entitled Developing and Managing Condominium and Homeowners’ Associations, National Business Institute (2007) (co-authored with Kathleen M. Elmore and Cynthia Hitt Kent), in which he wrote:
”Md. Com. Law Code Ann. Sec. 13-408(a) establishes a private cause of action for damages sustained as a result of an act prohibited by the Consumer Protection Act. The Act is specifically applicable to ‘consumer realty,’ and, accordingly, representations made in connection with the sale of real property may constitute unfair and deceptive trade practices where they are misleading.”
It's one of our oldest mantras - email marketing is not just about sending emails, but getting them delivered.
Unfortunately, too many law firms sacrifice deliverability on the altar of savings (i.e., pennywise, pound foolish) by using cheap email blast services that attract hordes of small businesses (and some "bad guys" too) who don't follow best practices and hurt the reputation of all the other companies using the same mail server IP addresses.
So what can law firms do to maximize the likelihood of getting their email alerts and newsletters delivered, and avoid filters?
Consider this quick list of law firm email deliverability tips published by one of our clients, Cyndy McCollough, Senior Manager of Marketing Technology at Dickstein Shapiro LLP, on her new legal marketing blog (Law Marketing Geek). Among the recommendations - regular monitoring of the IP addresses and domains you are using in your emails (a service we provide to Dickstein Shapiro and other firms as part of our sender authentication package).
We'd like to congratulate the law firm of DeMont & Breyer LLP on the launch of their new website.
DeMont & Breyer is a leading intellectual property law firm with a strong focus on patents for highly specialized technologies such as electromagnetics and optics.
Running on Drupal, the website features a number of cutting edge features, including a navigable Javascript slideshow on the homepage with strong visuals highlighting the firm's successful track record in various high tech industries; a patent "expertise" section with links to download copies of numerous patents that the firm has helped prosecute; and "About Us" pages in multiple foreign languages.
We'd like to congratulate the intellectual property group at client Ober Kaler, a leading Maryland-based law firm, on the launch of their new blog - Ober IP Watch - Fueling Innovation.
The blog will focus on intellectual property issues of importance to clients in the technology, healthcare, education, media and arts industries.
The blog is running on WordPress, and part of our customization included programming of special access rules to facilitate multi-lawyer blogging.
It's that time of the year again - with Labor Day now past, it's time to start planning for Flash holiday cards for the 2011 holiday season.
Flash holiday cards are a great alternative to traditional print cards that help brand a firm as:
Please take a moment to view Flash holiday card samples from last year (see links to samples in the lefthand sidebar).
If you are interested in a Flash holiday card option for this coming holiday season, please contact us.
In a result that will come as a surprise to devotees of Twitter and other social sharing tools, a recent New York Times study found that e-mail remains the most popular tool for sharing Internet content.
Specifically, in an online survey of 2,500 self-identified "medium-to-heavy content sharers," respondents said they often preferred email for sharing content because they viewed email as more secure and private and therefore more "personal." Apparently, email is used when people want to have a more intimate, one-to-one conversation about news they find compelling instead of a one-to-many interaction. Respondents also noted that a post can get lost in the shuffle of a Twitter or Facebook stream, but content shared via e-mail definitely will get seen and thus more likely elicit a response.
Legal marketers should keep this insight in mind when adding "sharing" functions to law firm email alerts and newsletters such as "forward to a friend" (which employs email as the sharing mechanism) and social sharing icons.
Separately, the study garnered some interesting insights into the psychology of social sharing with respondents disclosing their motivations for sharing content across various media:
Click here to read more about the study on PaidContent.
We're happy to announce the release of our latest white paper - The Top 10 Law Firm Website Best Practices.
Websites remain a mainstay of a law firm’s online presence. Whether via Google, a referral, or other source, prospective clients come to your website to learn more about your firm’s experience and track record, and to determine whether your attorneys have the expertise to meet their needs. Indeed, in a recent survey of general counsel, 100% of respondents indicated that they always review a firm's website when evaluating and purchasing legal services, while 90% reported that lawyer biographies are the most important section of a law firm's website.
A law firm website that is well-designed, easily navigated, and populated with useful content projects expertise, attention to detail, and technological savvy – key qualities that clients look for in a law firm.
On the other hand, an outdated, poorly designed website is, as one general counsel aptly remarked in a recent survey, "like showing up to a meeting in a crumpled suit."
Deploying a law firm website that attracts visitors, holds their attention and converts them into leads, requires compliance with "best practices."
Our white paper discusses the following top 10 law firm website best practices:
Download your free copy of the white paper today.
If your firm is interested in building a website that complies with "best practices," please contact us.
During the past year, we've begun designing and developing all of our new law firm websites on Drupal - a leading free open-source content management applications now powering tens of thousands of websites worldwide (including the White House website).
Due to the huge developer community (now exceeding 10,000 individuals worldwide) constantly extending and refining Drupal's core capabilities, and contributing value-added modules, we find that we can deploy sophisticated website features at low cost that might otherwise be out of reach for law firms operating on a tight budget and working with a proprietary, closed content management system.
We are thus grateful to Larry Bodine for publishing to his Law Marketing blog today our recent interview with him concerning the benefits of developing a law firm website on Drupal. The interview walks through a number of "power" features available on Drupal such as:
Enjoy!
(note: we don't recommend Drupal for law firm blogs. For blogs, we prefer development on Word Press, which has numerous key blogging features built into the software and available out-of-the-box. Perhaps that will be the subject of a future interview ; - ).
When we speak with law firms about developing and designing a new website, many express the wish for some interactivity on their website homepage. The goal is to highlight, for example, certain success stories, or industries where the firm has expertise, and interactive applications (like Flash) do a good job of drawing visitors' attention to such content.
Alas, it's been over a year since Steve Jobs' penned his famous "Thoughts on Flash" explaining why iPods, iPads and iPhones don't run Flash (which is still the case, although there are apps available for the iPad that allow users to view Flash).
Given the popularity of Apple devices, and the obvious importance of catering to the broadest audience possible, we've started recommending that firms avoid Flash and use Javascript instead to create interactive slideshows if they want some pizzazz on the homepage of their website. See examples of slideshows on our websites at http://www.emonlinemedia.com and http://www.elawmarketing.com.
We've got two law firm websites in production that will feature even more impressive slideshows.
Of course, for some applications, like Flash holiday cards for law firms, the animation desired is so complex that one must resort to Flash. In which case, when a firm distributes a link to a Flash holiday card to clients via email, we'd recommend a little disclaimer that the card won't run on an Apple device, and thus should be viewed on another computer or device.
Audits (Email Marketing and Websites)
Email Marketing:
Core Edition
Email
Marketing:
Advanced Edition
Flash
Applications
Landing
Pages
Online
Press Releases
Online
Reputation Management
Online
RSVP
Podcasts
Powerpoints
Search
Engine Optimization
Social
Media
Video
Webcasting
Website
Development
White
Paper Marketing
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