Solo Practice

What Does Your ?About? Page Say about You and Your Law Firm

By The Greatest American Lawyer

When it comes to lawyers and marketing, there is an awful lot that falls through the cracks and gets lost in translation.  Too often, lawyers are so busy billing by the hour that they forget that they are in the business of getting business.  If you ask any lawyer in charge of managing their law firm, they will tell you that they welcome additional client prospects.  But when you ask them what they are doing to get those prospects, you will find that the answers tie into everything except the law firm?s website.

One of the most neglected web pages on law firm websites is the ?About? page.  I know, we?ve neglected ours for way too long.  In considering an upgrade, we leveraged some of what we believe to be our best marketing tools:

• Our faces.  Anyone in marketing will tell you that a face personalizes the marketing message at a level which cannot be achieved by any other means.  The cleverest of slogans will not get near as far as the connection between you and a prospect when they can see what you look like.  Faces build trust, familiarity and shows that there are actually real people standing behind a law firm website.
• We included a flash image with quotes from each of our attorneys.  This allows clients to see that we are a small, niche law firm specializing in areas such as trademark infringement, internet law, cybersquatting and domain disputes, copyright infringement, e-commerce contracts, trade secret/non-compete agreements, and complex litigation.
• We recently used Vertio.net to conduct client interviews and obtain client testimonials.  With Vertio, those interviews are transcribed.  We publish those interviews on our website including the audio file and transcript.  We included some of the highlights of those testimonials on our about page. 
• Of course, we listed our attorneys? names and added information about the specialized practice areas for each attorney.  
• At the bottom, we included our mission statement so that prospective clients could see what it is we stand for and our overall approach to legal services.

Of course, we are always looking for ideas.  Please post your best about page links here and let us know what you think of our redesign as well.

Full post as published by The Greatest American Lawyer on June 17, 2009 (boomark / email).