One award we have always asked our clients to seek out is a rating from Best Lawyers. For many years they had a partnership with US News & World Report where the Best Lawyers award would also get you the US News & World Report award.
This was a great combination in terms of trust signals and helping to enhance your law firm website design. If you were able to secure it based on the massive advertising US News & World Report rankings get for other categories.
As of July 31, 2023 this partnership will unfortunately come to an end.
What Changes will Be Made?
With this change US News & World Report will be announcing their own ranking system soon directly with them. According to Best Lawyers “As of August 1, 2023, Best Lawyers® will exclusively manage and host Best Law Firms profiles and rankings on its own website, bestlawfirms.com. The website will also host the launch of our 2024 Best Law Firms rankings this fall.”
The US News and Best Law Firms profiles that lived at bestlawfirms.usnews.com will no longer be updated or maintained after August 1, 2023. If you have a US News Best Law Firms badge on your website, you should replace it with the new Best Lawyers badge pointing to bestlawfirms.com. Take a few minutes to audit your website’s awards section and any link you’re sending visitors to.
If you need any help removing the Best Law Firms badge from your site, contact our law firm website design services team.
The Silver Lining
Although this change will have impacts on the assumed value of the rewards one silver lining is that maybe more firms will be able to get in. See an issue with these awards previously was that even if you met the incredible qualification requirements, the same firms tended to stay on the list. Since its limited this meant that many of the same firms just stayed on year after year. This left newer firms in the dark regardless of their performance.
Another potential silver lining is that if US News & World Report offer their own product and they promote it as much as they do for Doctors. This could actually turn into a strong case generation source.
US News hasn’t said publicly when they’ll launch their own legal rankings. If they do, and they promote it the way they promote their hospital and doctor rankings, it could actually start driving real case leads for the firms that get listed.
The old system while seemingly very prestigious did not really generate a large number of new qualified case leads so it was previously more of a vanity metric.
From an SEO standpoint, getting listed on bestlawfirms.com or usnews.com does give you a backlink from a highly trusted domain. In our experience, that alone isn’t going to move the needle dramatically for rankings. The bigger win is using the award as a credibility marker on your homepage and in your content.
If you need backlinks from highly trusted domains as part of your strategy, learn more about our law SEO services.
We will see how that changes moving forward.
Keep your eye on the blog for updates on the Best Lawyers nomination and approval process once I get more information.
