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Building your online presence is a critical part of advertising for your law firm. Online advertising has the potential to bring in a large number of clients, particularly since clients who are searching for a law firm in a hurry are likely to turn to the internet to provide them with information about the firms in their area.

No matter what type of law you practice, it’s important that you build your online presence in order to generate a larger number of clients for your firm.

Increase Your Organic Search Rankings

As a law firm, you often see clients when they’re desperate or in a hurry to sign on a lawyer. Many people start looking for a lawyer when they find out they need one due to their legal situation.

A quick Google search may be the first awareness of what law firms are practicing in their area. Falling below the first few search results can significantly decrease your chances of being seen.

In fact, 95% of search traffic comes from the first page of search engine results and most of these clicks go to the top few ranking websites.

Make sure you’re following these key tips to ensure that your law firm appears in those critical top results, increasing your SEO and building your business as a result.

• Optimize for mobile. Since over 50% of traffic is now mobile–and many people visit a location within 5 miles of them shortly after performing a search–it’s important that your site and your search efforts are visible on mobile devices.
• Make sure you focus on local keywords. Search is very localized these days and results will vary depending on where the searcher is searching from. Make sure you’re following best practices and sending the proper signals to Google about the location of your firm.
• Long-form content receives more attention. Shares and links back to your content can have a significant impact on your search engine ranking, so make sure you’re creating the content that visitors genuinely want to see–ideally, helpful content that will help them navigate the legal difficulties in which they’ve found themselves.
• Check your keywords regularly. Keep in mind that you want to drive relevant traffic to your website: if you specialize in family law, you might not want to highlight information about how to handle traffic tickets.Likewise, a criminal attorney need not create posts about divorce recommendations, no matter how much traffic those posts might bring.

Get Involved With Pay Per Click

Part of building search engine optimization may also include opting for paid ads, which will help highlight your firm and help push you higher on the search engine results page.

With pay per click, you pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement. With personal injury law firms, this can get expensive since these keywords can cost hundreds of dollars per click.

However, it’s economical for many other industries as well. If you’re looking to get listed in search engines quickly, PPC is a great option to start driving traffic quickly.

Build Your Social Media Presence

Social media is an excellent location to build your platform and your network. With 2.13 billion active users logging onto Facebook every month, it’s evident that this is a platform that you can’t afford to ignore.

Unfortunately, all too many lawyers fall into the trap of posting static, vague posts that are of little use to the people who are reading them. As a result, you may find yourself wondering if social media marketing is really worthwhile for your law firm. The short answer? It is–but only if you do it correctly.

Leverage social media ads. Facebook’s ads track customer interest in certain topics as well as past searches, which means that you can craft ads that are specifically designed to reach individuals who are looking for information about the type of law you practice.

Social media ads can also be specifically targeted to reach exactly the type of individual you’d like to have as your client, helping to narrow the people that you target with your ads.

Pay attention to hot topics. What is it that people genuinely want to know about? What types of information will generate awareness of your firm? For example, as a divorce attorney, you might consistently post information that will help people start over, rebuild their finances, or handle custody of the kids following a divorce.

A criminal attorney might keep a close eye on local events to help generate content that will be helpful to people in the area.

Keep building your presence. Posts that are designed to be liked, shared, and commented on will help build interest in your website and increase awareness of your firm–and that means that when locals in your area have needs in your field of expertise, they’ll be more likely to call you.

Develop Solid Page Templates

A landing page is a page intended to help tell customers exactly what to do when they’ve reached your site. They might have arrived there via an ad, through a social media post, or through an email–and chances are, they did so for a specific reason.

Make it easy for them to find the action they’re looking for, whether it’s providing you with critical information so that you can add them to an email list or contact them, make a phone call to your office, or read a specific post. Landing pages should include an intuitive design, be void of as much clutter as possible, and include only the necessary links in order to increase their efficiency and help you make the most of your online marketing efforts.

Improve Your Firm’s Content Creation

As a law firm, one of your most important online advertisements is the content you create. Your content will do more than just increase SEO and draw people to your website. It’s also a clear indication of your expertise in your field and how much you care about your clients. Keep these standards in mind when writing or outsourcing content for your firm.

• Write about the pain points of your clients. A client who is dealing with criminal charges, for example, might need to know about how to talk to their boss about their legal troubles, while a woman going through a divorce might need to know how to juggle finances until child support or alimony are established.
• Provide genuinely useful information for your clients. It’s not just about convincing them to call you for help; it’s about establishing yourself as an authority. When they see that you know what you’re talking about in these areas, they may have an easier time trusting you with their legal issues.
• Answer some of the questions your clients have on a regular basis. Your content library can help decrease the questions clients have, helping your meetings and phone calls run more smoothly.

Developing your online presence is a critical part of advertising for today’s law firms. You can’t afford to miss out on all the benefits that online advertising offers. Beginning with these simple strategies, you can increase your business and make it easier for the right clients to find your business.

Recently, Google quietly made a change in organic search results with the additional inclusion of more “people also search for” boxes.

This new addition appears in search results when a user conducts an organic search, clicks on a result, and then returns back to the search results page. You can see an example of what this looks like below. The pink section represents the new feature you would see.

From Google’s point of view, this implies that the searcher did not find what they were looking for when they visited the first website they clicked on and are now providing alternative searches that may be relevant to your search query.

Is This A New Feature?

When doing a Google Search there are several ways that Google tries to send additional relevant queries to searchers. Right now those include the following:

1. Searches Related To: Displays at the bottom of the organic search results.
2. People Also Ask Section: The placement for this box seems to vary.
   
3. The New “People Also Search For”: Displays only after you bounce back to the search results after clicking on a website.

You can see that there are several different ways that Google is trying to provide searchers with more options that might be more relevant to their query.

So after looking at this feature deeper, it seems that is, in fact, a brand new feature and it can provide unique results from the other related search options that previously existed.

How Do The Related Search Options Compare?

I wanted to take a deeper dive and get an idea of how these related searches differ from what was already available. To do this I looked at the example “Do I Need To Hire A Car Accident Lawyer?”.

After conducting this search I was presented with the related searches, people also ask, and people also search for options on the search results page after clicking back from the first result.

This showed me that for this single search, Google provided me with 18 total additional searches I could try and click on. Google clearly sees these as related topics and it was surprising to me that there were only 2 searches that overlapped.

This means that for this one search query, Google provided me with 16 unique related topics.

You can see an example of this below with a list of the questions it curated along with a visual example of each result on the search page.

How You Can Use This To Your Advantage

There are some clear benefits of reviewing this data. First, from a keyword research perspective, you can basically get unlimited topics just by searching and looking at what Google values. But here are my main takeaways from this analysis:

1. Featured snippets do not appear to be affected by this and are therefore even more awesome.
   When I tried to replicate the click through and back button test for featured snippets the “People also search for” box did not display.
   
2. If people are bouncing, maybe you can look at these related queries?
   Another thought I had is that if you’re seeing a high bounce rate or quick exits from organic landing pages you should consider making the page more useful for users. If you need to know how you should consider reviewing what Google is associating to the search query in related searches.But then again, why wait?
3. Maybe you should just create content around the related queries
   Another strategy is to get to work and just start expanding the information on your website around topics related to the primary topic. I mean, the information is there. Why wait?

Overall I think this information is incredible and there are lots of ways to use this data. Imagine the possibilities? What if a potential customer finds you in organic search results, clicks your result, but doesn’t find what they were searching for. Then they click on a related query, and boom you are there again. That can be very powerful marketing.

Want to replicate the “People Also Search For”? Here’s how:

Step 1: Go to Google and conduct a search. My search was for Denver Personal Injury Lawyer. I then clicked on the first organic result which is highlighted below.

Step 2: After visiting the page I clicked the browser back button.  I was then shown the example below:

What are your feelings or thoughts about this new feature?

What downsides am I missing about this new feature? What are your thoughts on the matter? Let me know in the comments below:

True or false: newer, younger lawyers have an easier time with technology than veteran attorneys with decades under their belts?

“True” is the easy answer, but it might not be the right one.

Truth is, the amount of technology available to law firms today is so expansive that virtually anyone would be overwhelmed by the sheer research of it all.

It isn’t only the legal services software you have to think about. (Though that’s certainly its own quagmire — choosing a case management software can take half a year. They teach whole CLE classes on that topic alone!)

But your law firm isn’t just a law firm. It’s a business too, which means you have to sort through all the tech-y decisions that organizations of all other stripes must contend with too.

In theory, these decisions will make your life easier in the long run. That’s the whole point of technology, right?

But to reach that happy ending, you’ll need to make the right choices… and ideally, avoid headaches along the way.

After hearing this complaint from several of the lawyers and law firms we work with, we decided to create a Guide to Researching and Ultimately Selecting the Best Software for Your Law Firm. You’ll find it in the paragraphs that follow.

We’ve written this guide primarily with these audiences in mind:

• Recent law graduates planning to go into solo practice
• Startup law firms, which may consist of experienced attorneys who nevertheless haven’t had to adopt whole suites of technologies for a new firm before
• Well-established law firms trying to update, simplify, or improve their existing software systems

In other words, this is a guide for the young and the not-so-young, because unless you’ve had a reason to keep up with software trends in business and law over the last three-to-five years, those trends have almost certainly passed you by — no matter how long you’ve been in practice.

That’s right: even if you don’t know ANYTHING about legal software or the internet in general, this guide is designed to get you on the right track. At the very least, you’ll come away knowing the types of technology you might need, and you’ll be on the road to research.

How to Use This Guide

We’ve picked six different categories of software for lawyers. You’ll find one section for each category below.

Each section begins with an overview of that technology and what it can do for you, and then we’ll recommend a few of the best / most popular options on the market.

And don’t worry — no one is paying us to make these recommendations, and we don’t get a cut for any sales, so our advice comes from an honest place.

1. Accounting, Billing, and Billable Hours Software for Lawyers

Since billable hours rank high among the things that vex lawyers most, we thought it was a good place to begin our software quest.

No matter how big or small your practice is, you’ll need to track your hours, account for your time, and keep up with clients who aren’t paying (and how many times you’ve tried to chase them down).

Like anyone else in the small business world, you’ll have the usual suspects available to you: Freshbooks, QuickBooks, Quicken, Xero, and so on.

Those aren’t bad choices in any other field, and even in a law firm, they’ll get the job done. But since there are plenty of programs geared specifically to lawyers — software that will capture your time, record it, generate an invoice, and enter it in your books (all within the same system) — why not choose one of those?

What to Look For

• Timekeeping feature (i.e. click a button to track your billable hours)• Invoice generation• Invoice management system• Basic business accounting / bookkeeping features (for tracking deposits, expenses, deductions, etc.)• Basic reporting features (e.g. listings for accounts receivable, accounts payable, cash flow, etc.)• Separate account management for trust / IOLTA accounts

  • The ability to filter by attorney so you can see each individual firm member’s billings

  • The ability to filter accounts by date, payment status, amount past-due, etc.

  • The ability to keep a log of when and how you’ve followed up with clients on late payments

  • The ability to accept client payments by credit card, echeck, PayPal, and Square

  • Compatibility with your other software (and your operating system)

• Secure portals for sharing information / documents with clients, accountants, partners, etc.

Bonus Features

• The ability to link directly to your bank accounts
• Statement generation
• Mileage tracking
• Check printing
• Compatibility with foreign currencies

Most Popular Options

• Bill4Time (the law firm edition)• Amicus Attorney
• PCLaw
• Clio (see Section 3 on Case Management Software below)

2. Productivity Software: Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Etc.

This one’s easy. In fact, if there’s a single category in this article that you already have covered, it’s probably this one. But just in case you haven’t adopted a productivity suite yet, or are in the market for a new one, let’s have a look.

The standard bearer here is Microsoft Office, which used to come on a CD-Rom, but like most software, it has gone the way of web-based subscriptions and is now called Office 365.

You know what you need here — word processing, spreadsheets, notetaking, an email program, a digital calendar, etc. — so we won’t bother with a lengthy list.

Let’s just size up the real contenders instead.

It’s hard to argue against Office 365. It’s far from perfect and probably not the best, but it combines the virtue of “good enough” with the inevitability of “everyone else uses it.”

In today’s interconnected world, universality matters. Office 365 reigns supreme. Most law firms will want the business version, but solo practitioners might make the personal or home versions work.

But before you pull the trigger, a caveat: Google’s G Suite is coming for Office 365’s crown, and it’s coming hard. Google Docs and the Google Drive have long been a staple of file sharing via Gmail, which is already the most popular free email service in the business world. That means G Suite can chip away at Microsoft’s universality edge.

So while Office 365 reigns supreme for now, don’t be surprised to see G Suite catching on. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in our line of work as attorney SEO experts, it’s never to underestimate Google.

Learn more about the basic G Suite subscription package here.

3. PDF Conversion Software

As any seasoned lawyer can attest, it doesn’t take long for papers to pile up in a law office.

One filing cabinet can grow into a storage closet within your first year or two of practice… and pretty soon, you’re wearing out paper shredders and looking to lease extra closet space.

Even if your practice has gone completely paperless, you’re probably still on the receiving end of paperwork all the time (faxes, even!). One client alone can leave a tower of banker boxes behind.

That’s why PDF conversion programs have become so essential to the modern law practice. You don’t hear as much chatter about these applications, but they’re among the most indispensable software for lawyers.

What to Look For

• Optical Character Recognition, or OCR (software that can scans printed text, renders it digitally, and then allows you to edit it)
• Encryption
• Ability to add / delete metadata
• Ability to build forms so that you and your business partners can complete / edit the forms digitally
• PDF packaging feature (so that you can easily combine multiple scans into a single document or file)
• Compatibility with your productivity suite and document management software (see below)

Most Popular Options

• Adobe Acrobat
• Power PDF by Nuance
• Some high-end print-and-scan machines have excellent PDF conversion software bundled with the machine purchase

4. Document Management, Automation, and Assembly

If you’re running a law firm without document management or automation software, you’re wasting valuable time! The 21st century is here, and it’s made life much easier for people who constantly work with electronic documents (ie. lawyers).

Whether it’s inserting boilerplate, customizing letterhead to particular clients and cases, or inserting terms or clauses throughout a complex contract, document automation and assembly software lets lawyers make use of work they’ve already done in the past, creating templates that can be easily re-customized for future use with other clients.

Document management, meanwhile, does what you’d expect it to. For the lawyer who has hundreds if not thousands (or tens of thousands) of electronic pages to contend with this month alone, organization means everything.

Many programs combine document management, automation, and assembly within the same software purchase. Others prioritize some of these features over others. So it’s helpful to think about which of these features matters most to you.

What to Look For

• Plug-ins for use with Microsoft Word (or whatever your primary word processor might be)
• Compatibility with Google Docs and / or any other document system you plan to use
• A wide variety of template options
• Great customer support (since this type of attorney software is all about customization, you’ll want to make sure you can get someone on the phone if complications arise)
• Ability to build clause libraries
• PDF packaging feature (so that you can easily combine multiple scans into a single document or file)
• Version control
• Ability to access all your documents and libraries while offline
• Advanced search functions for easily finding the right file when you need it
• Advanced tagging features so you can sort, organize, and categorize your documents in a zillion different ways

Most Popular Options

• HotDocs
• The Form Tool
• FileMaker Pro
• NetDocuments (principally for document management)
• iManage (principally for document management)
• Worldox (principally for document management)
• Pathagoras
• LEAP
• XPressDox
• Draft Once
• Microsoft QuickParts (within Office 365; free but less advanced)

5. Legal Research Solutions  

Even the best attorney must rely on more than his or her memory. Lawyering is very much an exercise in research excellence, and excellence requires access to the right tools.

Today, most law firms use one of two online services for legal research: LexisNexis and Westlaw. They offer a variety of packages and pricing models, but none of them are what you’d call “cheap.”

So what do you do if you’re a smaller law firm with a modest budget and only moderate research needs? In this section, rather than focusing on the two most popular options (i.e. full-blown Lexis and West), we’ll list several alternative online legal research solutions for small and solo law firms that have been recommended by the ABA (though, as we’ll see, all most roads lead back to Lexis):

• LexisONE (includes free caselaw from the last five years, free court documents and legal forms, free access to every U.S. Supreme Court decision since 1970, and more)
• LexisNexis Pay As You Go
• Shepard’s Citations Service (available as a stand-alone service through LexisNexis)
• Fastcase
• Westlaw Next

6. Customer Relation Management (CRM) System  

We’ve written a lot about the importance of law firm intake analytics as an attorney marketing strategy in the past (as recently as last week, in fact). You can employ all the fancy marketing tricks in the world to get prospective clients’ attention, but if your leads don’t actually hire you, what’s the point?

Analytics is the science of tracking your marketing and contact efforts to determine what worked, what didn’t, and how you can improve your client conversion game.

Here at Juris Digital, we include an analytics component in everything we do as a law firm marketing agency, and if you don’t have someone handling your marketing for you, you should be conducting analytics too.

CRM software for lawyers is one great way to analyze your conversion efforts. It won’t actually collect your client data for you (that’s on you and your staff), but it will help you keep track of all your contact with them, and it will produce insightful reports about how you close in on clients (and where you can improve).

What to Look For

• Phone call tracking
• Notes features, organizable by client / account
• Visual reporting features (e.g. graphs)
• Social media integration
• If you have a legal marketing agency, you’ll want to use a program they know

What If Clio is the Only Attorney Software You Need?

If a piecemeal approach to selecting and installing your law firm software is simply too onerous, consider getting a single case management system (CMS) that covers at least most of your bases.

Case in point: Clio, the single most popular software for lawyers out there. It’s the leading CMS for a reason, and while it won’t check every box on the list we’ve laid out above, it can meet most of your needs.

If you want to learn more about case management software for lawyers, visit our guide to choosing one here. You might also want to read our recent, in-depth overview of Clio.

What About Your Website?

When it comes to technology, there may be no more important investment than the one your law firm makes in digital marketing, which is the #1 way for firms to grow in the evolving legal market. Increasingly, clients look for lawyers on Google, and if your law firm isn’t there for them to find (and making a great case), you’re going to lose their business to someone else.

Ultimately, getting bigger cases from better clients will afford your law firm to invest in higher-scale software to make your daily life as lawyers easily.

At Juris Digital, we help law firms get big results online — especially when it comes to getting on the first page of the Google results.

The internet is a powerful tool for growth. Just as the right attorney software can revolutionize your in-office efforts, attorney web marketing can revolutionize your bottom line. Contact Juris Digital and find out what we can do for you today.

2017 has been the year of changes for Local SEO’s. There has been more product modifications and major additions (upgrades?) than I can remember happening in a single year.

One of the new features we have seen rolling out (or just being tested) a lot over the past week is visible review summaries showing up in the three pack and local finder. You can see an example of what I’m talking about highlighted in red below on the third local pack result on the Desktop example and on the first result in local.

Desktop Review Summary Example

Another example of review summaries in search results

Mobile Review Summary Example

You will notice that personal injury is highlighted in the example above. This is interesting as the search I conducted was for “Car Accident Lawyer” and I assumed they might highlight the keyword I typed.

I noticed that these reviews are not popping up in every market. In fact, I still see very few overall when I’m searching for them. You can also see these triggered in the local finder as you can see in the example below:

What Reviews Are Being Pulled?

In the examples that I have seen, I did not notice an immediate pattern as to why they are picking certain reviews over others. A quick glance showed me that some were pulled from most recent reviews and others seemed to have no identifying factors such. It appears to be algorithmic as to why they pick the reviews they do and how they truncate them.

Who Gets The Reviews?

This also still seems to be a bit of an unknown. After looking at a small sample set of attorneys (15) the only thing we noticed is that reviews were in the double digits in these cases. However, there are plenty of firms with 10+ reviews that do not generate the review samples at this time.

Will The Reviews Show Pictures?

From a user experience, I thought it would be cool if this feature showed the picture of the actual reviewer instead of just the blue graphic headshot. On the examples we checked we saw that many reviewers had actual pictures in their review profile and they are not pulling to the shortened review summaries. I don’t think this will change, but it reminded me a bit about the old Google Authorship photos in search results and got me excited.

There Is Still Much To Learn // Send Us Your Screenshots & Searches!

Right now this seems more like a test than a full rollout and there seems that there is more we don’t know about this test than what we do.

If you’re able to get a screenshot example with a search phrase we would love to see it! (We prefer lawyer results). Please send it to cmeraz (at) jurisdigital.com

As a law firm marketing agency, we write our blog articles primarily with lawyers in mind.

Today, we address a topic that you might expect attorneys to already know about, but it’s one that is nevertheless getting a lot of law firms in trouble.

It’s also a topic that applies to everyone in every field, so even if you’re a non-lawyer who’s never stepped foot in a firm, this one’s still for you.

The question at hand: copyright, images, and when you can (or can’t) use someone else’s photograph or graphic design in your own work.

One of our clients, an excellent law firm with a sterling reputation, recently got in trouble for using an image they didn’t own in their firm’s newsletter. Like a lot of people, they had an urgent need for a relevant photograph and ran a quick Google Image search to save the day.

Google Images is a godsend to a generation that craves, expects, and demands visual aid. (And because we’re an attorney SEO agency, we’ll also nod toward the marketing benefits we can get for our law firm clients by using Google Image SEO strategy the right way.)

But with convenience comes temptation. It’s all too easy to find the perfect image in under ten seconds, right click that bad boy, and drop it into your newsletter / blog article / what have you.

Today, we’re going to take a simple look at the bright-line copyright rules surrounding internet images… and we’ll also throw in some practical, “non-binding,” experience-based advice about when your Google Image search is more or less likely to catch flak from somebody with a copyright claim.

How Could a Law Firm Make a Copyright Images Mistake?

We work with lawyers every single day, but we are not ourselves esquires. The irony of writing about a legal issue to legal experts isn’t lost on us. But marketing for lawyers is our specialty, and it’s in that context — marketing publications — that law firms most frequently run afoul of the copyright rules.

Here’s how and why:

• Not all lawyers are well versed in IP rules. Copyright Law is usually an elective in law school, and it doesn’t turn up on the MBE (Multistate Bar Exam). Some states touch on it in their bar exams, but it’s never really regarded as one of the “major” topics of law. Even among attorneys, copyright and trademark laws are sometimes treated as more of a specialty, owing in part to the fact that patent lawyers (who must have additional certification) tend to practice in those same areas.
• “Fair Use” is fuzzy. We mentioned “bright-line rules” earlier, but when it comes to the question of fair use, the lines are harder to see. There is no universal yes/no answer for when something qualifies as fair use, and that can lead to some confusion — especially among newer lawyers or those unacquainted with IP law.
• The person putting together your law firm newsletter might not be a lawyer. You might know the rules, but what about your office manager, in-house marketing manager, or the Photoshop-savvy paralegal you’ve tasked with creating or reviewing your publications?
• “Color of title.” We use the phrase loosely here. In real property law, “color of title” refers to the mere appearance of ownership, such as when a person takes title to property in good faith but there is a defect in the deed, rendering it legally invalid. In a more general sense, the phrase can refer to an innocent mistake of fact or law. That’s what happens sometimes when legal images appear on law firm websites without permission. If the image looks like a stock photo, the law firm might assume in good faith that their marketing agency acquired it through legal means, such as an image license subscription service or a royalty-free stock gallery. Similarly, lawyers might reasonably assume all the graphics on their site came from their in-house graphics person. But that isn’t always the case.
• Even if you know better, temptation is powerful. Let’s face it: grabbing a graphic from Google Images is easy. And you probably aren’t going to get caught. “Besides,” you might think, “it’s just for my little email newsletter… what’s the harm?” But the copyright holder might see things differently.

Copyright, Images, and Fair Use 101

In general, before we dive into the specific context of using legal images from the ’net in law firm website and newsletters, it’s helpful to review some of the foundational tenets of copyright law as it relates to fair use and images:

Copyright

• A copyright is a creator’s right to exclusively use and distribute his or her original work. Copyright is of limited duration (for most modern works in the U.S., it expires 70 years after the creator’s death) and is subject to certain exceptions and other limitations.
• Copyright generally attaches at the moment of creation. In other words, the creator is automatically the exclusive owner of the work — even if they never take any steps to register the copyright, publish the work, or apply for trademark protection, etc. (Copyright and trademark are two different things.)
• Photographs are the exclusive right of the photographer. The instant the photographer clicks the camera’s shutter (or the iPhone’s photo button), they become the owner of that work and can license or sell it as they please.
• Copyright also includes the creator’s right to display the work publicly and to create derivative works — so you can’t use their public display of their work as justification for using it yourself, nor can you create your own derivate work and call it “original” (again, generally speaking).
• Copyright does not protect general ideas, only particular expressions of ideas.
• The public policy behind U.S. copyright law has always been to balance the interest of the creator with the interests of the public. So the law does recognize your interest in making new or creative use of someone else’s original work (and your readers’ interest in seeing what you can do with that work.) But the usage must be fair, and that brings us to the doctrine of…

Fair Use

“Does this qualify as fair use?” It must be one of the most-asked questions of the digital age. And perhaps we’ll someday get a clearer answer to that question. But for now, courts are the only ones who can ultimately decide. In assessing fair use, judges weigh several factors on balance:

1. The purpose and character of the use (for example, are you using it for commercial purposes, or for nonprofit or commercial purposes?); and
2. The nature of the copyrighted work; and
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market value for or value of the copyrighted work.

These four factors are set forth in 17 USC § 107, home of U.S. Copyright Law. Notable, a court must consider all the factors in tandem, but the first is often given the most weight.

Understanding Copyright Rules for Legal Images: “Can I Use This Picture?”

It goes without saying that if you own the image yourself — because you’re the photographer or it was work for hire — or you’ve purchased a license to use the image, you’re in the clear.

Likewise, you’re good to go if:

• The image is in the public domain, or
  
  • Is used with express permission from the copyright owner (and hey, it never hurts to ask), or
  
  • Has been made available for public use, royalty free (under a Creative Commons license, for example, but then you must be careful to follow the terms of the license with specificity… a Creative Commons license is not carte blanche for unlimited usage of someone else’s work, and not all Creative Commons licenses are the same).

But what if you definitely don’t own the image and don’t have clear permission to use it? Your next question becomes whether it qualifies as Fair Use. That question gets complicated when it comes to using legal images in law firm publications. Here’s why:

• If you’re writing about the law, you’re probably engaged in commentary or education. These are the hallmarks of fair use. But does the image you’re using clearly relate to what you’ve written, or is it merely incidental? For example, it’s one thing to write about bus accidents and use a haunting photograph of a famous bus accident… it’s another to write an article about the photograph itself. In context, either could qualify as fair, but the latter scenario comes much closer to the meaning of “fair use.”
• Just for the record, courts have historically shown great deference to photographers who haven’t yet made their images available to the public. But since you’re probably not digging far beyond Page 1 of the Google Image search, we doubt you’ve stumbled upon anyone’s private storage account by mistake. But keep this in mind also: the more creative a photo is (as opposed to a “documentary photograph”), the more protection it gets… of course, defining creativity is a difficult task, even for courts and scholars.
• As an attorney or legal practice, you are a commercial enterprise. Even if what you’re writing is educational and appears in a free newsletter, if it promotes your law firm in any way, courts might construe it as commercial.
• With text, movies, and songs, it’s easy to use only a small portion of a work. But with images, that’s a challenge. If you crop much, you’ll be left with something unrecognizable. Scale it down to low resolution and the creator might have a claim against you for harming their reputation by compromising the quality. So the “portion of use” factor will probably weigh against you (or at least won’t weigh in your favor)… though it helps if you’ve only used the image in a single blog post where it was relevant instead of, you know, the home page and fifteen other landing pages.
• Providing credit and a direct link to the original author/source can help. But credit isn’t the same thing as permission, and exposure isn’t the same thing as compensation. Don’t assume you’ve qualified for fair use simply because you’ve put a spotlight on the creator.

As you can see, fair use questions usually fall in a gray area. As a law firm engaged in commercial publication, you want to have a really strong first-factor case to overcome your shortcomings on the other three fair use factors.

As a Practical Matter…

A certain ethics system has evolved — and is still evolving — around the use of images in social media, and the law hasn’t quite caught up. Case in point: memes, which are arguably fair-use transformative works. See also: images that were seemingly posted on social media for the very purpose of being seen and used by the public.

Based on our experience, we think you’re less likely to get stung by a copyright infringement complaint in the following scenarios, even if they don’t quite qualify as ownership or fair use:

• The image is promotional in nature. For example, let’s say you mention Erin Brockovich in your environmental law blog, and you include an image of the movie poster to add visual interest. You might not have a legal claim to the image, and fair use might not factor out in your favor. But as a practical reality, movie studios are not in the habit of suing people for reproducing their posters. They want their images to be shared — and the same goes for publicity stills, official product images, and just about any other image created by a company to promote its works.
• You’ve done your due diligence, provided credit, and are willing to comply with requests to remove. If an image has been so widely shared on the internet that you can’t possibly determine who originated it in order to contact them for permission (or to confirm a Creative Commons license), you should probably assume that, legally speaking, you can’t use the photo. But when images are so widely circulated that they take on a life of their own — as is the case with memes or so-called “viral images” on social media — it’s unlikely you’ll end up as a defendant for using the image in a similar fashion. Provide whatever attribution you can, and be willing to immediately remove the image upon the first request from the copyright owner (or, alternatively, to negotiate a license).

In both these cases, only use internet images if you’re comfortable doing so — at your own risk.

Above all else, remember these three rules:

• Assume every image is protected by copyright law until you confirm otherwise
• Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t give you a legal right to do it (even if social custom is evolving such that you might have an ethical right).
• If it’s on your website or in your newsletter, you’re liable for it.

Figuring Out the Internet Isn’t Your Full-Time Job

Avoiding copyright infringement is especially important for law firms. Like anyone else, you don’t want to get sued. But you also have another important consideration: your reputation as practitioners of a noble profession.

Getting busted for stealing a photograph can be a professional embarrassment and could even lead to ethical problems with your state bar. That’s why it’s important to err on the side of caution.

As a law firm marketing agency, we often handle our clients’ graphic and image needs for them. Our clients trust us to keep them out of trouble — not only for images but also with copywriting. (As many law firms have learned the hard way, if you hire cheap writers with no legal background to do your blogging for you, you’ll likely end up with plagiarized work!)

We care about our clients’ content because content makes them grow. And that’s literally the only reason Juris Digital exists: to make law firms grow.

Need some help growing your firm using the internet the right way? Contact Juris Digital and find out what we can do for you today.

The PPC Problem and Juris Digital’s Approach

Pay-Per-Click all comes down to how much you pay per click — and whether it’s getting you what you want.

At Juris Digital, we’re consistently getting our clients more than double the average PPC conversion rate for law firms without breaking their budgets.

In fact, for one of our clients, we recently beat that average conversion rate more than seven times over. In today’s case study, we’re going to put that law firm in the spotlight to show you exactly how we achieved sevenfold success.

But first, a word on what we’re up against.

PPC advertising is an enormous industry. Google rakes in over $75 billion from AdWords alone each year, which means our law firm PPC clients are competing against some fat wallets.

That’s especially true in the legal services market. Keywords and phrases relevant to attorneys — and especially to personal injury attorneys — rank as the costliest terms in all of online advertising. (The most expensive keyword in the whole world: “Insurance.”)

And that’s just in AdWords. There are plenty of other PPC platforms that can produce big results for law firms too, chief among them: Facebook and Yahoo! Bing.

But outside of Big Law, few firms have wallets thick enough to outspend their biggest competitors. Bidding on PPC for lawyers can get out of control quickly, and smaller or mid-sized firms can easily bid themselves beyond the point of diminishing returns if they aren’t careful.

So if your dollars can’t be bigger, they need to be smarter, and that’s where PPC strategy comes in.

In the sections that follow, you’ll get a glimpse of one of our real clients, Malman Law, and their PPC goals. We’ll walk you through the custom-developed strategies we used to get them the growth they wanted for their firm, complete with graphs and easy-to-understand explanations.

We think Malman’s story is a compelling illustration for any firm wanting to get better PPC conversion rates than its competitors without breaking the bank.

The Details of the Case: A Look at Malman Law and Its Goals

The Law Offices of Malman Law, PC is a Chicago personal injury law firm with 11 associate and senior associate attorneys alongside president and founder Steven J. Malman. The firm handles everything from auto accidents and worker’s compensation claims to slip and fall, nursing home abuse, medical malpractice, and beyond.

Since opening in 1994, Malman Law has handled over 15,000 cases and has a slew of successful settlements and verdicts to its credit — including several over $5 million each.

Still, despite its success, Malman knows well the scope of competition in the Chicago market. As in every major city — and many of the smaller ones — there are more attorneys than the market really needs, and they’re all battling it out for the same four PPC slots at the top of the Google results page.

But as much as they want to win the race, Malman knows it can’t focus on PPC alone. Attorney web marketing is a multi-faceted exercise, and it includes many other services: inbound content marketing, social media, SEO, web design, local search marketing, and more. The firm has other advertising interests, too — television, billboard ads, outbound print marketing, etc.

So while they are able to devote an effective budget to online advertising, Malman wants to make sure they aren’t spending a single penny on law firm PPC that could be better allocated elsewhere.

In other words, PPC for lawyers it’s all about conversion. At the end of the day, even if you spend enough to claim those coveted spots at the top of Google, and even if your ads are good enough to get clicks, if those clicks don’t become clients, it was all for naught — and a relative waste of finite dollars.

So Malman asked our team here at Juris Digital to find out what other law firms are getting in terms of a conversion rate for PPC… and to make theirs better.

Our Results: Malman Law

As it happens, our results were pretty stellar, so let’s get right to them:

The average conversion rate in PPC for lawyers is 4%.
Malman’s conversion rate after hiring Juris Digital: over 30%.

And we aren’t just talking about a one-time spike to 30%. Malman Law’s conversion rate and performance metrics have remained steady — and by steady, we mean more than seven times the law firm average — during the entire time that we have managed their account.

30% is a substantial benchmark, and it compares favorably in any industry. That means nearly 1 out of every 3 people clicking their ad goes on to contact their firm.

What would that kind of PPC conversion rate do for your practice?

How Did We Do It? Step 1: Targeted Terms and Optimized Copy

So much of a successful attorney PPC campaign comes down to two kinds of word choice:

• The keywords you target
• The words you use in your ad copy

Because legal terms are some of the costliest in all of PPC, picking the right terms is critical. It’s a value game: which terms will get results for this specific firm in this specific market without spending more than they’re worth?

To find out, we conducted extensive keyword research. Which terms go for the most money? Which relevant key terms and phrases work best? What are their competitors in the market currently paying for?

Armed with that info, we started to bid competitively on “best opportunity” terms for Malman — and started winning the auctions we wanted.

But CPC is only half the equation (literally).

Generally speaking, Google’s formula for serving PPC ads to users looks like this:

CPC Bid x Quality Score = Ad Rank

At Juris Digital, we like to think we run quality PPC campaigns for lawyers, so we pride ourselves on high Quality Scores… and that takes us to Step 2.

How Did We Do It? Step 2: Higher Quality Scores

Google is absolutely obsessed with getting its users the best, most relevant content possible. That goal drives everything the company does. It’s why organic SEO matters so much for turning up on Page 1 of their results. It’s why keyword stuffing doesn’t work anymore. And it’s the reason their PPC slots don’t simply go to the highest bidder.

In fact, an advertiser with a sky-high quality score can win a Google ad auction with a smaller CPC bid. So what is a Quality Score and how do we boost it?

A number of factors influence your ad’s Quality Score, including:

• Relevance of the ad copy to the keyword it’s bidding on
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of your landing page
• Your AdWords account’s performance over time
•  The ad’s click-through rate

No one knows exactly how much weight Google assigns to each factor, but through careful (read: fanatical) monitoring, we were able to fine-tune Malman’s ads so that they earned optimal Quality Scores for each targeted key term.

This is where our expert copywriting comes in. By choosing words that work — both for the ad itself and for its landing page — we’re able to give Google the gold-standard relevance it’s looking for.

How Did We Do It? Step 3: The Bigger Picture (Multiple PPC Platforms)

To some extent, this is a “chicken and the egg” proposition. As Quality Scores improved, Malman’s Ad Ranks continued to rise. This, in turn, improved click-through rate, which would then lead to an even higher Quality Score.

It’s easy to get caught up in that cycle and lose sight of anything that isn’t AdWords. But the truth is that while Google’s service is still leader of the pack, there are many other sophisticated PPC platforms out there that can drive substantial and highly relevant traffic to a law firm online. We wanted to make sure Malman wouldn’t miss out on those opportunities.

PPC platforms aren’t created equal, though, and what makes sense for one firm might not for another. LinkedIn’s PPC program, for instance, works well for business and transactional attorneys. Not so much for personal injury lawyers, who will generally get more bang for their bucks at Google, Facebook, Yahoo! Bing, and YouTube. So that’s where we concentrated our energy.

How Did We Do It? Step 4: Clear Communication and Goals

So far, we’ve talked a lot about what we did for Malman, but in reality, we do all of this with Malman, and that’s a key ingredient for success.

PPC is a significant investment for any law firm. The client needs to know its dollars are going to good use. They expect us to be good stewards of their investment and to produce a sizeable, demonstrable return.

Managing PPC for lawyers is unique in that our clients are some of the busiest working professionals out there. So while Mr. Malman and his attorneys don’t have time to pour over every little metric in our data, they do expect us to.

They also expect us to explain our findings in a way they can clearly visualize and confirm.

We want to bring a good report card to our clients — honest and transparent but also evident of real success. That’s why we work hard to optimize CPC and Quality Scores. We don’t sign our clients to long-term contracts, so if we don’t show results, we wouldn’t expect Malman to continue with our services.

A more than sevenfold improvement over the average attorney PPC conversion rate? Yeah, that’s a pretty stellar report card. And we’re producing that same level of success from month to month and from quarter to quarter.

How Did We Do It? Step 5: Great Site Content & Web Design

Earlier, we talked about optimizing the copy on Malman’s landing pages so that users who click their ads are taken to useful and relevant destinations.

But if they’re going to convert into clients (and remember: conversion is what it’s all about… that’s the ultimate goal, and it’s the metric we successfully multiplied over the industry average for Malman), they are almost certainly going to venture beyond that first landing page.

So the rest of the site has to look great, read well, and perform masterfully too.

Studies of web user behavior show that most people have very little patience for a sloppy or slow-loading site. And when it comes to professional service providers, like attorneys, they expect a really Grade-A website. Anything less raises real questions in the user’s mind about the law firm’s credibility. (A halfway decent law firm should be “with it” enough, and should have budget enough, to maintain a great website… or so the reasoning goes.)

Our law firm web design team here at Juris Digital designed Malman Law’s website using WordPress, the #1, top-rated, most widely used Content Management System (CMS) in attorney web design. We invite you to visit and take a look.

You’ll find:

• A strong visual message that gets right to the point
• A personable connection between the real people behind Malman Law and the real clients they serve
• Compelling, SEO-friendly web copy
• Intuitive layout
• Fast-loading, mobile-responsive design
• An overall content strategy that complements the content we put inside each of Malman’s PPC ads

The ads drive users to the website, but the site is what makes the sale. It’s Malman’s single most important conversion tool, and it’s the secret to the killer results we deliver them.

Need Some Help with Your Own Law Firm PPC Strategy?

We realize that our results for Malman are pretty extraordinary, especially given how quickly we got there and how consistently we’ve stayed there.

But we were also reminded throughout this campaign that an all-in commitment to making our digital marketing efforts a success (and having a client who is willing to make that commitment with us) can make all the difference.

We understand that every law firm is different, and yours might not be ready to embrace PPC with arms as widely opened as Malman’s were, but we’ve also worked with enough law firms over the years to know that diligence and strategy will translate to ROI.

If there’s been a consistent lesson to come out of working with all our clients, it is this: committing to excellence always works.

If you haven’t seen the level of success you’d like in your past PPC campaigns, we can help. Our team is passionate about making your website and your web marketing efforts the law firm growth tools they ought to be. Contact Juris Digital today for law firm PPC management services.

A Review of Justia’s Web Design and Digital Marketing Services

If you’re in the market for digital marketing services for your law firm, it’s quite possible that you’ve come across Justia. Justia offers legal marketing services including web design, SEO, content marketing, and social media. These services supplement their lawyer directory on which they sell “Premium” listings.

In this article I’ve done by best to provide valuable insight into Justia’s marketing services. The goal is to help you make the most informed decision possible as you consider hiring Justia to handle your firm’s web design and digital marketing.

Disclaimer: Justia is a competitor of ours, and so we are hopelessly biased. That being said, what follows is my honest assessment based on what I know of their marketing services and results.

An Overview of Justia’s History

Before I examine Justia’s specific marketing services, I think it’ll be useful to have a look at the company’s history.

Justia was co-founded Tim Stanley (current CEO) and Stacy Stern (current President). The duo launched Justia.com not long after their previous company, FindLaw, was acquired by West Publishing (Thomson Reuters) in January 2001.

Justia.com circa December 2004 via Web.Archive.org

Justia.com appears to have been launched in November of 2002. However, at that point the site was was little more than pre-LinkedIn LinkedIn profile for Tim Stanley. Check out what the site looked like on the WayBack Machine.

By late 2004, Justia.com was advertising law firm website design and SEO services on a “coming soon” page, and the full site appears to have been launched on December 13, 2004. So, at the time of writing this post, Justia has been providing legal marketing services, including website design and SEO, for 12 years and 9 months. Props to Justia!

Justia.com has evolved since this first version was launched back in 2004. Most law firms are familiar with Justia.com because of it’s comprehensive lawyer directory, legal Q&A, and legal research resources. For our purposes here, we’ll keep our focus on reviewing Justia’s web design, content marketing and blogging, and SEO services.

Reviews of Justia’s Core Marketing Services

Justia Website Design & Development Review

Justia Website Designs

One of Justia’s core services for law firms is website design and development. As I’ve said before, much of judging the quality of a given agency’s website design services comes down to preferential, subjective measures.

In the case of Justia’s contemporary websites, my personal opinion on their overall design is that it’s not particularly unique, diverse, or compelling, but it’s by no means bad or ineffective. Here are some examples:

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My personal opinion of Justia’s website designs is that they leave much to be desired in terms of creativity and diversity. But that’s just one person’s opinion. There are clearly people who quite like the aesthetic of Justia’s websites given their success and longevity.

Justia Website PageSpeed

Besides design, we should also consider the technical qualities of Justia websites. For law firms who aspire to generate consistent leads from the web, website pagespeed is critical. At Juris Digital, we strive to ensure that our client’s site are not only elegant, unique, and highly functional, but also blazing fast.

Apparently, Justia values pagespeed too. I ran the four websites listed above through Google’s pagespeed tool, and the scores were impressive:

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Kudos to Justia for prioritized pagespeed. This certainly puts their websites ahead of many of the other legal web design agencies in the field.

Justia Website Content Management System

On Justia’s marketing website, they differentiate between websites and blogs (I’ll explain my opposition to this approach from a strategic standpoint below). It appears that Justia also uses different content management systems for their websites vs. blogs.

The best we can tell, Justia builds their client’s “websites” on a proprietary content management system (CMS). As we’ve discussed on this blog before, we always advise our clients to have their website built on WordPress. WordPress is the most commonly used CMS in the world, it’s the best suited for SEO and content marketing, and its easily transferrable.

And therein lies my issue with Justia using their own proprietary CMS for client websites. If you decide to move on from Justia, your new website provider will not be able to simply take over management of the site. You’ll have to build a new site on a platform that you or your new provider can manage.

Alternatively, it appears that Justia’s “blogs” are indeed built on WordPress. This does make sense; WordPress is an excellent platform for frequent publishing of new content. What doesn’t make a ton of sense, in my opinion, is using separate websites, and content management systems, for your firm’s “website” and “blog”.

Justia Blogs

In addition to offering law firm websites, Justia also offer law firm blogs. At Juris Digital, we don’t really make this distinction, because we build all of our client’s sites on WordPress, which accommodates both traditional “website” pages, and blogging.

Furthermore, we believe that blogging (ie. content marketing) is an essential part of any law firm’s digital marketing strategy. We bake blogs right into our client’s websites. Maintaining two separate websites, on two separate domains, means inefficiency, both from a management standpoint and from an SEO standpoint.

For example, if your blog gets a bunch of social media shares and natural backlinks, that’s great! But that SEO authority isn’t being equally applied to your separate “law firm website”. That site will require its own content and links in order to generate rankings and traffic.

While we have no doubt that Justia has produced effective blogs for their clients over the years, we strongly disagree with the approach of separating the firm’s website from the blog.

My rating of Justia’s web design and development services

While I’m not a huge fan of their designs, or the fact that they use a proprietary CMS and domains for blogs vs. websites, I’d score Justia’s website’s a solid 4.5 our of 5 based on their strong calls-to-action, responsive coding, and fast page load times.

Justia Content Marketing Services Review

On the Content page on their marketing website, Justia says:

At Justia, we help our clients develop a sound content strategy that combines SEO best practices with each firm’s unique voice and approach to legal issues. We also offer custom content services for clients who prefer that their content be drafted by an experienced legal marketing professional.

Justia then goes on to list out the various attributes of their content services that makes them valuable. These include:

• Practice Areas
• Geographical Focus
• Format and Structure
• Uniqueness
• Keyword Density

I am wholly unimpressed by Justia’s ability to describe the value of their content marketing services. This gives me pause and makes me wonder whether Justia has given any consideration to what’s required to succeed at legal content marketing in 2017 vs. 2004.

I invite you to compare Justia’s information on content marketing vs. our approach here at Juris Digital, by checking out our content marketing service page and our guide to evergreen content marketing.

In fairness, just because the person who wrote Justia’s content marketing services pages failed to convey much value, doesn’t mean that Justia isn’t capable of producing effective content for their clients. But it certainly doesn’t bode well. If Justia’s content capabilities are limited to producing content that addresses your practice areas and geographic market, that is properly formatted, that is unique, and that has “keyword density”, then you’re better off looking elsewhere for these services.

My rating of Justia’s content marketing services

I gave Justia a 4.5 out of 5 for the quality of their websites. I can’t say the same for their content marketing services. Based on browsing through their client’s sites, and the information they have on their website, I’d give their content marketing services a 3 out of 5.

Justia SEO Services Review

Effective SEO depends greatly on being proficient in a variety of areas of digital marketing. For example, effective SEO cannot be achieved in the absence of a technically sound website, or a thoughtful content and keyword strategy, or link building initiatives that deliver quality links.

In other words, providing effective SEO services is difficult because it requires that you have capabilities beyond a basic knowledge of how search engines work.

Justia’s SEO services page contains the same vague description of how they provide value with their SEO services as they used on the content marketing page. The various headings on the page cover:

• Quality Content
• Practice Areas
• Geographical Focus
• HTML Tags
• Website Organization and Structure
• Uniqueness
• Keyword Density
• Distribution
• Social Media Integration

It’s not that I necessarily object to the validity of any of these areas of focus, but I am again struck by the lack of value communicated. These are basic concepts that any qualified SEO understands. I encourage you to compare Justia’s explanation of their SEO services with ours.

What also strikes me here is the absence of a mention of link building. Justia does mention Distribution, which they define as:

Submitting your website to directories and databases may help your placement in search engine results pages.

While this is technically link building, it’s the absolute most basic form of link building, and it will not be enough to get your site ranked in competitive markets. At Juris Digital we are obsessed with link building because we understand that the ability to gain valuable backlinks is essential to achieving keyword rankings that generate new cases for our clients.

Again, just because the person who wrote Justia’s SEO services page failed to convey particularly compelling value, doesn’t mean that Justia isn’t capable of achieving SEO success, but it’s not a great sign.

We were recently approached by a Justia client who explained that he had been investing in marketing with Justia for nearly a decade. I was shocked when I analyze the site’s performance using AHrefs.com, and this is what I saw in terms of organic traffic:

AHrefs estimates that the site gets roughly 41 organic search visits per month. This is incredibly low for such an old site, and one that’s been “SEO’d” for nearly a decade. Compare that to Juris Digital’s oldest client:

The Justia client also has a blog with Justia, so I checked the performance of it as well, but the stats were far worse:

I realize that this example is anecdotal, and it certainly is not representative of all of Justia’s clients. But the fact that this client has been with them for so long, and still the site’s traffic is not more robust, is troubling.

My rating of Justia’s SEO services

I gave Justia a 4.5 out of 5 for the quality of their websites. But, like with their content marketing services, I have major doubts about their ability to provide aggressive and effective SEO services to their clients. I’d rate Justia’s SEO services the same as I do their content marketing: 3 out of 5.

Summing it up…

Justia is a well established name in the online legal world, not only for their website and marketing services, but also for their lawyer directory and legal resources.

Based on my recent discussions with Justia clients, and my own examination of the site’s that they’re producing I can confidently say that law firms could do much worse in terms of digital marketing than Justia.

However, I sense that Justia’s history as one of the original online marketing companies for law firms has made them comfortable. I don’t see any special effort to keep up with what’s required for law firms to compete online in 2018, which is highlighted by issues like their lack of link building acumen and their vanilla content marketing services.

[juris_cta heading=”Considering hiring Justia for digital marketing?” content=”If you’re considering hiring Justia, we hope you’ll talk to us first to discuss our vision for generating new cases for your law firm online.” button=”Let’s Talk”]

So you’re ready to start your own law firm? Congratulations! This is the beginning of many a success story in the United States. Yours might be next. So you’re ready to start your own law firm? Congratulations! This is the beginning of many a success story in the United States. Yours might be next.

Mind you, not all law firms soar at first — or even ever. If they did, every attorney would have their own practice.

Starting your own law firm takes a lot of work and in this world of ethics rules and legal forms and bank accounts and insurance premiums and regulations… well, you get the idea. It isn’t easy. Or cheap. And there are no guarantees.

But the biggest stumbling block for shingle hangers is often simply the uncrossed “t” or the un-dotted “i.”

The things you forget about, overlook, or never even anticipate are the things most likely to cause you problems early on.

To that end, we’ve developed an everything-you-need-to-do list for lawyers opening their own practices.

We call it The Ultimate Starting Your Own Law Firm Checklist, and whether you’re a recent graduate or a seasoned vet venturing out of Big Law for the first time, it’s an excellent resource.

Below, we’ll walk you through the 13 most important areas of preparation. You’ll find a to-do list within each category. That’s a good thing because, as any Type-A personality can tell you (and if you’re hanging your own shingle, there’s a good chance you are one), crossing off a to-do list feels good.

1. Planning

“Planning” might seem like a pretty obvious item, but we aren’t talking about the abstract here. We mean a business plan… the same type of formal packet entrepreneurs must take to investors or the bank for a loan.

Even if you aren’t looking for that kind of capital just yet, it’s healthy to have a formal business plan in place for your firm. Too often, legal practices falter because the attorney only saw the firm as a vocation, not as a business.

As the head of your own practice, you’ll need to start wearing both hats from square one.

PLANNING CHECKLIST

• Assess yourself: Why are you starting a law firm? What are your goals?
• Ask yourself: Are you ready to run a business and practice law?
• Know yourself: Are you experienced enough to practice law on your own? (Or do you have someone joining you who is?)
• Project how many hours you will work each week.
• Set your fees. (How much will you charge clients?)
• Write up fee agreements and client intake forms.
• Write a formal Business Plan.

2. Budgeting

You need to have an idea of what your finances will look like, even if you expect them to be meager in the beginning. Know how much money you have to work with, where that money’s going, and when/where/how you’ll see it return.

You’ll probably need to adjust your Business Plan as you work through this step.

BUDGETING CHECKLIST

• Project your gross receipts.
• Project your overhead expenses.
• Project your net receipts, salary, and profits.
• Project your cash flow.

3. Which Form of Business?

Attorneys usually have several options when forming a law firm as a business organization:

• Solo practice
• Partnership
• LLC
• LLP
• Partnership with a non-lawyer (where allowed)
• In some cases, a corporation

The right choice will depend on:

• The size of your practice
• Your state bar’s rules
• The business organizations available in your state
• Tax considerations
• Liability considerations
• Long-term succession plans
• What kind of agreements you want to draw up between you and your potential partners

While it’s usually possible to change your form of business later, doing so is never not a pain, so think carefully now.

FORM OF BUSINESS CHECKLIST

• Determine how many people will be a part of your business and what roles they’ll play.
• Consult with an accountant.
• Make sure you understand the liability and taxation implications of each form of business.
• Make sure you understand the paperwork and reporting requirements for each form of business.
• Check for any attorney ethics rules pertaining to your chosen form of business in your state. Make sure you comply.
• Create partnership agreements (if necessary).
• Draft and file your Articles of Incorporation (or the relevant documents required by the State Department).

4. How Are You Going to Market Yourself?

Do you have a ready-made client base? If you’ve been practicing for a long time at another law firm, the answer might be yes.

But many lawyers don’t have a bankable book of business to carry out the front door. In that case, you need to give real thought to how you’ll attract clients.

Remember: this is more difficult in law than in other professions. Strict rules apply when attorneys try to advertise themselves. Make sure you follow them.

Incidentally, this is one item on the law firm startup checklist that we can help with. Juris Digital is a top-ranked provider of web marketing for law firms, and we’re experts at using the internet to make law firms grow. However, if you would rather learn the ropes on your own or hire someone in-house to get a headstart on marketing, we recommend you check out our SEO Training Program for law firms. Your in-house marketer will appreciate it.

MARKETING CHECKLIST

• Identify your potential client base.
• Refresh yourself on the ethics rules for attorney advertising.
• List at least three practical, demonstrable ways you’ll attract clients. Include these in your Business Plan.
• Contact your state and county bar associations to see if they have helpful resources for startup law firms.
• Decide how you’ll advertise (print, web, television, radio, etc.).
• Hire an attorney web marketing team to design your website and get your new law firm ranked on Google.

5. Where Will Your Office Be?

Obviously, it’s better to be in a busy part of town… but those spaces will cost you. If there’s a more affordable option outside of downtown, it might be worth considering.

Then again, some types of legal practices – like defense attorneys specializing in traffic tickets and low-level arrests — benefit tremendously from being near a courthouse. Medical malpractice attorneys might value proximity to hospitals.

These days, the virtual office is a popular option, as is the home office, but most lawyers find it easier to recruit clients when their shingle is both real and nonresidential. Here again, though, it’s all a question of cost.

The bottom line: real estate is a research-intensive inquiry, so plan on this part of the checklist taking some extra time.

LOCATION CHECKLIST

• Research some law practices of different sizes and types in your area. Where are their offices?
• Look for available office space. Consider consulting with a realtor.
• Ask yourself: how much space do you want vs. how much do you need?
• Define a maximum budget for leasing or buying office space.
• Keep the client experience in mind. What kind of impression will your office make? Now weigh that against the cost.
• Is office sharing an option? Working from home?
• Before signing anything, look into the parking situation and ask about renovation needs, janitorial services, utility and service providers, amenities, expansion opportunities, regulations concerning marketing or signage, applicable zoning ordinances, and ADA compliance.

6. Keeping the State Bar Happy

If you’re starting a law firm, the state bar is going to want to know about it… and not just with an informal “by the way.” There are forms to fill out, rules to abide by, and (of course) fees to pay.

Don’t overlook any of those, or you’ll find yourself starting with your worst foot forward.

In fact, we recommend calling your state bar’s advisory board and asking them to walk you through the requirements. Make a note of the day, the time, the person you spoke with, and what they said.

STATE BAR & ETHICS COMPLIANCE CHECKLIST

• Reread all the rules about opening, owning, and operating a legal practice.
• Give the state bar adequate notice of your new practice.
• Fill out all the necessary forms and pay all applicable fees.
• Call the ethics board to make sure you’re doing things the right way.

7. Opening Bank Accounts and a Line of Credit

As with everything else in law, managing your funds (and even more importantly, your clients’ funds) is something to take very seriously. You’ll need to have the right kinds of accounts and report on them regularly. You might also consider a line of credit.

As a general rule, your total capital account balance + your total line of available credit should be enough to cover all your startup costs and at least six months of overhead. (You’ll also need to have enough personal money to cover your bills and living expenses for the first six months to a year.)

BANK ACCOUNT & CREDIT CHECKLIST

• Open a business operating account (for expenses, payroll, etc.).
• Open a separate IOLTA account (where applicable/required).
• Consider a business savings account and safety deposit box.
• Talk to banks and credit unions. Research your options for a law firm credit card and/or business line of credit.
• Consider additional sources of funding: investors, private lenders, personal loans, home equity or refinancing, secured loans, family loans, your own personal savings. (Note: some states may impose restrictions or regulations on some sources of funding.)
• Order business checks, bookkeeping binders, deposit slips, and endorsement stamps.
• Get set up for accepting and processing credit cards from your clients.
• Consider retirement accounts. You might also add a retirement plan to your Business Plan.
• Provide the requisite notice of all your bank accounts to your state bar. Update your Business Plan too.

8. Accounting

Make sure you have access to an accountant you can trust. Just as importantly, make sure you’ll be able to communicate with that person regularly, smoothly, and securely.

ACCOUNTING CHECKLIST

• Talk to a CPA about becoming the accountant for your firm. Ask about their fees.
• Ask your accountant for help in identifying all your reporting requirements at the city, county, state, and federal level.
• Set up all your accounting procedures (bookkeeping, profit/loss statements, balance sheets and ledgers, tax returns, etc.)
• Purchase and install a reliable accounting program for law firms. Read reviews from other attorneys in your state before choosing software. Make sure your software is compatible with your accountant’s.

9. Getting Insurance

You and your firm will need all kinds of insurance protection. Consider each of the following.

LAW FIRM INSURANCE CHECKLIST

• Liability insurance
• Malpractice insurance
• Health insurance
• Worker’s compensation
• Property insurance
• Auto insurance that covers business use
• Life insurance
• Disability insurance
• Flood insurance
• Business interruption insurance

10. Researching the Law

One of the best ways to avoid a malpractice suit is to do your due diligence before advising a client! But where will you do your research? And how?

• Get quotes from LexisNexis and Westlaw. Make sure you understand what you will (and won’t) have access to under your plan.
• Locate the nearest legal library and/or law school. How far is it? What are its hours? Is membership available to non-students? If so, how much are the fees (and what are the restrictions)?
• Find out if nearby courts have a legal library available for your use.
• Consider purchasing / subscribing to a library of hardcopy legal books.

11. Getting Connected

LexisNexis and Westlaw aren’t the only subscriptions you might need. In addition to those and the accounting program we mentioned earlier, you might also want to consider:

SOFTWARE & SUBSCRIPTIONS CHECKLIST

• Case management software
• Voice recognition/dictation software
• Conflicts checking software
• Word processing (and all the standard office management applications)
• Billing software (if your case management program doesn’t include it)
• Virus protection
• Any other programs relevant to your specific area of law
• Magazine subscriptions for your waiting room
• Cable television and/or a streaming music service for the office
• High-speed internet service
• Cell phone plan

For more guidance, be sure to consult our guide to the Top 10 Case Management software programs for lawyers.

12. Buying or Renting Equipment

Every office needs equipment, and a law firm is no exception. We’ve already written a guide to the best laptops for lawyers. But the computer’s only the first piece of the puzzle.

OFFICE ITEMS CHECKLIST

• Printer / fax / copier / scanner
• Telephone System (including voicemail, answering service, long distance, conference calling, multiple lines, etc.)
• Office furniture
• Office décor
• Office supplies
• Filing cabinets
• Business cards
• Brochures for your clients (You can sometimes order these from the local bar association, or you can hire a copywriting and design agency to create firm-specific pamphlets for you.)

13. Being an Employer

Don’t forget that just like any other business owner, you’ll be a boss too. As you know, there’s a lot of liability for employers, so think things through.

THE LAW FIRM EMPLOYER’S CHECKLIST

• Decide how many paralegals, office assistants, etc. you’ll need.
• Create ads for hiring employees.
• Draft an employment application.
• Create your employee policies & procedures. Cover things like vacation time, lunch hours, breaks, benefits, sick leave, overtime, etc.
• Establish training procedures.
• Draw up confidentiality agreements.
• Print Forms W-4, I-9, etc.

Starting Your Own Law Firm? Checklist Your Way to Success!

As Walt Disney once said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” We hope this list helps you get that “doing” ball rolling. But don’t let it overwhelm you!

Remember: there is no one-size-fits-all approach to law firm management. Every startup is different, and there might be some boxes above that you simply don’t need to check. That’s okay.

Keep this in mind too: you don’t have to go it alone. If you want an experienced agency to help get your firm off the ground with an effective web marketing and SEO strategy, we can help. Contact Juris Digital and learn more about how we can help launch your new firm into success.

Wondering whether it’s time to fire your current SEO provider? Here we’ll look at five things to look for which may indicate that a change is in your best interest.

1. Your SEO provider can’t explain what success looks like

Ask your SEO the following questions and see what kind of answers you get:

• What are our primary target transactional keywords?
• Where do we currently rank for our transactional keywords, and what do we need to do to improve positioning?
• If we achieve top three rankings for our target transactional keywords, what kind of return can we expect?
• What are our primary target informational keywords?
• What pieces of content have you published to optimize for our informational keywords?
• If we achieve top three rankings for our target informational keywords, what kind of return can we expect?
• What are we doing to be continually getting new backlinks?

If you hear a bunch of stuttering, “ers” and “uhs”, or attempting to “talk over your head” it’s probably because your SEO provider does not have a clear picture of what success looks like for your firm online. This indicates a lack of strategic foresight, and you’d be well served getting an outside set of eyes on your project.

2. Your website has significant display or functionality issues

If you’re paying your SEO company every month you ought to expect that they proactively monitor and QA your website to ensure that all is in order. That’s not to say that your site should be 100% error free, but there should not be any significant display or functionality issues.

You don’t need to be a technical expert to determine whether your website is technically sound. All you have to do is use your website. Navigate your site like a potential client would and look for issues:

• Browse your site on your mobile device. Does it load reasonably fast? Is the navigation intuitive? Is the content easy to read? Is it easy to contact your firm from the site?
• Browse your site on a variety of browsers (especially Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox) on your lap or desktop computer. Does the site display properly on each?

If you find significant website display and functionality issues it may be a sign that your SEO company is not paying adequate attention to your project.

3. You aren’t delighted by deliverables

Back in “the day” many SEO agencies didn’t employ creatives like designers and copywriters because it wasn’t necessary. A webmaster with a fundamental knowledge of SEO could simply optimize the site, build some crappy links, and bam! The results would follow.

Modern SEO requires a broad set of capabilities.

If your SEO agency consistently delivers assets – infographics, articles, videos, landing pages, etc. – that don’t delight you, it could be because they have failed to hire the skilled personnel required to execute a successful modern SEO program. If your SEO provider’s deliverables don’t make you smile, it may be time to look elsewhere.

4. Your reports don’t clearly show consistent progress (or you don’t get reports)

At Juris Digital we report to our SEO clients monthly. Our reports include the following details:

Key Performance Indicators:

• Google Analytics Traffic trends (traffic by source, compared to previous period, etc.)
• Keyword Rankings
• Conversions (website forms, click-to-call, LiveChat, etc.)

Details of Monthly Work Completed

• Details of all content marketing including new content published
• Details of all link building efforts including all new links placed
• Details of all website and optimization changes

Agenda for Month Ahead

• Details of all initiatives and areas of focus for the coming month

If your SEO company does not provide reports which clearly and transparently explain how your site is performing, what work has been completed, and what initiatives are on-deck, it’s probably because your project is being neglected, or because the agency does not have confidence in their strategy.

5. Your SEO company works with your competitors

This one is a no-brainer. If your SEO company is willing to work with your competitors, you deserve better. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for a company to get results for two clients in the same market, but it’s a clear conflict and a sign that your firm’s long-term success is not their top priority.

Some bad reasons to switch SEO companies:

• They made a mistake. Mistakes happen, especially when your SEO company is proactively and aggressively working toward your goals. I suggest that you not over-react to a small mistake every now and then.
• It’s been 3 months and you haven’t seen results. SEO takes time to bear fruit – normally at least 6 months. Give your SEO a fair shake. If you pull the plug too fast you’ll likely regret it.
• They won’t do things your way. A qualified SEO professional should be confident in the strategy they’ve created for you. You should expect push-back if you’re suggesting tactics that do not fit with your SEO’s vision for your project.

Still have questions about when you should consider switching SEO companies? Please leave them in the comments below!

Wondering how long SEO will take to show results? The broad answer – which doesn’t apply in every circumstance, and should be taken with a grain of salt – is:

Around one (1) year. As little as 6 to 8 months, as long as 16 to 18 months.

The duration that you’ll need to invest in SEO before it begins to bear fruit is impacted by several factors. Here are the big ones:

1. Competition in your legal area of practice
2. Competition in your geographic market
3. Quality of your SEO strategy (this is a big one, and often neglected)
4. Technical quality of your website
5. History of your website’s domain

 
Then again, even when all of these factors are known it’s still not possible to know exactly how long SEO will take to “work”. In general, I am comfortable using one year(ish) answer in almost all circumstances.

SEO Case Study: IllinoisRecklessDriving.com

Breakdown of costs:

1. Domain registration, 5 years: $64.95
2. Web Hosting: $348.00 (WpEngine)
3. Web development costs: 10 man hours = $1,500.00
4. Strategy and content creation: 10 man hours = $1,500.00
5. Lawyer consulting fee for content: $300
6. Link buys: $150.00

 
Total SEO project cost = $3,514.95

Our process

1. In February of 2016 we launched IllinoisRecklessDriving.com on our JurisXpress framework.
2. We began with strategy. We conducted keyword research to identify a low competition practice area with a relatively strong search volume (low competition, high volume). We landed on reckless driving defense in Illinois.
3. We were able to snag the domain name, IllinoisRecklessDriving.com, on GoDaddy for $12.99. Not bad for an exact match!
4. We then researched identified a handful of sub-topics using the process described here.
5. We then interviewed a lawyer in Illinois – one who had experience prosecuting and representing people facing reckless driving charges – on each of the topics.
6. We recorded, transcribed, formatted, and publsihed the content from the interview. In other words, we produced original and authoritative content.
7. After the site was launched, we bought a few relatively cheap legal directory backlinks. We pointed them to specific pages the site and used anchor text containing strategic keywords.

The results

Organic search traffic

The site was launched on February 1, 2016. As you can see in the screenshot below, by February 2017, the site’s organic search traffic took a big leap forward:

Google keyword rankings

In the same period we were able to achieve top three organic rankings for our primary target keywords:

Conversions on website (ie. leads generated)

As you can see, when the rankings and traffic hit, the site began producing leads:

Things to consider

1. These results do not represent the ceiling for this website. This is a case where it took SEO ~12 months to “begin to work”, but not to reach its full potential. For instance, we currently rank #3 for our primary keywords. If we move those to #2 or #1, we’ll see greater results.
2. We intentionally chose a low-competition practice area. This is what allowed us to make such a minimal investment but still yield high rankings. For high-competition areas, greater investment is required.
3. We did not do any SEO work on the site after launch. It is likely that we would have seen results faster if we had. Keep in mind that this was a brand new domain. In our experience, a brand new domain takes time to rank in Google, regardless of the quality and quantity of positive SEO signals produced (see Google Sandbox Effect).
4. Strategy really matters. The site would failed to have produced results as quickly as it did in the absence of an effective keyword targeting and content strategy. “Going back to the drawing board” on strategy can delay SEO results significantly.