LOOK FAMILIAR?	Do You Recognize Elements From Your Own Web Site?
COURTHOUSES	SKYLINES
FURNITURE	BUILDINGS & INTERIORS

By Dean Rotbart
LFOMA Contributing Editor

For the tens of millions of dollars that personal injury law firms spend each year jockeying for position at the top of the ‘organic’ results on search engines such as Google, you’d think that more lawyers would give some thought to what visitors view when they do click onto their web sites.

Having reviewed hundreds of top personal injury law firm web sites for the Law Firm Online Marketing Association (LFOMA), I can tell you that the vast majority of web sites – contrary to proven marketing stratagems, are way way too egocentric.

As a rule, here are the Top Five Most Common Mistakes we find among the “best” personal injury law firm web sites.

1. The law firms talk all about themselves and little, if at all, about their clients.

2. The sites are devoid of compassion.  It may, in the end, only be about money, but we suspect for many personal injury victims it is also about spiritual recovery and vindication.

3. Almost all the photos (other than of the partners) are canned, stock photos.  Here is our building.  Here is our city skyline.  Here is our conference room.  Here is our courthouse.  Please!  People like to see people, not structures.

4. Name us a personal injury attorney that doesn’t offer a free consultation?  Yet, each site plays up this feature of their firm as if they invented it.  Why not just invite accident victims to call you to discuss their experience and their legal options? 

5. Either law firm partners are the least photogenic people on the planet or they all share the same photographer who has yet to learn to shoot subjects in other than formal poses. 

Instead of everyone standing around a board table or some other stoic fixture, why not show your partners out in the field: investigating accident sites; making hospital visits; plowing through public filings; even playing ball with their kids?  Come on.  Many of your clients will spend years of their lives working with you – so let them know you are more than your formal headshot.

To date, I’ve not found ‘the perfect’ personal injury law firm web site, but I am on the hunt.  And I invite you to contact me if you think your firm’s web site has the right stuff.

The bottom line is simple.  You want the folks who come to your firm’s web site to put their valid cases in your hands.  Their first and most important impression of you will be what they find at your web site.  If your site is cold, impersonal, egotistical and off-putting, well you very likely are sending away some terrific potential cases that rightfully belong in your capable hands.

Great lawyers are not necessarily great marketers.  But they should be.  For their sake and for the sake of their clients.


=================================================================================

Dean Rotbart is an award-winning journalist and former columnist for The Wall Street Journal.  Rotbart has advised hundreds of companies and law firms on how to communicate more effectively with their constituents. He is the founder and executive editor of NewsBios.com.

To nominate a law firm for review by LFOMA, email our director, James Stewart, at JStewart@highvip.com.