You might be surprised by the number of times I’ve taken a meeting with a law firm about building a new website, and it becomes clear that at least one attorney in the meeting has no idea what’s on their existing site. “Haven’t looked at it in years,” some attorney declares.
Why is this? There are many possible explanations, one being that most lawyers have little, if any, “ownership” of the site. They believe that it’s the marketing department’s job to worry about the site. This sentiment is, of course, counterproductive. A high level of attorney participation is vital to creating a website that will help drive new clients.
So how do you give attorneys a stake in the website? One possible solution is attorney microsites: multi-page attorney profiles that act like miniature websites. By giving each attorney their own microsite, you are giving them increased control over their online marketing. It’s their microsite. They can add any type of information they want to their microsite. With this comes pride of ownership – and increased participation in marketing.
I like your thinking and leadership on this point. Certainly firm web sites are important, but over and over again we learn that people hire the attorney, not necessarily the firm. So giving the attorneys more control over their bio pages makes sense. I have always tried to approach the attorney bio page as the attorney’s “home page” and to make sure that it links to their most recent articles, and related stuff on the site. Your approach goes to the next level. And in the social media age, why not allow attorney’s to include links to their Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook pages if they are active users of those platforms?
I look forward to seeing some examples of what you come up with.
Thanks,
Amy
Hi Amy. Thank you for your thoughts.
We would be happy to take you through our prototype for the “Rainmaker Focused Website” — our approach for incorporating attorney microsites into the firm’s website. It’s pretty exciting stuff, and we’ve been getting a great response to it. I’ll call you to arrange.
Good idea! Nice post, Robert.
Hi!
It is really interesting idea! Are there any law firm web sites of this kind?
Regards from Poland!
Rafal
[…] Movers, Fast Followers, and How Lawyers Can Be Both Update: The folks over at Great Jakes have been posting some interesting thoughts on a content delivery model they’re calling […]
Recently i lost my PR. My page rank 2. But now 0. coz my site bandwidth and others problem.
All that my my fault. But recently hear about catalyst for web marketing. It is for web site.
I am not understand how i build catalyst for my sites.
I read your article. It is very good.
Regards
uthan
[…] How Lawyers Can Be Both August 24, 2010 By Jay Pinkert Leave a Comment Update: The folks over at Great Jakes have been posting some interesting thoughts on a content delivery model they’re calling […]