Don’t blame potential clients scanning the internet for the right lawyer. It’s not their fault that you’re facing a conundrum, whether because you’re a new lawyer who lacks the experience they seek but is willing to take a case for significantly less money than a more experienced lawyer. Or a lawyer with the experience but unwilling to offer a “two murders for the price of one” deal on Wednesdays.
A company called WebVisible did a survey providing some basic notions of what people are looking for when searching for a lawyer online. When I received the press release, I deleted it, but the ABA Journal posted it and, to be honest, it’s more enlightening than I realized. Enlightening, however, doesn’t mean helpful.
And the survey shows:
Details about credentials and experience 68 percent Personal referrals or recommendations from network 58
Information about legal procedures and answers to common questions 52
Expect him/her to show up in variety of directory listings 30
A special offer – a discount, or added service for free 20
A video profile of the attorney or legal practice 16
A video testimonial from an actual client 9
A non-video testimonial from a client 9
Some additional findings:
• Almost a quarter (24 percent) of all retired people take into consideration a video profile when choosing an attorney or legal service.
• Nearly one in three – 30 percent – of both men and women want the attorney/legal service to show up in a variety of directory listings.
• More than half (55 percent) of women value information on legal procedures and answers to common questions when choosing an attorney/legal service.
• Younger respondents are particularly keen on discounts, with those in the 18‐24, 25‐34 and 35‐44 groups choosing discounts at higher rates than the overall average.
The problem facing lawyers who either look to, or claim that, the internet as the “future of the law” is that the expectations and demands of potential clients put the lawyer in an awkward situation. The only honest answer to most common questions is “it depends,” and nobody likes that answer. Testimonials are used by some lawyers, but are rife for deception. And “younger respondents” want a discount, while younger lawyers don’t want anyone to know just how inexperienced they really are, by neglecting to mention their year of admission when puffing their vast experience in 49 highly specific practice niches.
Missing from this (as well as the ABA’s own survey) are two considerations for lawyers to ponder when deciding how to play the internet marketing game. First, do you really want these potential clients, the ones who will trade off experience for a BOGO offer. Assuming that fees charged are appropriate to cover expenses and provide a reasonable profit, why would you want clients who pay less?
Second, do those voices cheering you on in the race to the bottom really reflect the “future” of the practice of law? Sure, lawyers can fairly easily manufacture credentials they don’t really possess, exaggerate their experience and competence and, unless they have a face made for radio, create a video to entice the unwary. Joseph Rakofsky had a particularly compelling video of himself on his website before he went dark.
It’s not that potential clients are to blame for what they want of lawyers. Heck, I would want some of the same things as well if I could get it. The internet has done some serious damage in creating foolish expectations, such as the wealth of websites offering “free answers to legal questions,” which range from generically stupid to shockingly wrong, but give rise to the belief that anybody can get legal advice for free for the asking.
The argument is that by providing answers for free, lawyers can establish themselves as trustworthy and competent in the eyes of the public. Aside from the irony of these free answer opportunities being the bastion of the schemers and deceivers, the ones who spend their empty hours trying to be a Level 64 Contributor on Avvo Answers and praying that nobody calls them out on their claim of practicing in a different area of law or in a jurisdiction thousands of miles away, these are questions from people for the express purpose of avoiding hiring a lawyer.
Here’s the shocker, anyone who starts his question, “I’ve just been arrested . . . ” and wonders what to do is telling you that he doesn’t want to pay a lawyer. Otherwise, an arrest would be a pretty good motivator to hire counsel, if that was within the realm of possibility and interest. Nobody, but nobody, needs to ask what to do after they’ve been arrested. They are looking for a way around the obvious. Or they are looking for cheap. Extreme cheap. Is that what you’re selling?
These survey are quite informative, though not necessarily in the way they’re intended. They are telling us that people want something different than what we have to offer. They are telling us that they may have no idea what to look for in a lawyer, but want it cheap. They are telling us that we’ve forsaken our own dignity in the effort to make a quick buck, and have led the public to believe that we should put shiny videos and fake testimonials online to entice them.
But they aren’t going to be happy with us in the end if we can’t produce competent representation. Even though it can’t be found in the survey, what clients want from lawyers is excellent representation. Offer two murders for the price of one every Wednesday, but losing two for the price of one isn’t going to make you loved.
And my guess is that most of the people who read this post will race to the bottom anyway. What are we doing to ourselves?
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It would be interesting to know how immediate the need for legal services were for the people answering the survey. Someone contemplating having a will drawn up one day in the distant future probably has a different attitude than someone who just received a call from the FBI asking if they’d like to answer some questions. At that point, the need for a discount and video testimonial might go out the window.
if the latter, there’s little the internet has to offer regardless of the bells and whistles.
There’s nothing unique about the Internet in this respect, except maybe the sheer speed at which its users can exchange a flood of garbage data.
The problem is that the lay person — especially one who has behaved himself and stayed out of court all his life — has no real way to tell the experienced lawyers from recent grads, much less the lawyers who will rush to plea bargain your criminal case (or settle your criminal case) rather than ever go to court if they can avoid it.
I can offer one suggestion, but I don’t know if it’s a good one: Have one of the bar associations (or some other neutral entity, maybe a consumer group) start an attorney comparison site and collect statistics from the public record about how often an attorney gets each of these possible outcomes in his cases. (I suspect we would need an enabling law giving the site protection from slander suits.)
Never before have people been able to spew more nonsense available to more people than on the internet. My solution: Have some self-respect and tell the truth.