A.L.T. Legal Professionals Marketing Group

The numbers are staggering. According to the American Bar Association, there are 50,000 law firms in the U.S. with two or more attorneys. If you also count solo practitioners firms, the U.S. Census estimates almost 175,000 total legal establishments. Guess what? Not all of them can or will be ranked #1 on Google. In fact, most won't make the first pages of the online directories. Now, if you’re one of the 95% that won’t, and you listen to the “experts", you might as well pack up shop right now. But to take that attitude is to run counter to everything that marketing is to supposed be about.

This article is prompted by an inquiry we received recently from a family law practitioner who felt that he had extracted all he could from the smorgasbord of online marketing tools and was seeking alternative, “out-of-the-box” means for growing his practice.

If one didn’t know better, one would think that the only way to market a law practice would be through online means. We are all bombarded with daily messages warning us that if we do not work on optimizing our site, we will fall off Google’s radar.

It’s not nearly as difficult to be a great marketer when you are the big fish in the little pond or when in comparison to your competitors, you have unlimited resources at syour disposal. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of law firms – that is simply not the case. Being a great marketer requires doing more with less, finding ways to extend your various initiatives cost effectively and determining the optimal marketing mix.

Journalists used to say that a story had “legs” if the topic promised to be far reaching or warranted extensive ongoing coverage. Similarly, many kinds of marketing activities have legs that might allow law firms to extend the depth and breadth of their efforts -- often without incurring much, if any additional cost.

Many law firms that offer a multiplicity of practice areas often have difficulty cross-selling these disparate services to their roster of clients.

One of the biggest concerns expressed by managing partners is a fear that they are leaving money on the table. By this, they are usually referring to the fact that clients are associating the firm with specific areas of focus, rather than as a resource for resolving any of a number of legal matters. This is typically seen in the client who contracts with a law practice for one legal matter and then walks down the street to contract with another regarding a different legal concern.

You know you need to get more traffic to your law firm's web site and funds are always limited. This article explores the benefits and drawbacks of search engine optimization and pay-per-click.

Lawyers are not marketers by nature and they don’t teach practice building in most law schools. Hiring a marketing vendor requires an investment beyond the expenses involved in the actual purchasing of ad space, pay-per-click services, broadcast time, printing services, etc. But once the decision to move forward has been made, how should law firms go about the actual selection process?

Literally hundreds of variables determine where your firm’s website will rank on a search engine directory. One of the most important of these is the existence of new content. Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the others absolutely love fresh material and reward those who consistently update and enhance their sites.

Critical to successful marketing is not just generating laundry lists of good ideas on how to promote the practice. There are literally hundreds of good ideas and thousands of communications vehicles. Rather, the key to effective marketing is selecting which of these ideas and which of these vehicles is best suited to achieve firm objectives…. and this is the critical part….within the constraints of its time and dollar resources.

In this day and age of search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, blogs and social media, one of the most underused and unappreciated marketing tools available to law firms is cause marketing – those efforts in which the law firm affiliates itself with a worthwhile cause, event or other type of endeavor.

Personal injury law attorneys often ask us how much it would cost for them to advertise on TV. They, like the rest of us, are witness to the scores of commercials that inundate the airwaves touting scores of firms’ commitment to “fight for you” at virtually no risk to the client (i.e., “We get paid only if you do.”) Many of these firms are known for doing quite well. Hence, it is only reasonable that competitors express interest in duplicating their efforts.

If you are a personal injury attorney and the leader when it comes to advertising spending in your market, this article is not for you. If however, you are a personal injury attorney who cannot afford to “outshout” the competition on television radio, or in print, fear not. There are a number of tactics the smaller PI firm or attorney can do to ensure their voice is heard. And they involve four very different though interrelated activities.

Over the years, we have seen, that the most successful marketing tool for generating new family law clients over the short-term, has without question, been the seminar.

New Jersey legislators are considering statutes that would require attorneys to wait 30 days before contacting defendants or victims of accidents. The proposed bills raise questions as to how law firms might effectively market themselves while still remaining true to all ethical guidelines.

One of the questions that consistently comes up these days is how law practices should allocate or rather reallocate their advertising funds between print directories versus directories of the on-line variety.

Inevitably any law firm with at least a handful of attorneys and more than one area of emphasis is faced with a critical business development question - does it market the firm in general or does it promote the successes and qualifications of individual attorneys. To do the former alone offers the tantalizing possibilities that come with branding. The latter promises the kind of word-of-mouth “buzz” that brings in clients for very specific reasons.

By temperament and by habit, attorneys tend to be a detailed, meticulous lot. Most understand that “proof,” data, substantiation etc. is not only required when building a case for a client, but for any business related decision as well. Thus, the inability to measure the inexact science of marketing has traditionally been a source of frustration for many attorneys and their firms.