Many lawyers will tell you that their number one medium for generating new client inquiries has shifted from the phone to the World Wide Web. This trend is evident across the board - a law firm's website is now one of its primary tools for marketing. While design certainly plays a role in a site, the more important component of any website is its content. If a site's design is part of the "bait," so to speak, then content is the "hook."
Lawyers face a difficult time management quandary when it comes to the discipline of creating useful and desired content for their publications and the Web. It is often easy to forget that writing, speaking and developing proprietary content through research will always be the top tactics in marketing, producing the market fame it takes to dominate an area of practice. However, many firms suffer with an ongoing problem regarding their website content: it becomes outdated quickly and everybody lacks the time needed to keep the information current and crisp. Plus, firms may worry that the cost of rewriting content is too high. However, as competitors modify their sites, freshen their content, and draw more prospects in, it is imperative that your firm isn't left behind with an outdated site. More than an online brochure, the site is a window into your firm, giving visitors a connection to your lawyers and practice areas. It should be viewed internally as a foundation for business development. And, like any good foundation, it requires regular maintenance to stay in top shape.
So, how does a firm tackle the problem of outdated website content? Often, it makes sense to select one aspect of a site and overhaul it first. For example, a firm might begin with revising all of its lawyers' biographies. Most firms will initially think of this as an easy process. The marketing committee or marketing department will send out an email and request that everyone edit their bios by a certain date to coincide with a selected launch date for the website. Inevitably, this process will prove to be disappointing, as lawyers will send incomplete information in incompatible formats, often well beyond the due date, if at all. While the marketing staff tries its best to collect information, make edits, and stay within the launch deadline, all other marketing initiatives come to a screeching halt, or are given a cursory glance, as time, resources and money are focused on producing biographies.
The truth is, most marketing executives cringe at the thought of writing new biographies or updating existing ones. They know that this effort will take valuable time away from regular business-development tasks, essentially crippling the in-house marketing department. Instead of managing the project from start to finish in-house, one viable solution is to consider outsourcing your website content management needs. A reputable content management group will start you off with the strategy you need to define the purpose, tone, style and content of the biographies. It will then provide a group of writers who will follow the same tone and produce revised biographies for each lawyer to review, and who are all supervised by a single project director. A firm may scoff at the idea of outsourcing the job, but when you consider the numbers, it often makes great sense.
Say your firm has 100 lawyers. Conservatively, it may take three hours to write one biography (scheduling, interviewing, writing, editing, proofreading, etc.). That translates into 300 hours, or nearly eight weeks, for one person to take on those 100 biographies. That's enough to make any managing partner cringe.
Maybe all you need is just a simple update of exiting biographies. Not so bad, right? Again, being conservative, say it takes 1.5 hours to update a biography. That's still 150 hours or four weeks just to complete a "simple" update. Of course, these numbers only apply to the marketing department; they do not include the time required of the support staff and the lawyers, which can be just as great. If you pile the firm's regular marketing duties on top of all this, it is easy to see how things can go haywire. Outsourcing these writing needs can save your firm time, money and countless headaches.
Take a look at your website, at your own biography even. Ask whether it tells enough about you to encourage prospective clients to hire you, and to remind current clients why they hired you in the first place. If it suits your needs, that's great. Then see if it matches up against the other lawyer biographies on your site. Are they similar? Or so different that they convey a lack of consistency? The most effective websites, whether in law or in other industries, are those that present compelling and consistent content. Lawyer biographies are just one aspect of this important content. If your in-house marketing capabilities cannot be focused on the revisions needed to keep your site fresh, consider the alternative of outsourcing the project. In a relatively short period of time, you'll be more pleased with your site and how it sells the firm.
Liz Bard Lindley is Director of WritersForLawyersTM, a website management company based in Edgewater, New Jersey and associated with JaffeAssociates. For more information, contact Liz at lindleyl@jaffeassociates.com, or by phone at 201-313-5661, or visit http://www.jaffeassociates.com/.