Login | April 20, 2024
Even now, many law firms have no Internet presence
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: April 10, 2015
In a series of surprise statistics (at least to me—you may not be so surprised), 40 percent of small law firms do not have websites, according to data compiled by legal software maker Rocket Matter from several different surveys.
This is in spite of the fact that 35 percent start their search for legal services on the Internet.
One could see this statistic in a couple of contradictory ways. The first is that the attorneys who do not have a website are so busy that they don’t need one. The second is that they still don’t get electronic communication.
There may also be a third group—lawyers who use social media but don’t actually have a website.
Probably some attorneys fit into each of those three categories.
But, in terms of technical non-proficiency, that same data mining came up with stats that indicate that even many smaller law firms that do have websites have no idea how to use them. Just because you have a website, in other words, doesn’t mean that it is doing you any good.
For instance, more than a third of the websites in the surveys have not been updated in the past three years. You know, if you know anything, you start looking at a website by scrolling down the page to the bottom, to see the last time that it was updated. If it was years ago, if it says “Copyright 2012,” maybe the firm is out of business. But, at least, the lawyer doesn’t care about keeping up to date, which is a real negative.
Along the same lines, only one third of attorney websites are optimized for mobile devices. I’m guessing that you are on a website on your mobile device a dozen times a day. You know what it’s like to hit a site that isn’t the right size. Again, just because you have a site….
The page designs also come up short. Briefly: only half of the sites have organized site content, virtually none have personalized content (for which you need a writer), more than a quarter do not have a phone number, and 68 percent don’t have an email address on the home page.
If you have a page, it doesn’t say anything, and nobody can contact you through it.
Hey—get it together out there!