Over the past six months, our team at LexisNexis has worked closely with the winners of our LexisNexis Legal Marketing Makeover contest – the law firm Case, Rajnoha & Boudreau, LLP (CR&B). Last week, we hosted a webinar that offered a “six-month status report” on the makeover.

CR&B’s package of services are valued at more than $50,000. These services have included website design, video production, search engine optimization, and the development of robust profiles on leading legal sites Lawyers.com^SM and martindale.com^®. Our goal has been to revamp and re-energize CR&B’s online marketing presence, resulting in a more effective and professional online image.

Last week’s “Law Firm Marketing Makeover Update” webinar featured legal online marketing best practices and perspectives from a panel that included: Ruth Davis and Len Gilbert, our own legal marketing experts; Larry Bodine, makeover contest judge and law firm marketing consultant; and Meg Boudreau, partner at CR&B.  I was fortunate to serve as the moderator of the online event.

We had a great turnout for the session, with the majority of participants joining us from law firms across the country. There was a fantastic discussion on best practices in online marketing, with anecdotes and thoughts offered by the winner of the makeover contest. Some of the topics we covered included:

• Why is online marketing so important for small firms and solo practitioners?
• How did the Online Marketing Makeover Team work with CR&B to perform a needs assessment, identify priorities and develop a strategy for their online marketing plan?
• What are the critical components of a successful online marketing plan?
• What are the greatest challenges faced by small and solo firms as they implement a successful marketing program?

There was also a robust Q&A session after the panelist presentations, which included some lively exchanges about best practices in online marketing for law firms. The really cool thing is that we recorded the entire session and have made it available for you now so you too can learn from the discussion – just click here.

In the discussion, Meg talked about her firm’s specific successes and challenges thus far, giving participants an idea of how the marketing makeover has worked in reality — she reported that the firm has been overwhelmed with all the leads the site produces. If the proof is in the pudding, that’s dessert that would taste good to any lawyer investing in an online marketing campaign.

- David Palmieri, Vice President and Managing Director of Marketing and Consumer Solutions, LexisNexis

This week, we thought it would be fun to pause on our regular updates regarding the LexisNexis^® Ultimate Law Firm Marketing Makeover for Case, Rajnoha & Boudreau (CR&B) and fill you in on what we’ve been doing with the other four finalists in the Marketing Makeover contest.

First, a quick reminder of who those firms were:

• The Chetson Firm, PLLC: Raleigh criminal lawyer Damon Chetson represents people charged with serious felonies and misdemeanors in the state and federal courts of North Carolina.
• DeutschJacobs, A Law Practice: This two-lawyer firm focuses on family law as well as legal issues confronting small businesses and consumers. Based in Austin, Texas, the firm opened its doors in 2009.
• Fahnert LLC: Marie Fahnert is a solo practitioner who employs two paralegals in her Chicago-based family law firm. Ms. Fahnert started her practice four years ago shortly after graduating from law school.
• Simplicity Law: Simplicity Law employs four lawyers with offices in the Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. The firm launched in 2009 with an exclusive focus on small business legal issues.

Although these entrants did not win the Grand Prize makeover, their selection as finalists entitled them to a complimentary listing for the law firm, for one year, in the Martindale-Hubbell^® Online Legal Network, as well as a consultation with our Makeover team. We held consultation calls with each finalist law firm, where we shared some important advice on a number of fronts:

1. Information from LexisNexis regarding “best practices” in how law firms can convert visitors to their website into new client leads;
2. Specific suggestions for how to improve each firm’s website rankings in search engine results by optimizing the content of their sites;
3. The value of Martindale-Hubbell® Ratings – both the Martindale-Hubbell^® Peer Review Ratings™ and the Client Review Ratings programs to increase the firm’s visibility and demonstrate credibility– and an explanation of how the process for each works so that the firms can pursue ratings; and
4. Collaboration on the development of content for their profiles on martindale.com^® and Lawyers.com℠ in order to drive more visitors to the profiles and then encourage them to call by providing user-friendly content.

We also put in place a tracking system for each finalist law firm, that will enable them to monitor their progress with lead generation and produce reports for analysis.

“My online marketing consultation with the LexisNexis experts was really valuable,” said Marie Fahnert. “I look forward to implementing all of the advice I was given and feel confident about the results this will help me achieve.”

LexisNexis^® Law Firm Marketing Solutions offers similar consultations for all of its customers in order to help them identify areas of possible improvement with online marketing. For more information, please go to http://www.lexisnexis.com/law-firm-marketing/contact-us/.

– Len Gilbert, Vice President, Promotional Solutions

As part of their Marketing Makeover, the partners of Case, Rajnoha & Boudreau (CR&B) were guided through the Martindale-Hubbell^® Ratings review process by a member of my team.
As most folks in the legal profession know, our peer review ratings have been a standard in the industry for more than 100 years. Our methodology enables us to capture peer feedback objectively, and our ratings are not influenced by external factors of any kind (including whether or not someone is a customer of LexisNexis).

After an extensive peer review, Joel Case was recently awarded an AV^® Preeminent ™ Rating! Receipt of an AV^® Preeminent ™ Rating is a significant rating accomplishment and is a testament to the fact that a lawyer’s peers rank him or her at the highest level of legal ability and ethics.

It’s important to point out that Joel’s evaluation was conducted entirely independent of his firm’s participation in the Marketing Makeover; all we did was help him complete his paperwork and enroll him in the review process. Nonetheless, we couldn’t be happier for Joel and are pleased that his peers have such a high opinion of the excellence he has shown throughout his nearly 40-year legal career.

Now that Joel has secured this Peer Review Rating, CR&B will be provided with some tools to help them promote this achievement and help them further differentiate themselves from other law firms. These items include:

• The Martindale-Hubbell^® Peer Review Ratings Toolkit – This is a package of tools and services for law firms to promote ratings on popular attorney directory websites, such as martindale.com^® and Lawyers.com℠, as well as through their own various marketing initiatives.

• A Peer Review Ratings Wall Plaque – This is a handsome acknowledgement that can be displayed in CR&B’s office to promote their Martindale-Hubbell rating as an added validation of Joel’s professional ability and high ethical standards.

• Martindale-Hubbell^® Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers™ – For 90+ years, this unique guide to the legal industry has been an invaluable reference for legal professionals looking for top lawyers in a given location or practice area.

• Exposure of Martindale Hubbell Ratings on LinkedIn^® – this will further reinforce the lawyers stated credentials on his or her LinkedIn profile with a prominent display of his AV^® Preeminent™ Martindale-Hubbell^® Peer Review Ratings™ and Client Review Ratings.

The lawyers rating will also be integrated into many applications and tools used by professionals and consumers, including Lexis^® for Microsoft^® Office, Google™, and our many mobile applications.

For more information about how to promote Martindale-Hubbell^® Peer Review Ratings to your prospective clients, please go to http://www.martindale.com/Products_and_Services/Peer_Review_Ratings.aspx.

CR&B also received recently its first Martindale-Hubbell Client Review rating, which enables clients who have hired individual attorneys or law firms, to provide feedback about the attorneys they have retained. Combined with CR&B’s new AV^® Preeminent ™ Ratingfor Joel Case, CR&B can now offer prospective clients a more complete, 360-degree view of their firm’s professional credentials.

- Carlton Dyce, Vice President of Martindale-Hubbell ^® Peer Review Ratings™ and Client Review Services

In recent weeks, we’ve taken you behind the scenes in each phase of the LexisNexis^® Ultimate Law Firm Marketing Makeover for Case, Rajnoha & Boudreau (CR&B) to explain the various strategies we follow in order to build a terrific website for each of our law firm customers, as well as the techniques we use to drive visitor traffic to those sites. And while every online marketing program should focus on attracting visitors, the investment to drive traffic is wasted if those visitors don’t take the next step to contact you.

Earlier this year, LexisNexis commissioned a study, Turning Website Visitors into Clients, into how people use the Internet to find, evaluate and hire lawyers. We learned there are seven common questions that most prospective clients have in their minds when they are doing their online research for a law firm and viewing various firm websites. Armed with this insight, we develop the content and the design of every site we build in order to anticipate these questions and answer them in a way that increases the chances a visitor to the site will contact our customer by phone or email.

Here are those seven questions and how we addressed them in the website for CR&B:

1. Is this firm’s office close to me? We made sure to prominently display CR&B’s local contact information at the very top of the home page, including the office’s local phone number.

2. Can this firm handle my specific legal issue? The first “navigation line” on the home page includes each of CR&B’s areas of practice and the bottom bar displays three large boxes to correspond with these three areas.

3. Is this firm experienced and knowledgeable? You will find the phrase “60 years of combined legal experience” is one of the first lines of text on the site, the firm’s year of founding is displayed and the attorney’s biographies emphasize their honors, awards and memberships.

4. Does this firm care about me and my needs? Each practice area page on the site follows a very clear “What to Expect” formula that explains exactly what will happen when someone contacts CR&B and clearly displays that the firm offers a free initial consultation. This is intended to reassure prospective clients that they will be treated graciously by the attorneys at the firm.

5. Will I make a personal connection to these lawyers? Rather than landscape or stock photos, we use personal photos of each attorney on the site so visitors can relate to them as individuals. We also use text such as “personal attention” and “caring attorneys” which truly describes these attorneys, throughout the site.

6. Is this firm successful at what they do? We have prominently displayed actual client testimonials on every page on the site in order to illustrate that the firm has done great work and produced great results for other people.

7. How do I differentiate this firm from others? We believe that the home page needs to function as an executive summary for the entire website because visitors may not go to any other pages. On the CR&B home page, you will quickly surmise what this firm does and how they go about doing it, inviting you to give them a call if you’d like to stop by for an initial chat.

Of course, there is no guarantee that someone viewing your site for the first time will become a new client, but there are some important things we do in website development to increase the number of folks who will contact you to learn more about your legal services.

– Ruth Davis, Senior Director of Web Services

Once upon a time, it was considered quite a luxury to have a video posted on your website. For the most part, only the largest law firms with the biggest marketing budgets were able to afford this kind of feature.

Those days are gone. Video is now a necessity for a law firm website.

Videos allow you to achieve four important objectives on your site. First, they’re great tools for helping your firm stand out from others in your area by giving you a chance to communicate your areas of expertise.

Second, a good video can be really engaging with visitors to your site – and is a nice break from the static text they’ll be reading on the various pages.

Third, videos allow you to have some personal interaction with prospective clients because they feel connected to you and are more relaxed about meeting with you in person.

Finally, video has become an important tool for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and helping your firm appear higher in the results when people do Internet searches for lawyers. In fact, chances of showing up at the top of Google search results are improved by 50xs when you add a video*

Last week, we wrapped the fifth phase of the LexisNexis^® Ultimate Law Firm Marketing Makeover for Case, Rajnoha & Boudreau (CR&B) by completing production on two brief videos that are now posted to the firm’s new website..

Our goal for CR&B was to create videos that would provide personal introductions to the firm for prospective clients by expressing a quick message and to do so in a way that showed the sensitive demeanor of the firm’s attorneys.

Our production team worked with the partners of the firm to film and create two videos that were specific to their two most important areas of practice: (1) Family Law – a brief video in which we tried to express the lawyers’ sensitivity to the trauma of divorce and how they can help their clients through that difficult time; and (2) Personal Injury – a short video that tried to convey the sense of compassion and personal attention the firm shows to accident victims who seek their legal counsel.

You can check out the two CR&B videos by going to http://www.stlouiscountylawfirm.com/ and http://www.stlouiscountylawfirm.com/aop/personal-injury/. On both pages, just scroll down the right-hand side and click on the small TV screens to play the videos.

* Source: Forrester Research Blog, January 8, 2009

– Ruth Davis, Senior Director of Web Services