Every year more than 40,000 new lawyers join the already crowded law firm marketplace. Some of these lawyers join established firms while some start their own practice. Every single one of these law firms is hoping to make a difference in each of their client’s lives in the future. Finding a place at a law firm or (better still) starting your own is an exciting step on this journey.
However, with more than 440,000 law firms across America making sure that yours stands out is essential if it’s going to succeed. But this is easier said than done.
In fact, a lot of law firms struggle to stand out online and this can make it difficult for them to find new clients to represent. Are you looking to grow your law firm? Then you’re in the right place!
Read on to find out six of the biggest challenges facing growing law firms around the country today!
1. Creating and Maintaining an Online Presence
Having a website is essential if you are going to expand your law firm, as nowadays it’s like your online business card. Other lawyers and new prospects judge you by it. However, there is a big difference between a basic website and one that commands attention, radiates authority, confidence and will help you convert more clients and expand your law office.
For maximum success, you need to commit to maximizing your website’s search engine optimization (or SEO). Your website’s SEO ranking reflects how easy it is for potential clients to find you online. A number of things can affect this, such as the amount of content available on your website, your use of hyperlinks, and your use of keywords. Without a good SEO ranking, you are going to seriously struggle to attract new clients.
Google initially wanted laymen to optimize their sites but a large number of marketers starting taking advantage and gaming the system. This lead Google to start adding more requirements and red tape to the optimization process. Today SEO’s have a checklist of 200-250 items, that can take anywhere between 20-30 hours just to kick off the optimization process. Today it is an absolute necessity to hire an SEO firm that keeps track of all SEO requirements and structured monthly activities to satisfy and exceed Google’s requirements so the website can become a lead magnet. A site that does not attract and convert leads will never fulfill its calling. This whole
2. Converting Leads into Sales
Improving your SEO ranking will help to drive traffic towards your website. However, once clients arrive you need to engage them quickly if you are going to make a sale and get hired. This is also known as conversion optimization.
One of the biggest mistakes that law firms make is assuming that anyone who visits their website will directly become their client. In fact, data shows us a different story, lead shops around a lot before they hunker down to select a law firm. Many screen share studies have shown prospects visit the about us page, blog, social profiles, Google My Business review, and then make a decision. All this happens in a matter of minutes. Professionals that optimize this journey to give a good reception and make things needed more accessible to linking, online assets, and all things needed to satisfy the client and then have them communicate on their terms drive visitors to be engaging and move towards becoming clients.
For example, you may want to use a welcome chatbot to keep clients on your site and direct them towards your services. Linking throughout your website can also help potential clients find the information and pages they are looking for, getting informed building rapport and calling your firm for a consult or directly becoming a client.
3. Tracking Their Marketing Data
Whether you are a small, midsize or large law firm, analyzing your marketing analytics for actionable insights is vital for attracting new clients. This tells people who you are and exactly and what journey they can take to become your client on their terms. It should also help expedite converting leads to clients through multi-channel attribution tracking. Attribution tracking on your law firm site requires getting snippets of conversion codes and UTM tag parameters to install on your site, so optimization software can track where potential new traffic is coming from, what are they looking for, what channels convert the higher and channel ROI attribution.
However, for this to be effective, you need to know whether or not your marketing is working. This is why tracking your marketing data is so important.
Marketing data insights can tell you a huge amount about how effectively your marketing strategies are working. For example, they will tell you:
- Who your marketing is reaching
- Which demographics your marketing is most popular with
- Which pieces of marketing, in particular, get the most attention
- How well your marketing converts into clicks and visits to your website
Once you know what people are (or aren’t) responding well to then you can adjust your marketing to make it as effective as possible.
4. Hiring Staff in the Right Places
When expanding your law firm, at some point you are going to need to take on more staff. This ensures that you will be able to handle your growing client list efficiently and still deliver a quality service.
However, it is important to think carefully about where you hire more staff. After all, qualified lawyers are not the only people that help a firm run smoothly.
In fact, getting support from administrative staff can make a big difference to your workload. They can provide support in key areas so that your legal team can focus on more specialized matters. So strategic hiring is absolutely key if you are going to expand your team.
5. Communicating With New Clients
When clients look up a ‘law firms near me’, they are looking for someone that they can rely on. After all, the outcome of a legal case can have a huge impact on their lives one way or another.
Because of this, the way that you communicate with your clients should be handled sensitively from the moment that they make contact with you. This includes:
- Responding to their messages or calls within a reasonable time frame
- Trying to ensure that they communicate with the same few people within a firm for familiarity
- Getting to know their case quickly so that you can respond to any in-person questions immediately
As a law firm expands, the demands of a bigger workload can make it easy to lose sight of how important client communication is. However, this will have a big impact on your reputation and long-term success. So it’s worth putting the time in.
6. Growing Law Firms Can Struggle to Manage Their Caseloads
You can also support client relations and your legal team by figuring out your organizational strategy for managing a bigger workload. This might involve:
- Bringing in new streamlining software
- Reorganizing your filing system
- Restructuring your legal team for efficiency
- Hiring more administrative staff
- Getting support for legal trainees
If your law firm is going to successfully expand, it needs to be able to handle bigger caseloads in a sustainable way. Putting the time into organizing this at the start is essential if you are going to keep your staff and clients happy.
Get Help Growing Your Law Firm Today
As you can see, when it comes to growing law firms, creating an online presence and planning ahead for how the expansion will affect your firm is key.
There are a lot of ways that marketing your law firm online can be difficult, especially if you don’t have online media training. Fortunately, specialist agencies are on hand to help market law firms online. So what are you waiting for?
Get in touch today for support in refreshing your law firm’s online presence. We’re happy to help!
