Not long after the turn of the New Year, The Law Firm On-line Marketing Association (LFOMA) produced an interesting article regarding the look and feel of Personal Injury Lawyers websites. There message was a blunt one – injury lawyers websites fail the test when marketing themselves on-line.
LFOMA Contributing Editor, Dean Rotbart, reviewed hundreds of top personal injury law firm web sites to evaluate what works – and what doesn’t work – in reaching out to those who have been injured in accidents or as the result of other kinds of negligence. Rotbart is a veteran, award-winning business and financial journalist.
I have printed of there findings below along with my response in bold to LFOMA and Rotbart’s findings. Please note that these are my own personal feelings over the article and not the views of The Injury Lawyers.
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The law firms talk all about themselves and little, if at all, about their clients.
I would say that the majority of websites out there within Law have static sites and cannot maintain a constant update of client proceedings. You could probably say the same for over 95% of any business website not just personal injury lawyers.
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The sites are devoid of compassion. Personal injury victims require spiritual recovery and vindication along with compensation for their losses.
I would agree that a large percentage of personal injury law sites are extremely rigid and devoid of compassion. However, it is hard balance to achieve. Most people browsing an injury lawyers site are looking for lawyers that they would trust to help them achieve a compensation claim. So, as much as I say showing compassion on a website is a factor, there are other messages just as important that need also to get across to a person browsing an injury lawyers site.
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Photos used on the sites are most often of inanimate objects, including conference rooms, courthouses and skylines. Few photos of real people can be found on these sites, and when they are used they are often ‘stock’ photos of people.
I’ll give them the stock photos argument but most sites I come across in the UK that are in the injury lawyers mold show pictures of people, stock or not.
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Every single site advertises that its lawyers offer a free initial consultation. If everyone does it, what is the big deal?
Erm… not everybody does it. Sorry, you called that one wrong!
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The photos of the firm’s lawyers look like formal high school yearbook photos. Why not show photos of your firm’s attorneys in action – not posed (in front of a shelf of law books)?
This is a good point actually. Probably the only nugget of gold worth considering.
And there you have it. All that money spent on marketing hundreds of websites and the only great thing to come out of it all is to put pictures of you at work on your website.