Month: March 2012

GoodLawyers – Branding for Lawyers and the Internet – 14 March 2012

On By cmecIn Business & Economy, Legal TechnologyLeave a comment

Thank you all for coming this evening, and a special thank you to those Partner Members who have understood our vision and who are supporting us while we build a membership, build a profile and start to refer some additional legal work into the group.

In a moment I’ll introduce our guest speaker for this evening, Ian Chipchase, but first I’d like to say a few words on how we believe GoodLawyers can help build members practices and what we are doing to achieve that.
Last month I talked about brands and what I think is the opportunity for GoodLawyers both in the on-line world and in the real world.

As I said last month, we have always thought that a brand name is missing in law, especially in the SME sector. The large firms deal with the top 500 companies, but where do the owners and managers of small and medium enterprises go? How do they find a good lawyer? The answer, according to lawyers, is word of mouth, but clients have often said ‘trial and error’.

It is the difference between those two perspectives, between word of mouth and trial and error which goes to the very heart of what a brand is all about. A brand appears to be about advertising and logos, but in fact it is a signal that denotes a connection between expectations and results. If we want to be successful as lawyers, our signals must consistently match our performance. The main purpose of GoodLawyers is to match clients to quality legal services so that each transaction, each relationship, fulfils the brand promise.

I think that most lawyers are only correct in nominating word of mouth as more important to their marketing efforts than branded law because there is no branded law firm in their space.

But that is changing, and a big driver of change, is Google, and Google is not only important for Family Lawyers, Personal Injury, Crime and Estate work (what we call personal law), it is important for corporate lawyers as well because following any kind of word of mouth recommendation or response to a tender, potential clients will Google you.

As you know, GoodLawyers has a three pronged strategy for helping to build members practices:
1. Encouraging inter-member referrals so that you get more of the work you like in exchange for the work you don’t like. The currency model to replace the barter model most firms use.
2. Raising the profile of members on the Internet so that the increasing proportion of work being researched via the web is captured.
3. Inviting corporate counsel and senior business people into our groups and to these meetings so that we are a source of legal expertise for them.

It is number two I want to talk about this evening because inter-member referrals are now a matter for you, you are here meeting each other now, I expect most of you will meet each other another three or four times this year, and you are free to bring guests to these meetings, so that ball is very much in your court. We are aware that there is some risk for you in bringing colleagues and clients to these meetings because they might meet someone and send work to them that they might have sent to you, but that is why we are restricting membership within specialisations, and we think that for confident members with strong relationships there is much more to gain than there is to lose. But of course that is a matter for each of you.

In relation to the Internet, and especially Google, I will just throw some statistics at you before showing you on screen what we are aiming to achieve.

Let me give you four numbers:

It is said that 90% of people locate internet resources via search and that Google has a 75% share of that.
84% of searchers look no further than the second page, and 65% of people never click on sponsored links.

Being on the first page of the organic search results is therefore what we are aiming for, and we believe that will become increasingly important for lawyers, especially those practicing in what we might call personal law.

Two more numbers:

Around 15% of all sales are now said to be completed online, and internet sales are slated to be 40% of all purchases by 2020.

In our view some of these numbers can be deceptive because they depend on factors such as on-line grocery shopping, banking and loan arranging, travel purchases and the like, but I think we all agree that Internet based research has become very important to most purchasing decisions and legal services either are, or will be, no different.
Nevertheless it is not easy to gain a page one listing on Google, and it is expensive to run sponsored links and on-line advertising. We have experimented with advertising on LinkedIn, but our goal is to gain a high Google ranking without ‘gaming’ Google, that is without any kind of cheating.

Google’s agenda is to provide quality search results so that people keep using Google and advertisers keep paying for sponsored links. Advertisers compete with each other in an on-line bidding war for effective search terms, while websites seek to create sites that rank on Google.

Ultimately, Google is refining the effectiveness of its search algorithms so that it displays the websites users are looking for. It can be gamed, but not for long. Therefore, our strategy has to be to create the website, and therefore the service, that end-users are looking for. We believe that legal clients want and need experienced and ethical lawyers, and in important matters they need specialists. To be effective, our website has to reflect who you are, what you know and how we work.

Key words are part of this, and so are external links, so we are starting to build content, and we are starting to ask members and sponsors for links from their personal profile pages.

The content we have built looks like this, and it has been moderately effective, but we have now commissioned an SEO company to write 25 articles for us each month, orientated around planned key words, specifically in the areas of personal law and employment law. It would be a great help if members can suggest the titles of articles, write articles on their expertise and suggest changes to the existing articles. We realise that this could be a big time commitment, but we don’t want to be a burden on any one member, we want to leverage the benefits of a large community so that by each member making a small contribution, perhaps an article or suggestion every month or two, the whole site will gain the ranking we need.

Our SEO team will research and identify keywords for us, but any anecdotes you have about how people have found you would be appreciated.

Remember, every time we gain a referral we are gaining a following and building a brand. Every time a member get an external matter, they are that much more likely to refer another matter to a member. Securing personal law work helps the corporate lawyers as much as the personal lawyers because the personal lawyers are less likely to try to do the corporate work themselves.

In relation to links, we would be pleased if every member displays the GoodLawyers logo on their personal profile pages, on their own site and elsewhere if possible, such that there is a link from the logo back to the GoodLawyers site. That will greatly assist our rankings as well, leading to more work. Please let me know if you would like to help with this and I will have our technical people liaise with your technical people.

Next month I will talk about corporate law and traditional advertising designed to create a profile in the business communities, but now let me introduce Ian Chipchase to you. Ian is a respected partner with Stacks Goudkamp, he practices personal injury law in Martin Place and he is going to give us a case study so that he talk about the interdisciplinary nature of his practice.

GoodLawyers and the Branding of Lawyers – 8 February 2012

On By cmecIn Business & Economy, Legal TechnologyLeave a comment

Thank you all for coming this evening. In a moment I’ll introduce our guest speaker, but first I’d like to say a few words on how GoodLawyers got started, where we are now, and where we are going.

It has taken quite a few years to gestate the idea and to refine the model for GoodLawyers, a process that is still continuing.

I worked at Slater & Gordon in the early 2000s, not as a lawyer but running a large project, and I was impressed with how they were able to brand “Mum & Dad” litigation.

Clearly a brand name is missing in law, especially in the SME sector. The large firms deal with the top 500 companies, but where do the owners and managers of small and medium enterprises go? How do they find a good lawyer? The answer, as all lawyers know, is word of mouth, but clients have said to me ‘trial and error’!
There is a big difference in those two perspectives, which go to the very heart of what a brand is all about.

Most lawyers are only correct in nominating word of mouth as more important to their marketing efforts than branded law because there is no branded law firm in their space. In recent years some mid-tier law firms have been trying to change that, and I think in the long run they will succeed.

Once that happens, once the value of a brand and systems becomes significant enough that external investors can take a position in a law firm without fear of the professionals setting up down the road, a situation Slaters has made a reality, then access to capital becomes increasingly important in the business of law, and it becomes more difficult for two or three good lawyers to set up a successful practice.

Part of the purpose of GoodLawyers is to ensure that as branded law firms get stronger, lawyers in smaller practices have a brand name through which they can promote their own specific abilities.
I do not think it is good thing if law becomes corporatized and the vast majority of lawyers have no choice but to become employees of brands and capital.

Legal process outsourcing is becoming more important and through the Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) the Australian Government is pushing for reduced trade barriers in professional services. Already, managers of Australian law firms are being offered Australian-admitted lawyers for 20 days per month for $2,500 per month. That is a real threat to the future of some lawyers and law firms, and of course is an opportunity for others.

But branding is only one element of the genesis of GoodLawyers: We have also seen that collegiality is as important to people running smaller practices and there are many opportunities for cost cutting and the acquisition of quality services through collaboration.

For most of the twentieth century lawyers were able to concentrate on their legal skills, and the most effective marketing really was who you served with in the navy or who your father knew. Marketing is rarely part of the DNA of lawyers, and this is one area where small firms can band together to access professional expertise, especially in relation to web-based marketing which is still a black art, sometimes promoted by charlatans. This is part of the purpose of GoodLawyers, to provide the requisite expertise and to help distinguish to good guys from the others. It is related to, but separate from, the need for branding.

The web is currently good at helping customers to identify low cost goods and services, but in time it will get better at identifying high quality offerings, and eventually good value offerings. In the long run, there is no substitute for or short cut to being good at what you do, in the sense of delivering the service the client demands, but in the short term there is a real risk that the firms who spend the most money on advertising will secure the most clients, leaving other firms behind.

We think that specialisation is generally a good indicator of quality, and that in the long run specialists will deliver the best value.

As I hope you all know, Goodlawyers therefore has a three part approach to generating increased revenues for Partner members:
1. We are encouraging members to refer work to each other, so that the lawyer who has most expertise in a matter gets that matter.
2. We will invest in on-line and traditional advertising to bring work to our members.
3. We will invite in-house counsel to these meetings so that they can meet and eventually instruct lawyers whom they might not usually meet, reducing some of the stranglehold large and mid-tier firms have on the mid-tier corporate work.

Clearly this dovetails with the development of the GoodLawyers business itself: Our first task is to acquire members, because without you we have very little to offer clients. We think that the ideal size of a group like this, the Sydney group, is about 100 partner members. That ought to see about 40 members at each meeting, assuming we have ten meetings a year and each member attends four meetings on average. Currently we have about 36 members, and another 100 people waiting for me to meet with them, so we are on the way.
Some people have asked what the benefit is of being a Partner level member rather than an Associate, which is free. The answer is that being an Associate is designed for more junior lawyers where their firm would not pay their subscription. It helps us to build the scale of the business quite quickly, but the risk is that there are only two Partner slots per area of expertise, and if someone else takes your slot, you will not receive many referrals. There are currently six or seven Associate members. Associates are obviously a good source of referrals and of expertise if a Partner retires and a slot become available.

Not all of our enquiries have turned into jobs, and we are investigating why that is. It may be that we will need to appoint “GP Lawyers”, people who are willing to talk to potential clients and to introduce them to Partner Members. Currently I am doing that by telephone, but my job is really to design processes so that we are scalable, so we can deal with a large number of enquiries and so we can filter out the real clients from those in search of attention or free legal advice.

I think that all of this, together with the establishment of groups in Brisbane, Melbourne and perhaps Adelaide, will take up most of the rest of this year.

I am happy to take questions later, but first I’ll introduce Leigh Adams, a Partner Member who is going to tell us about the Personal Property Securities Act 2009.