Why Law Firm Web Sites Don't Bring in Business

By Larry Bodine, a marketing and Web site consultant.

Reprinted with permission from The LawMarketing Portal.

Collectively, large law firms have probably spent $50 million on Web sites in the past five years. During the tech boom, they sought to impress Internet executives by snapping up just about every new online technology. The systems they bought were complicated, and the price tags were high. In my experience, the budget for a large law firm seeking to overhaul its Web site starts at $100,000.

So why are so many large firms' Web sites so difficult to use? Many firms' sites are more like labyrinths than tools, hiding information and clogged with extraneous videos. The sites don't fulfill their basic function -- communication -- and they certainly don't bring in any new business.

Consider the following flaws, which I found in visits to top firms' sites in January:

The pause that infuriates.      At one firm I was greeted with a 20-second introductory video that added nothing memorable, except for the delay. (There was a "skip intro" option, but in my view, the designers should have taken that advice themselves.) Once I got past that, every page was framed to display the same address -- making the pages hard to bookmark or forward. Finally, pages didn't reproduce fully when I printed the results from the site's "Our Practice" and "Attorney" search function.

Too much information.     Another firm appears to have dumped its entire internal attorney manual onto its site. The table of contents page even has little Roman numerals. By listing more than 70 practice groups, the site is organized around the firm's internal organization rather than its clients' markets.

Geek speak.     A third site forced me to choose between an "HTML" site and a "Flash" site. Unless a visitor is familiar with Web technology (and most people aren't), this is a confusing and pointless choice. In addition, finding basic information on the site required too many steps. To find the street address of the firm's San Francisco office, I had to click on a link called "The Practice," then one called "Locations," then "San Francisco," and then "Our Address." After all that, the address finally appeared -- at the bottom of the Web page.

These three firms aren't alone. These are typical examples of law firm Web sites that are designed around the way that lawyers inside the firm think, not the way clients or other people looking for information think.

A firm's Web site should help its marketing effort. It should employ "usability concepts" -- design principles that help ensure that, to the user, a site's purpose is obvious, self-evident, and self-explanatory, and that its navigation tools allow users to find what they're looking for quickly. Usability concepts first surfaced in two books: Jakob Nielsen's "Designing Web Usability" (New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis, 1999) and Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" (Que, Indianapolis, 2000). The ideas contained in these books are just now starting to catch on in the legal profession.

When examining a site's usability, keep these questions in mind:

• What is the information that visitors most often seek, and how can they find it quickly?
• Is the text written to attract business?
• Do the organization and layout of the site conform to the conventions that most visitors expect?
• Are there impediments that get in the way of the information visitors want?
• Are the services described and organized in a way that is intuitive for clients?

You can learn a lot just by reading a Web site's "traffic reports" -- information that the site keeps about which pages are visited most often and who the visitors are. If it turns out that many law students are visiting your site, as is typically the case, you should amplify your recruiting pages. But avoid the temptation to make those pages look radically different from the rest of the site. Many firms create hip recruiting pages with photos, animations, and even video games. But if the rest of the site does not have the same jazzy feel, the effort will come off as contrived.

Typically, law firm Web sites are organized around the firm's internal practice groups and departments. This is fine for administrative purposes but should be reserved for an intranet -- a private network accessible only to the firm's lawyers and staff. A public Web site should be built around the way that clients and potential clients think, so firms need to spell out what they do according to business and industry lines.

When general counsel visit a law firm's site, they want to know whether the firm has worked for a corporation similar to it or a business in its industry. Knowing this, smart law firms post on their sites such information as the names of representative clients, specific descriptions of the work done for those clients, and a roster of industries about which the firm is knowledgeable. Yet few law firms design their sites in this way, because they are accustomed to talking only about themselves on their Web sites.

Firms should also take care to follow directional norms regarding site navigation. In a city, people are accustomed to looking for signs on street corners, and in grocery stores, they look for signs over the aisles. On a Web site, visitors expect to find the law firm's name and home page link in the top left corner. Yet many law firms put their names elsewhere, thinking their design is clever. In truth, they are just making their sites harder to use. Further, the primary navigation choices should be listed across the top of every Web page and down the left side. This is how big commercial sites like Yahoo! and Amazon.com are organized, and it is what visitors expect to see.

A search function should appear on every page of a Web site. Usability studies show that the first thing visitors look for when they arrive at a site is the search box. Clients typically know the industry or lawyer they are looking for, and don't want to waste time figuring out the intricacies of a firm's navigation system. Why not make it easy for your clients by making the search feature easy to find?

In "Finding and Working With Lawyers on the Web," a survey of corporate counsel published by Greenfield/Belser Ltd. in March 2001, two-thirds of respondents said they had gone online to locate outside legal counsel. Further, 71 percent of corporate counsel in the survey ranked experience with specific matters as one of the most important pieces of information a law firm Web site can offer. It pays to learn from each of those statistics: The more usable and marketing-oriented your site is, the more likely it will start bringing in new business -- and paying for itself.

Six Deadly Sins

Typical flaws in the design of law firms' Web sites include the following:

Tiny text that scrolls across the screen. Small text is hard enough to read on a computer, and scrolling text is even more difficult to see.

Links that are hidden behind graphics, such as a picture of a cloud that is actually a link to a firm's brochure. Mystery graphics force visitors to "minesweep" -- clicking on everything on a page to see which elements connect to other pages.

Graphics that have no function other than decoration. If a graphic is not "clickable," it's only taking up space and should be deleted from the site. Real estate on a Web site is too valuable to waste on a dead graphic.

Introductory videos (sometimes called "Flash videos"). Visitors want to get to your home page quickly; they don't want to be slowed down by an introduction.

Requiring plug-ins to be downloaded. Special downloads to get animation or sound players are just barriers. They slow down the visitor's experience and waste time.

Offering too many choices. Some law firm Web sites obscure their content in a blizzard of options to click on. Often this is the result of a decision by internal committee that every partner have a link on the home page. However, this just makes the site hard to use. Smart law firms will read their Web traffic reports, and limit the choices to pages that most visitors regularly want to see.

-- Larry Bodine