If you want to ensure that your practice remains very quiet, and clients do not pester you with new instructions, make sure you follow each of these steps very carefully.
These 10 sure fire ways will guarantee that your legal website will never produce any new client instructions for you.
1. Don’t Believe Your Legal Website Can Produce New Instructions For You
This is probably the most important one. Ensure that you never listen to all of your colleagues and friends who keep banging on about how successful their legal website is in terms of generating new instructions for them.
Keep your head buried firmly in the sand and carry on believing directly the opposite.
2. Never Add Any New Content – Ever!
Whilst a brochure is printed once and then often forgotten in that cupboard near to reception, a legal website has the ability to be updated regularly. Don’t make the mistake of doing this though, as it only proves to Google that you are running an active solicitors practice, so it might send you more website visitors.
Stick with the same 5 pages you added when you created the website in 1991 and this covert or stealth mode of never adding any content to your website will make your website more of a, shall we say, museum to how legal website design used to be.
3. Talk Only About Your Firm
This is important. With marketing being all about putting your clients interests and needs first, you must ensure that your website talks solely about how brilliant your law firm is, when it was established, and why the picture of all of the partners was taken 100 years ago using a pin hole camera.
This is the best way forward, for sure.
4. Hide Your Contact Details
If a client manages to navigate passed all of your attempts to deter them up to this point, you must now make it very hard to find the details that they need to contact you, so hide your office details.
Ensure you do not add your address of telephone number to each page, and perhaps most importantly, never provide an easy to use contact or enquiry form (see below).
5. Don’t Provide A Free Enquiry Form
To do this would be to invite contact and new client enquiries to use your legal services. Tsk tsk.
If you must insist on allowing people to contact you through the medium of a website enquiry form, do so under the heading of ‘Legal Consultation’ which is far more likely to scare people away, or even better, ask them to ‘Instruct You’ to handle their legal matter by filling in a form.
6. Put Your Costs On Every Page
Everyone knows that clients are terrified of the amount of legal costs that they might incur when instructing a solicitor, so ensure you put them on every page of your website, especially if you charge a large hourly rate. This will show them that you must be good, and they can then use the pricing to compare your fees to other, more approachable law firms.
7. Limit Details Of Your Services To One Page
Have only one long page referring to all of your services.
To do otherwise would imply expertise in lots of different legal areas and may well lead to the client reading sufficient information to go off and handle the complicated legal transaction themselves (despite not undergoing any of your extensive legal training).
8. List Your Services In Order Of Importance To Your Firm By Reference To Fee Income
To list your services alphabetically would only make it easy for your clients to find the service that they are looking for. List them by order of importance to you and you can hopefully deter people from contacting you about the services that you would rather not bother with but you still dabble in.
9. Refer To The Term ‘Fee Earners’ Copiously
Make it clear that you are in the business of running a law firm to make money; lots of it.
Fee earners not only spells out to your staff that they are there to earn money for you, but makes it clear to your clients that they are going to have to give you lots of money to obtain your help.
10. Don’t Do Any Of The Above
I like a bit of humour in life; there is simply enough serious bumf in the news, in the papers and in the real word already, so I hope that this has given you some humorous food for thought.
However, humour aside, the underlying message is very serious. If you are making any of these mistakes on your legal website, you should make some very urgent changes.
For help on any legal website design matters, enter your details below to find out more.
Ready To Take Action And See Results Now?
Please call 0117 290 8555 to arrange a mutually convenient time for a telephone discussion, Email me or complete a Free Online Enquiry. There is no cost or obligation. We will have a chat about where you are and where you would like to be and I will suggest some things you can do to get there quickly.