Law Firm Website Failure Reasons and Tricks To Counter It

Chandni Ansari
JanBask Digital Design
6 min readNov 1, 2021

Designing a website is always a difficult exercise, but when it comes to the world of lawyers and professional firms, this work is a bit more difficult. In this post, we give the reasons why law firm web designs fail and then keys to making your website stand out in the legal sector. And to show that we understand your legal business we have used expressions of legal jargon to emphasize certain more important ideas. First, we must know the big reasons that even the best law firm web design fails. Let’s get started.

Reasons to Fail With Solutions

• The conversion is one of the most common weaknesses on the websites of law firms. Most are concerned with transmitting a serious and professional image of their offices. Instead, they forget that users have to be invited to go one step further (get in touch, ask for more information, request a quote, make a call,…) and point out the path they should follow. Users need instructions to move on.

To make this possible, what is known in marketing as “calls to action” are used.

• Many of the visitors who come to your website have a problem but are not yet ready to decide to hire the legal services of your firm. Therefore, it is unlikely that they will contact you at that time. But…

Does this mean that these users should be written off? Absolutely. Or at least, not all. Maybe what they need is a little more time and information to decide.

For this reason, it is important to prepare content on your website for these potential customers who are not yet ready to hire any service and guide them with “calls to action”.

• Ideally, all the visitors who will enter your website get in touch with you and end up becoming real clients for your office, right?

However, you should not have false expectations of what a website is capable of achieving. In fact, this situation is not fulfilled in any industry or sector.

Each one has its own conversion funnel, as well as a different conversion rate. In this way, an online clothing store will have a conversion rate (the percentage of web visitors who become real customers who buy) much higher than that of a law firm.

Imagine that your conversion rate from web visitors to customers is 0.1%. That is, 0.1% of the people who enter your website end up becoming clients of your office.

This means that if 1000 people visit your website a month, you will get 1 client every month. So if you want 5 clients per month (keeping the conversion rate constant), you need to increase web traffic up to 5,000 visits per month (5 / 0.1%).

As you increase your web traffic, the chances of converting those visits into potential clients of your firm increase.

Tip — A legal marketing strategy is necessary, where a set of actions is integrated that make possible the final objective of getting clients for your law firm.

Now moving to build an innovative website for your law firm.

How to innovate with a legal website: 5 TOP actions

The final consumer who demands legal services has evolved a lot, largely due to the impact that the Internet has had on society.

Today the potential client is better informed and tends to compare value propositions by accessing the websites and social networks of the different law firms.

It is no longer valid to have a presence on the Internet, we have to bet on a spectacular website and enrich it without the help of a law firm web design company. Here we leave you the most effective:

1. Online chat: the online advisor your potential client needs

An online chat set up on your firm’s website will allow users who are looking for legal advice to answer questions immediately.

Chat allows us to proactively offer help, answer specific questions, and, above all, break the ice with clients who are very reluctant to give out phone numbers and emails to avoid spam or aggressive calls.

The conversion of the chat is undeniable and there are high-quality solutions for less than 10 dollars a month and there are even free options on the market.

2. A chat-Bot: 24-hour online assistance

No, Artificial Intelligence is not going to take away your job as a lawyer (… for now).

It would be the evolution of chat using AI. The bot will respond automatically without the need for a lawyer connected online.

In our opinion, we prefer the previous solution, that of chat. In a context of saturation in the supply of legal services, a client is important enough not to give him a canned answer.

3. The legal online store

A few years ago it would have seemed a joke to raise the possibility of selling legal services in a packaged way like any online store worth it’s salt.

Well, there are already many digital business models that offer tax advice, labor management, contract adaptation, accounting, and many other plans that are already a resounding success.

It is true that there are certain very complex services where it is practically impossible to set a price a priori.

In fact, law firms that work with large companies or estates can rest easy, since all collaboration proposals in a legal matter must be ad hoc.

For legal initiatives that work with freelancers, small businesses, or individuals, it can create a lot of value to close a price or a fee before hiring legal services. Turning your lawyer’s website into a legal services store would make sense.

We are talking about lawyers for traffic accidents, claims against airlines, or payment for payment proceedings. That is services that have highly standardized processes and are aimed at a more massive target audience. We think you should take help from a law firm website design company to build this page.

4. Make online appointments in the office’s digital agenda

Although the weight of the offices of “digital” lawyers is gaining weight, yet most of the interactions are done on a face.

The simple task of making an appointment may require different members of the firm to align their agendas. This is an element that is added by almost all law firm web design services companies to manage and schedule appointments.

Well, tools have emerged that can be integrated into the web and that allow the user to see live the time slots in which to schedule a meeting.

Once everything has been decided, everything works smoothly, all the participants receive an email with the place, the topic to be discussed, and the contact information. The administrator of the agenda can postpone or reschedule the appointments, leaving everyone informed automatically.

This is very useful in terms of time. On the one hand, you do not have to be aware of the phone and, on the other, the user perceives it as a top and differentiating element.

With the dramatic health crisis caused by COVID-19 (coronavirus), professional firms in general and law firms, in particular, have exponentially increased the demands for video assistance services and the application of online stores on their web pages.

5. Deploy a legal inbound marketing strategy

Online advertising is showing obvious signs of fatigue, with alarmingly low rates of return on investment. Today, online law firms are scrapping online advertising campaigns that are intrusive and do not provide concrete solutions.

It’s like when you find your mailbox full of flyers from dentists and furniture stores that you don’t stop to read and it bothers you. Applying inbound marketing to our law firm, we generate traffic from potential clients, we capture the lead with interesting content and we will maintain communications with high added value.

For us to be successful, we must create quality content that projects the company as a reference and an expert in the legal sector or area of ​​specialization.

By creating articles of interest and decoding legal news that may affect certain groups, we will drastically improve SEO positioning in the long term, thus optimizing the cost of customer acquisition.

Social channels, the database, and automation close the circle of a way of acting that will transform the philosophy of the office in the long term. I hope these bullet-points will help you to get the best law firm design.

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Chandni Ansari
JanBask Digital Design

Chandni loves pursuing excellence through writing and has a passion for digital marketing. She currently writes for JanBaskDigitalDesign.com