As part of my Top 5 Legal series, I often profile legal website design/SEO companies based in different States. Given the size and market share of FindLaw, I thought I would devote an entire page to them. FindLaw is by far and away the market leader when it comes to legal website design with thousands of legal websites throughout the country. The company was originally founded in Sunnyvale California by Tim Stanley, the current CEO and founder of Justia. West Publishing purchased FindLaw in 2002 – and is now owned by Thomson Reuters. I have personal experience with FindLaw, having been a sales consultant for them for 7+ years in Phoenix.
Examples Showcase Clients: Given their sheer size, FindLaw has showcase clients in just about every market: ex. www.girardikeese.com, www.myphillylaw.com, http://www.stephanpeskin.com/,
Website Levels: Findlaw has a number of website and SEO options. Here are some examples:
Higher Level Custom Site www.butlerwooten.com
Basic Custom Site: www.ganotelaw.com
Template Site: www.garyfranklaw.com
Benefits of Working with FindLaw:
Because they are the biggest, FindLaw often gets a bad rap. While not a fit for every lawyer, its important to realize that the FindLaw model has produced great results for thousands of law firms.
–A Dedicated Local Marketing Consultant: Perhaps the single biggest reason for FindLaw’s success in the legal vertical has been their dedicated team of knowledgeable sales consultants throughout the Country. Having an experienced local legal marketing consultant who understands your particular market and can meet with you in person cannot be overstated.
– FindLaw Profile: One benefit of having a FindLaw website is that it comes with a premium FindLaw profile, which will get you featured in up to 25 practice areas in the FindLaw directory. If you don’t have a website you can purchase a FindLaw profile between $150 and $300/month depending on the size of the market. In addition to getting you exposure in a lot of directories a profile can be useful for reputation management.
– FindLaw listings: There are certain practice areas for which a Top Spot in the FindLaw directory is a no brainer: Employment Law, Immigration, Divorce, Family Law, Child Custody and Medical malpractice. These areas generate a ton of qualified traffic, and in many metros these spots can generate enough traffic to sustain a consistent stream of new calls and cases. In certain large metros, criminal law, bankruptcy and DUI are also quite good. Like any directory purchase you should always ask for click thru data and confirm ranking performance.
–Smaller firms with Limited Budgets: FindLAw allows all clients to spread out the cost of SEO and their website in a monthly subscription fee. This makes a professional looking website accessible to many attorneys who might not be able to afford a quality website. Besides custom websites, FindLaw also offers lots of cheaper Template websites that are often perfect for uncompetitive practice areas or metros. I often recommend young startup attorneys to consider FindLaw with very low budgets – For less than $600/month – you can purchase an 8 page template site, with decent onsite SEO and access to the FindLaw directory.
–A Complete Marketing Solution for Attorneys: In recent years FindLaw has acquired several companies outside traditional website/SEO. FindLaw now offers PPC, Lead Generation, Media Buying, and TV Commercial Production. In addition they own several other web properties like Super Lawyers and Lawinfo. While I can’t speak for the efficacy of these programs, the breadth of their offerings makes meeting with a FindLaw rep a worthwhile educational experience if nothing else.
–FindLaw Design: In general FindLaw designs are extremely clean and professional looking. Thanks to a large diverse group of designers, their custom designs vary in quality and style. For a while FindLaw design took a step backward as designers were known for building cookie cutter websites that stuffed everything above the fold – a holdover from the myth that web users don’t scroll down. Thankfully in the last year, Findlaw has come around, and are building some great looking and modern long form sites like http://www.cbdlaw.com/.
–Onsite SEO and Keyword Research: For lawyers in less competitive metros, suburbs or practice areas, a content rich FindLaw website will do quite well – given they normally do a solid job of onsite SEO and custom content creation
–The Midsized Law firm. I personally think FindLaw is a very good option for the midsized corporate law firm of 10-30 lawyers. With FindLaw you can build a very professional website for 1000-2000/month and have it backed by a Fortune 100 company. A firm like this often needs to make a lot of changes with updates – something that is covered by Findlaw’s subscription cost and can be done by one of their dedicated account managers.
–A Fortune 100 company: Having your web marketing handled by a Fortune 100 company is on balance a positive. With FindLaw your website is being handled by a Thomson Reuters company. You don’t have to worry about your website going down or your “web guy” going out of business.
–Use of Attorney Editors: FindLaw employs an army of attorney editors to ensure the legal content they produce conforms to State bar regulations. A luxury most legal design firms can’t duplicate.
–Great Reporting: FindLaw has invested in State of the art tracking tools for all of their websites and directory products. Since FindLAw consultants have access to these reports for every client from around the country – a FindLaw rep can be an invaluable resource for evaluating different attorney directories as they can often give you hard click thru numbers.
–Web Design Process: FindLaw is very good at producing websites. The company launches hundreds of websites every month, more than most legal design companies release in a year. Their refined web development process starts with a development call where you can expect to speak with a team of upbeat, positive and knowledgeable professionals: content writer, SEO consultant, designer and project manager – each with friendly Minnesota accents. The fact that each project is managed by a professional project manager is a big reason why their web development process is normally so seamless.
Negatives of Working with FindLaw:
– Long Term Contracts: When you work with FindLaw you will either enter into a 1, 2 or 3 year contract.
– Conflict of Interest: A downside of having an army of quota based sales consultants is that they are constantly selling to your competitors. While most FindLaw consultants have a sincere interest in their clients success, the FindLaw model of selling to everyone creates an unavoidable conflict.
– SEO in Competitive Markets, If you are an attorney with designs of dominating the Google search results in a hyper competitive market Findlaw is not a good option. In fact FindLaw does not discuss rank or hold themselves accountable to getting great rankings anymore. This makes sense since doing so would undermine their entire model of selling to everyone. The problem was that prior to Penguin 2.2 (October 2013) release, Findlaw had lots of sites ranking and some sales reps would leverage those successes to sell more sites, with the tacit understanding that they too would enjoy the same ranking success. If a rep is promising great rankings, it stands in stark contrast with FindLaw’s director of SEO who wrote this article a month after Penguin 2.2 devastated many FindLaw SEO clients.
–Portability: When you build a site with FindLaw you are building a site on their proprietary content management system. If you do leave and want to keep your design, you will have to purchase your end user interface (EUI). This is not a website, but rather a collection of web files that need to be redeveloped back into a working website. The really bad part is that the EUI typically strips all of the onsite SEO that has been done. This is a terrible policy and I hope FindLaw changes it.
–Everything is a subscription: If you think about it, paying for a website in perpetuity is silly. A website site is designed, programmed, written and optimized up front yet Findlaw will continue to bill for that website every month, forever. I recently looked at a bill from a FindLaw client and he was paying over $1000/month for a collection of Spanish language pages that had been added to his site years ago. After several years of paying – the lawyer had effectively paid 20k for something he could have gotten for a couple of thousand up front. While the FindlAw model may be seductive, as you can get a great website for a low monthly payment, in the long run, its not a very good deal as you are paying for the website forever.
–A Victim of their Own Sales Success: The biggest problem with FindLaw, in this post Penguin world, is how do you perform quality off-site SEO across thousands of websites? Just having a link from Findlaw.com is no longer sufficient to get good rankings in many areas. When FindLaw has gotten in trouble with Google in the past, its because they attempted to scale SEO – like building a network of sites to pump up FindLaw rental websites or adding lots of low quality directory links for their SEO clients. Findlaw employs a lot of really talented search engine optimization consultants, but they will likely need to hire a lot more of them if they want to stay competitive with SEO in the future.