This blog post is part of a series on beginning content creation tips for law firms. To see all the posts in this series, visit our series introduction page.
When potential clients are trying to determine if you’re the right attorney for their needs, they’ll want to see how you’ve helped others in the past.
Reviews and recommendations from happy former clients can serve as essential points of social proof that a potential client needs to decide to contact your law firm.
Your reputation is a valuable asset. Here’s how to get the most out of recommendations and positive reviews on your law firm’s website.
Why is it important to have reviews on law firm websites?
Having access to online reviews is more critical than ever. These days, many of us rarely make a purchase decision without seeing what other people have to say about a product or service.
This is likely to be particularly true in cases where a purchase decision requires significant expense and/or the failiure to make the right choice could significantly affect a person’s life, such as hiring an attorney.
The financial cost of hiring private representation — and the desire for the best possible outcome — means that a potential client is likely to look to many resources (including reviews) before making a final decision to contact a law firm. A potential client wants to see repeat proof that your former clients had a positive experience with your firm that resulted in the best possible outcome for the client.
Another benefit of publishing positive reviews to your law firm’s website is that assuming that you own and control your law firm’s website (as LawLytics members do), you have control over the published reviews.
That means you can highlight positive reviews and keep potential clients from getting distracted by reviews from competitors, as you might find on social media or law firm directories.
Review sites and directories can, in some cases, provide further social proof of your excellent work. However, there are downsides to third-party review sites and directories that can expose your potential clients to your competitors’ messaging and distract them from reaching out to you.
Note: Your potential clients can find reviews about your firm in a number of places besides your law firm’s website, which is why it’s important to feature a consistent message about your law firm regardless of where the potential client looks. In a future blog post, we’ll discuss the value of collecting reviews on third-party sites and how to do so effectively.
When should you collect reviews for your law firm?
Be proactive when you’re building your online reviews. That doesn’t mean cheating or doing anything unethical or manipulative, but it does mean asking for reviews and doing it at the right time.
One of the best times to ask for a review from a happy client is at the conclusion of a case or matter.
When you do it right, collecting reviews can be baked right into your other daily activities — something that LawLytics makes easy to do. (See below for how we make collecting and publishing reviews from happy clients easy.)
Many attorneys that we work with, using the LawLytics platform, end up baking in the reviews-seeking practice right into their file-closing procedure.
Let’s say a criminal defense lawyer concludes a case and ultimately gets a result that allows his or her client to walk out of the courtroom.
At that point, this client is likely full of gratitude — that’s a great point to ask for a review.
How should you collect reviews for your law firm’s website?
It can be hard for some attorneys to ask for reviews, but it’s important all the same. One of the best ways to ask for reviews is to explain — without telling the potential client what to say — why reviews are important to your firm.
You might explain something like, “It would really help me out if you’d talk about your experiences with me and my firm online. The reason why is because I’d like to make sure that other clients in your situation understand the value of my services/understand how proactive I am/how available I am/how much work I put into this.”
When you describe it in this kind of way, you’re not asking clients to say those things about you (and of course you should never tell them what to say). But, explaining why it matters to you (and your future clients) can help them comply with your request.
How LawLytics makes collecting and displaying law firm website reviews easy
Good technology helps you showcase recommendations on your law firm’s website that convert potential clients into new business for you.
Our platform includes a built-in recommendations engine that allows you to add reviews in just a few clicks. It creates dedicated pages for each review. It also creates an index that lets potential clients see reviews that are most relevant to them.
LawLytics creates an optimized display of your recommendations and lets you drag and drop your recommendations in the order you choose. If you have multiple websites, you can choose which recommendations are published to your websites.
To learn more about using LawLytics for your law firm, schedule a free demo with us.
