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.
Your law firm’s case results can go a long way toward convincing a potential client that you’re the right attorney to represent them. However, case results on law firm websites often state the result without providing valuable, additional context. That additional information brings the case result to life and helps potential clients understand what went into that victory, verdict amount, or not guilty verdict.
Here’s what you need to know about how the right strategy and tools make it easy to create case results that work harder for your firm.
Why should attorneys post case results on their law firm’s website?
Case results can be influential for prospective clients who are researching their problem and your firm.
When they’re well written, case results can demonstrate how much you care about your practice and clients. They can reveal your enthusiasm and that you have your clients’ best interests in mind.
Potential clients will put themselves into the shoes of the client who is the subject of your results — because of this, well-written case results can do a lot to help potential clients make the emotional and logical leap required to hire you.
What goes into a good case result on a law firm website?
Case results that drive more business to law firms have some features in common.
- It has a story arc;
- It shows what the firm did to earn the result;
- It has a protagonist that is not the attorney (typically, the protagonist is the client);
- It shows the odds that the client and firm were up against;
- It shows that you helped the client overcome the struggle they were facing;
- It shows that justice was done, order was restored, loss was prevented or whatever the happy outcome was;
- It personifies the client and shows that the law firm cares.
Examples of well-written case result elements on law firm websites
Let’s say that a personal injury attorney wants to write a case result about an auto accident which badly hurt a client. Maybe the client was driving her children home from school when a negligent driver seriously injured them.
Set up the story. What was at stake? Consider including things such as how/where the injury occurred, and how the injury affected your client physically and emotionally. These details provide emotional depth to the story.
Was your client frustrated with the insurance company? With medical bills? Was she worried about her health and her family’s health? By describing these elements, your client’s situation becomes relatable to others who read the case result.
In this real example, here’s how the attorney author of this case result begins a story about a young man whose serious condition is misdiagnosed by his doctor:
“C was a young man who came to our office with a problem. He’d had a slow growing lump on his knee for several years. C had done the right things; he’d been to multiple orthopedic physicians, and one in particular on multiple occasions. The recent doctor had performed some testing (of so C thought), and had determined that the mass was benign (non-cancerous). C was a composer, who was in graduate school and lived at home with his single mother. He was her only child.
Unfortunately the mass was not benign; it was a rare form of cancer known as a synovial sarcoma. And within a year from his last appointment with the orthopedic physician, C’s mass had grown significantly in size. When he came to see us he had just been told that he had cancer.”
Once the story is set up, it’s time to lay out the challenges that you and your client faced, the details of the story, and finally, the result.
Conflict is the essence of most good stories. Part of good storytelling in a case result is explaining the odds that you (and your client) overcame to get the result, and how you fought for the client.
For example, in this real case result about a slip and fall victim injured at a historic bed and breakfast, a law firm writes:
“One of the challenges in the case was that the insurance company immediately hired an engineer that conducted an inspection and came to the conclusion that because the building was built in the late 1700s, it was grandfathered into existing building codes and that the design of the stairs was consistent with customary construction techniques that prevailed at the time.
Through discovery and investigation, [we] discovered that the use of the building had been changed from a single-family residence to a commercial use after the enactment of the building code and that substantial renovations had been done to the building and the staircase at issue. [We] then hired a construction engineer to inspect the staircase and evaluate whether it was constructed in accordance with the applicable commercial building codes and generally accepted engineering principals.
That analysis revealed several building code violations, which [we] argued contributed to causing the accident. Essentially, modern building codes prohibit the triangular stair depicted above in commercial buildings because staircase users will be less familiar with the staircase and are far more likely to have a misstep on them than a homeowner would be.”
Lastly, it’s important to demonstrate the outcome and what that meant for both your client and your firm. Did your representation help a client keep their house? Their job? Show how your work helped the potential client in both the short and long term, and how assisting this client better prepared you for future cases.
How LawLytics makes case result creation easy
Your law firm’s case results should tell stories that are relatable to potential clients in similar situations.
Generally, useful case results pages are not short. That is why LawLytics has a built-in case results module that allows you to display each case result on its own search-engine-optimized page while creating a client-friendly index that you can easily reorder at any time. LawLytics helps you get the most out of your case results by providing you with the strategy that you need to write compelling results and the technology you need to add and publish your success stories easily.
When you join LawLytics, you get access to our software, support, and strategy. We’ll show you how to use our software, and show you what you need to write and how to write it. The result is a law firm website that drives more — and better aligned — potential clients to your law firm.
To learn more about using LawLytics for your law firm, schedule a free, interactive demo.
