Law Firm Websites

Law Firm Websites

One of the main ways that clients find a lawyer is through a google search – if I find myself in need of a family lawyer, I’m going to google “family lawyer Kelowna” and click on the first few firm’s websites. It is therefore important that a law firm has an online presence – to maximize your potential for new clients, you must have a website through which those clients can find you. This blog post discusses the dos and don’ts of law firm websites in BC.

THE DON’TS

The Law Society of British Columbia does not have specific rules for law firm websites. But, their rules around marketing restrict the content that a law firm can put on their website.

  • Rule 4.2-5 of the Law Society’s Code of Professional Conduct for British Columbia means that content on a law firm’s website must not be: false, inaccurate, unverifiable, reasonably capable of misleading someone viewing the website, or contrary to the best interests of the public.
  • Rule 4.2-8 means that if anyone listed on the firm website is anything other than a lawyer currently licensed to practice in BC, that person’s status must be clearly indicated. For example, if you want to list your articling student on your website, you have to state that they are an articling student. The same applies to legal assistants, paralegals.
  • Rule 4.3 provides the specific scenarios that allow you to list “practice areas” on your website. Any area of law that you regularly practice in, you can list on your website as a preferred practice area. Do not use the word “specialist” or anything similar when doing this – Rule 4.3.1 prohibits it.

As long as you comply with these specific rules around marketing, you are free to create your website in any way you wish. With all of this freedom, there are several strategies that you can use to ensure that your website lives up to its full client-gaining potential.

THE DOS

Clio provides an excellent guide to law firm website design. The following list includes tips from that guide, and talks about how I considered and implemented these things while designing Refresh Law’s website.

Above anything else, your website should be easy to use. I made sure that information on Refresh Law’s website was presented in a straight forward, intuitive way. The site also works on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. I chose images that weren’t bulky (which slows down the loading speed, especially on mobile), and selected colours and text that had a high contrast to ensure that the website was as accessible as possible.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another important thing to consider for your firm’s website. If used correctly, SEO will drive more traffic to the website by making it appear higher up in the list of search results. When designing Refresh Law’s website, I used a list of SEO ranking factors provided by Clio and made sure to implement them all to the best of my ability.

  • Content: Refresh law helps people with CRT claims. So, we want to appear high up in the search results when people google things like “CRT Lawyer” “CRT Help” or “CRT Claim”. To do this, I made sure that the content on the website clearly outlined our scope of work and the amount we charge for that work. I also took advantage of keywords. Basically, using keywords means that you put the words that people would enter into their google search into key areas of your website – like the titles, headings, and the meta description of your website. Because I primarily want the Refresh Law website to appear when people google things like “CRT help” or “CRT Lawyer,” I focused on these key words.
  • Backlinks and off page citations: Google will refer users to pages that seem the most credible, and one of the ways that they assess credibility is by counting how many other websites link to content on yours. Because Refresh Law is new, no other websites have links that lead to our page yet. However, I have written blog posts with the hope that other sites will link to them.
  • Technical SEO: Clio describes technical SEO as how “google friendly” your website is. This included looking at Google’s webmaster guidelines, as well as making sure that Refresh Law’s website is easy to navigate and loads quickly.

Because the area of law that Refresh practices isn’t a highly competitive space, I think I was able to implement enough of these SEO tips without the help of a professional. If I were designing a website for a law firm that did wills and estates in Vancouver, I would probably hire an expert to make sure that the page had the best chance of appearing near the top of the results when someone googled “wills lawyer Vancouver”.

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