Law Firm Marketing

That is because there is no limit to the number of lawyer participants in the free services and no effective limit placed by the mass lawyer-finder commercial platforms on their own ability to sign up paying divorce lawyers in your market. They have become incredibly successful at signing up divorce lawyers on the false premise that they will handle your law firm marketing and you will handle your law practice.

In reality, the commercial platforms handle only their own marketing. You are their commodity, and there are plenty of you in line. Your ROI is not their concern or purpose. Their commercial interests do not coincide with yours.

As a result, you receive equalized and ever-diminishing returns on your law firm advertising in an environment that completely favors the mass lawyer-finder company, not you. You are constantly under pressure to escalate your monthly payment (and refer colleagues) to improve your position and frequency of exposure within the platform’s hierarchy on their website. If you don’t pay more constantly, your law firm advertising slides.

You are on their treadmill. They pitch you constantly. And your reward for increased law firm advertising investment in the lawyer-finder company’s success is a smaller slice of the same pie while they use your money to sign up more divorce lawyers in your town to compete with you for the same relatively static amount of legal work. The demand for legal services is tied to the population of your area, not to the success of the lawyer-finder company.

Further, if this is your sole law firm marketing strategy, you have no source of business that you control. You are at the mercy of how many other divorce lawyers in your zip code sign up for each me-too plan, whether paid or free, and how much your competitors continue to pump the system. The paid plans are worse because when more local lawyers sign up, you still get to pay the same fee for an even smaller equalized slice of the same pie. If you increase your law firm advertising payments or bids, it’s worse. You then get the same number of cases at a lower profit margin. How could that possibly be a wise legal marketing strategy for you?

And as a kicker to the mass lawyer-finder roulette wheel, the clients you satisfy are going back to Avvo, GMB, Justia, FindLaw, Super Lawyers, Yelp and Legal Zoom in the future. They’re not coming back to you and they won’t refer friends or relatives to you. They won’t even remember your name or number or where they put your business card. Why? Because Avvo has a stronger and more memorable brand – that you paid for! If you had a great Uber experience last week, will you be contacting that driver or Uber next time?

In any event, Avvo will play your clients far better in the future than you have the time to do. You’ll be struggling with either fewer cases and a smaller gross or more cases at a lower net profit margin.

By contrast, if you sign up for 1-800-DIVORCE, you will be the exclusive 1-800-DIVORCE lawyer in your town. You will BE 1-800-DIVORCE in your town. You will be the best and most memorable family law brand in the world – better than Avvo. Your clients will actually remember you and refer their friends and relatives to you. American consumers love to refer. They particularly love to refer 1-800-DIVORCE. The psychology of the referral is strong.

No other local lawyer will be able to duplicate your performance while you are the exclusive 1-800-DIVORCE lawyer in your market.

If you want more divorce and family law clients than you are presently getting and a higher net income from those clients, you obviously must do something different to what you are presently doing in the field of law firm advertising.

We’re pretty sure you came to our website because you want to get more divorce and family law clients – either to start a law firm or to grow your existing law practice. If that is so, it would now seem that, after assessing the material on this website, you have only two logical choices available: either to check the availability of your area and clinch the deal OR to maintain the status quo in your law firm marketing efforts and perhaps to guess at which of your local competitors (you already know which one it will be – it’s that guy you hate from across town) will secure the 1-800-DIVORCE advantage over you and the rest of the local lawyer-crowd for years to come.

If your complete law firm business development plan is to build your practice only with and through excellent, noble lawyerly work one client at a time in today’s highly competitive “gig” economy, we wish you well, and we hope you are very young.

The barrier to success in consumer law today is not the excellence of your work or the name of your law school or even the amount of money you are prepared to spend on law firm advertising.  The barrier to your success in consumer law is your ability to distinguish yourself from all other local lawyers as the single lawyer who is best positioned to understand this particular target client’s specific problems and fears from her perspective and to be able to engage and intrigue her as being the one unique lawyer most likely to provide her the most creative solutions to her specific problems.

To succeed above and beyond the crowd of local lawyers, your law firm marketing outreach must distinguish you from them. By definition, if you do not stand out from the lawyer-crowd, you are the lawyer-crowd.  How could conforming to the group possibly lead to success for your law firm? Your target clients are looking for someone to act decisively and competitively to protect their legal and economic interests. Are they going to be intrigued by or interested in a lawyer who is not even competitive enough to protect his or her own professional interests in a distinctive way?

So, if your business plan is to build a successful family law practice through engaging target clients in an intriguing manner, why not actually do that? Why not clinch a complete law firm marketing plan that is impressive, loved and appreciated by divorce consumers and which distinguishes you competitively from all other local firms.  Why not clinch (exclusively in your market) both the best family law brand in the world and a proven commercial advantage that your local competitors cannot duplicate?

Branding includes intangibles such as your firm’s policies, attitudes, personality, style and reputation.

And that’s fine as an academic definition of branding, but it’s a definition from your own perspective.  So it somewhat ignores the divorce consumer’s perspective. And the divorce consumer’s perspective is the only one that counts.

What you think about yourself and your law firm brand and what should constitute your law firm brand doesn’t count.

That’s why we see so many unproductive lawyer websites where it is apparently considered wise to tell potential clients where the lawyer went to school and what organizations she belongs to. The implication is that such matters are important to your target clients in their present state of mind. This shows an incredible lack of insight into target clients’ interests and mental states.

If you think that your brand is constituted by telling website visitors that you are, “aggressive,”  “a good listener,” “compassionate,” “reliable,” “dedicated” or any of the other meaningless adjectives ANY lawyer can claim without the requirement or possibility of proof, you’re missing the point about branding. Branding is not bragging.

Your law firm branding should set you apart from all other divorce lawyers.  If it doesn’t set you apart, it isn’t effective branding, and if it isn’t effective, it’s a waste of your marketing time, effort and law firm advertising budget.

We think Lawyerist has a far better and more consumer-based definition when they stated in their Thoughts on Law Firm Branding, “Communicate your knowledge, skill, and experience without talking about your knowledge, skill, and experience.”

That’s what successful branding does.  “Show me. Don’t tell me.”

Successful branding defines you in the mind of the divorce or family law consumer as the SINGLE lawyer who understands her specific problem within the parameters of her own present understanding of that problem and offers her an encompassing solution that is perceived as better than anyone else’s. You must talk directly to the needs and fears of your target client – without talking about yourself. They don’t care about you personally. They care only about what value you can provide them.

That is the wisdom of branding your law firm with 1-800-DIVORCE. 1-800-DIVORCE tells your target client a lot about you without the empty bragging or the off-putting, unsupportable self-serving statements.

In fact, 1-800-DIVORCE proves in an instant that you are bold, decisive, distinctive, savvy, consumer-friendly, creative, considerate, experienced, competitive and cost-effective without you having to say a word about those benefits.  You have successfully aced the all-important first few seconds (Google calls them “micro-moments.”) of perception and impression.

Nielsen’s September 2013 study on Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages reveals that in North America, consumers trust (82%) and take action on (79%) “recommendations from people I know.”

Like all consumers, your potential clients are seeking the comfort level of a recognized national brand LOCALLY. US consumers love to share 1-800-DIVORCE and the never-ending word-of-mouth referrals mentioned by Nielsen are built-in automatically.

We’re not suggesting for a moment that all you have to do is to sign up for 1-800-DIVORCE. In fact, that’s exactly what we are NOT suggesting. What we are suggesting is that 1-800-DIVORCE provides a solid, ethical commercially attractive law firm branding platform upon which you can complete your law firm’s branding with the addition of your personality and style. That has been the path of all successful 1-800-DIVORCE lawyers since June 1991.

1-800-DIVORCE is the best Family Law brand in the world and one of the best legal brands! Your name is not. Your firm’s name is not. 1-800-DIVORCE provides you instant branding and the commercial advantage you seek over your competitors.

There is only one 1-800-DIVORCE. There will be only one 1-800-DIVORCE lawyer in your market area. 1-800-DIVORCE provides you a distinct competitive advantage over the local lawyer-crowd.