Ethics Violations to Avoid on Law Firm Web Sites

From case studies to core practice-area content to e-mail newsletters, law firms have a variety of Internet-based content tools they can use to inform potential clients of who they are and what they do. Other online marketing tactics, however, fall outside of state ethics rules, as well as the ethical guidelines the American Bar Association (ABA) promotes the states to adopt.

As an attorney working to develop client relationships online, it’s your responsibility to educate yourself about these rules and apply them. One good resource is the ABA Web site, which provides links to the rules governing lawyer advertising, solicitation and marketing in all 50 states: www.abanet.org/ad rules

While the ABA’s prohibition against posting "false and misleading" information on a legal Web site is interpreted differently in various states, there are some established guidelines your law firm can refer to make sure that you are operating ethically on your site. Some of the key areas that your firm should address include:

Illegal communications. If the Internet is anything it’s information-rich — and the unauthorized "borrowing" of content is a recurring problem. Utilizing plagiarized materials, stolen testimonials or copyrighted images from other Web sites is not only unethical, but illegal.

Omissions. Statements such as "No Recovery — No Fee" can be misleading if the client is exempt from legal fees only and is still liable for courts costs or administrative fees. Many states require disclaimers when contingent fee arrangements are publicized. Another common omission on legal Web sites is the posting of positive awards and settlements without a prominently displayed disclaimer on all relevant pages of the site stating that results may vary or that the facts and circumstances of each case dictate the results.

Unjustified expectations. The creation of unjustified expectations is an important consideration that is relevant in all states. Some of the key areas of concern are:

• Many of the same rules that apply to law firm names also apply to Web site domain names. A firm may not, for example, adopt a domain name that creates undue expectations of success (www.winyourlegalcase.com) or that implies a connection with a government agency or charitable legal services organization.
• Some states restrict the use of awards, honors or commendations, as they can create unjustified expectations of success. New Jersey is presently discussing the use of the "Super Lawyers" designation due, in part, to a concern that the designation may create an unjustified expectation that the "Super Lawyer" is better than other lawyers.
  The inclusion of "verdicts and settlements" pages or other descriptions of success can be a powerful marketing tool, but may create unjustified expectations without the inclusion of appropriate disclaimers or factual descriptions. Most states regulate the use of this type of information.
• Testimonials, endorsements or representative-client lists are also prohibited or banned in certain states because they can create expectations of success merely by reference to who has retained the firm in the past.

Statements about a lawyer’s services. Statements that compare one lawyer’s services with another’s run afoul of the ethics rules in many states, if they cannot be factually substantiated or objectively verified. In some states, self-laudatory are also against the rules. Any comparisons to the services of other lawyers — even implied comparisons, such as a law firm that bills itself as "the most experienced in the state" or "the most qualified" — should be avoided or clearly documented, if possible, on your site.

Claims of specialization. While the rules differ state-by-state, a Web site that positions a firm as "experts" or "specialists" may violate ethics guidelines. In most states it is allowable, however, to state that you "limit your practice to" or "concentrate in" your area of expertise.

Failure to include necessary disclaimers. Many states require special disclaimers that govern contingency fees or legal services in general. It is important that the attorney understand all disclaimers required, as well as any size, position, type and color requirements that may exist in certain states. In some states, failure to include necessary disclaimers results in a per se violation of the rules.

Spamming. Spamming is another key ethics concern online. If your firm uses mass e-mail communication, do not include overt marketing messages in the subject line, and give recipients a prominently displayed "opt-out" option to ensure the e-mail is not misconstrued as spam. Some states also require that advertising for legal services be included in the subject line itself.

The ethics guidelines covering spam and some other aspects of Internet-based legal marketing, such as online recordkeeping requirements, are still being fine-tuned. To stay on top of developments in blogging, pay-per-clicks and other emerging areas, the best strategy is to bookmark the ABA Web page that tracks changes in state advertising laws (www.abanet.org/cpr/professionalism/lawyerAd.html) and refer to it frequently for updates.

Conclusion

Law firms can pay a high price for unethical online marketing in disciplinary measures, fee forfeiture and reduced visibility. If your Operating your Web site within the rules can help you avoid ethics repercussions and make the most of this dynamic marketing tool for your law firm.

How to Benefit from Google’s Enhancements

Behind the scenes, Internet search engines continually refine how they rank information and provide search results. Recently, however, they’ve rolled out changes that are more dramatic. Search-engines users are noticing the difference and so are law firms that market themselves online.

Google and other popular search engines like Yahoo! and Ask are attempting to give their users both more information and more personalized information — by incorporating maps, video and other useful tools into their search results and by tailoring those results based on data they collect about the user.

The three key factors driving these changes are:

1. Universal search
2. Geo-targeting
3. Personalization
   

Universal search, which Google introduced in May, is a broader, more comprehensive way to search the Web. A universal search serves up standard Web results alongside video clips, blog entries, images, news results and other categories of information — all pulled from Google’s so-called "vertical search" tools which index information by type (images, maps, blogs) or content (finance, shopping, academia). Those specialized search tools have been available at google.com for years, but now they’re being brought to the forefront.

So a search for "Chicago car accident," for example, might generate local TV video, newspaper coverage of recent events and (if you do personal-injury work in the Windy City) a listing for your law firm, integrated into one result. For Google and other search engines implementing universal search, the goal is to break down the walls that separate different types of Web content and give users a better search experience.

Geo-targeting refers to the increasingly sophisticated way that search engines are tailoring results based on a user’s location, which Google says it can determine nearly 90% of the time. As a result of geo-targeting, two people searching for "Boston defense lawyer" — one from a coffee shop in Massachusetts, the other from a home office in Denver — likely will get very different results.

User-based information (the physical location of the computer, MapQuest defaults) is part of this trend, but geo-targeting is a two-way street. For both legal prospects and law firm Web sites, geographic details now matter more. Referencing local towns and neighborhoods on your site, displaying the firm address prominently, your presence on local directories ... all are becoming more critical as search engines strive to provide relevant, location-specific results.

Personalization means that along with geographic information, search engines are collecting more data about the search behavior and online browsing patterns of users, then using it to shape results. Type in a Google search and your Web history, Gmail account, iGoogle settings and other unique-to-you information all may impact the results delivered to your screen.

Universal search, geo-targeting and personalization are good news for law firms that market themselves effectively online. With access to better, more relevant results, prospects are likely to spend more time online. On the attorney side, law firm Web sites that are grounded in their target market and provide a diverse mix of relevant content — and that are monitored and updated frequently — may see better qualified prospects and convert them at a higher rate.

How can your law firm take advantage of these Google updates? Consider these specific steps:

1) Get your firm on Google Maps. When users search for services online, they’re more likely to include a geographic qualifier than when searching for products. The integration of Google Maps into general search results is an opportunity to make yourself more accessible to those prospects. There’s no charge for adding your firm, though a Gmail account is required — go to google.com, select Maps, then select "Add or edit your business."

2) Think content, not just copy. As search parameters expand, new ways of communicating with your prospects beyond standard Web site text are more likely to find an audience. Video is an example of this. YouTube streams more than 200 million videos daily, and Web video is emerging as an important new tool for online legal marketing.

3) Go local. In today’s search environment, with results tailored to each individual, being #1 is relative. Achieving a top rank is less important than being seen by your target audience. Zero in on your prospects by utilizing keywords, key phrases and geographic terms relevant to your local market — avoiding legal jargon in favor of commonly-used terms. By incorporating targeted, unique content into your site, you’ll define your market and capture more local traffic.

4) Stay relevant. On the Internet a generic, one-size-fits-all approach is less effective than content that sets you apart and speaks to your prospects; Spanish-language information, for example, if you’re in a city with a high concentration of Spanish speakers. Or consider establishing a topical practice center on your site that focuses exclusively on an industry or area of the law that’s big in your market.

5) Incorporate current events. Search engines increasingly are blending news, blog entries, video clips and other timely, event-focused information into results, and that’s an opportunity for your firm. Keep your eye on news that’s relevant to your practice and integrate it into your site. Reference current events and local stories in case results, on your blog and in online articles. The key: make updates frequently.

6) Use local directories and search engines. Get your Web address out through a variety of online resources including local search engines, superpages.com, legal directories and your bar association and chamber of commerce Web sites. That’s important not only for the leads they generate directly, but also because search engines like Google pull from smaller directories and search tools to validate information, compile rankings and provide better local results.

7) Monitor, then modify. Increasingly, there’s no one "right" set of keywords or content strategy for legal Web sites. Results are fluid. They vary by user and location and are influenced by trends. That makes understanding user behavior through the use of analytics more important than ever. Available from Web site developers, analytic programs help you determine how users find your site and how they behave once they arrive. Which keywords drew prospects last month? What are the most (and least) effective pages on your site? Use analytics to ask these questions; use the answers to make upgrades to your site.

Overall, search is becoming more refined and precise, and opening up to encompass new categories of information.

That’s good news for a law firm that knows its target market and is proactive about staying relevant to its prospects, monitoring site performance and delivering a diverse mix of quality content.

How To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

No marketing channel can touch the power of the Internet. And no channel is as crowded with competitors or as potentially intimidating to clients. That’s why addressing the issue of visibility — how your web site is linked to other sites, how prospects find you, and how you can improve those connections — should be an important piece of your online strategy.

One smart move to consider is making changes to your site, and to your overall online presence, that boost your rankings with powerful search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. That’s called search engine optimization, and it’s not about tricks or shady tactics.

The goal is to make your site more visible and relevant to both search engines and the people who use them to find legal representation. By taking a few basic steps to raise your site’s visibility, you’ve got a great opportunity to generate more leads and up the return on your web investment.

The challenge, of course, is standing out from the crowd. Research shows that most people look at just the first page or two of a search result. So how do search engines compile those lists? Why does Firm A rank highly in a given result, while Firm B struggles in at #273?

It starts with "spiders," software programs that the search engines send out to visit web sites, collect information, then use that information to build a searchable index. When a person types in a query, the search engine sorts through its index for the most relevant, authoritative information related to that request. Search engines frequently adjust the formulas they use to rank sites. They do that to make their rankings more precise and to prevent spam. But you can leave the technical fine-tuning to folks who don’t have a law firm to run. Focus instead on strategies that are proven winners in improving search engine results.

These strategies include:

• Ensuring your web site’s content is fresh and easily browsable.
• Choosing words and phrases that target your prospects.
• Increasing the number of inbound links from other sites that drive leads to yours.
• Content A rule of thumb: What attracts and holds the attention of site visitors will also improve search engine rankings. Regularly updated content, for example. A search engine’s spider looks for fresh information to index.
• Straightforward, easy to browse design also makes a difference. The same slow-loading, overdone graphics and multimedia bells-and-whistles that drive web users up the wall also drastically decrease the likelihood of your web site being found in a search result.
• One of the most important factors in search-engine-optimizing your web site is to intelligently use keywords that promote your marketing objectives, fit your geographic location and practice areas, and match the words that prospects use when they conduct a search.
• To use keywords effectively on your site, remember to:
• Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Prospects won’t necessarily use legal terms of art when conducting a search. Incorporate layman’s terms for your key practice areas.
• Include "lawyer" and "attorney" and "law firm."
• Cover your geographic area in all its permutations: city, state, even neighborhood if you’re in a big city.

Keep it readable. Keyword stuffing — repeating key words and phrases over and over — makes for a poor user experience and could get your site flagged by search engines. Your goal should be keyword-rich language that’s also natural and easy to read.

Own a niche. While the typical search generates thousands (or even millions) of results, most users click the first few links. So it’s key to target your specific market niche and location. You’re better off, in other words, scoring high in a unique search than chasing the most competitive, generic keywords like "divorce lawyer" or "criminal-defense attorney."

Keywords should also be incorporated into the behind-the-scenes programming of your site. Properly written title tags, meta descriptions and alt tags are a few of the key elements that can help keep you at the top of search engine rankings. Content really is king. So if you work with a web-site provider, make sure they know the legal industry and how to write for it, and understand how search engines evaluate and rank law firm web sites like yours.

Inbound Links Another factor influencing search-engine rankings are inbound links to your web address from other online sites. With inbound links, quality is much more important than quantity. Relevant links from other law firms, legal sites and bar associations should influence your results in search engines. Think of it like a frequently cited legal case. A case is more important if lots of other rulings reference it, particularly if they’re high-profile cases that are directly on topic. In the same way, when authoritative web sites link to your site it raises your credibility. That said, links should only be purchased for the traffic they will generate and not for any potential search engine result lift they might provide.

Ongoing Process Search engine optimization is a straightforward, common-sense process, but it’s important to keep at it — to regularly measure your site traffic and conversion rate, audit the content on your site and adjust it as your marketing goals, and the legal issues facing your clients, change. Then republish your site as necessary.

If you outsource your online marketing, look for a provider who can assist you throughout that process — from traffic analysis to writing and design services to the nuts-and-bolts of site management. That will help ensure that the time, money and creative energy you’ve invested in your web site pay off. Search engine optimization is a terrific opportunity to make smart use of the Internet to generate more leads, and ultimately more cases, for your firm.

Google Basics

According to Google, there are three key process in delivering search results to an end user. They are:

1. Crawling: Does Google know about your site. Can Google find your site?
2. Indexing: Can Google index your site?
3. Relevancy: Does your site have content that useful and relevant to the useer's search?

---In Google's Words---

Crawling: Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.
Google uses a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.
Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.
Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Indexing: Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Relevancy: When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.
In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it's important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site's ranking.
Google's Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it's because we've algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user's query.

I hope this is some useful information as to what it takes to get found online. Please don't hesitate to call me with any questions at 303-947-1737 or check out my legal marketing site at www.legalmarketingguy.com.

Antonio Lucero - Representing Denver's Hispanic Community for over 24 Years

All too often people do not understand the U.S. court system and all the possible consequences they face. Fearing immigration consequences, they do not call a lawyer to learn about their rights. Serving residents of the Hispanic and Spanish-speaking community in Denver, Colorado, for twenty-seven years, the lawyers of Lucero & Associates, P.C. strive to advise their clients on all their legal options.
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To find out more about your case, call us at (303) 455-7699. Sit down with us during a free initial consultation about your family law, criminal law, personal injury, and workers' compensation case. While it is important to understand the consequences of your legal actions, you need an experienced attorney who can advise you about your options.
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Depending on your case, we can work with you to find an affordable solution to your legal troubles. We work on a contingency fee basis when handling a personal injury case. We will not collect anything from you until you receive compensation for your injuries. As a small firm, we offer prompt attention and personalized counsel for each of our clients. You will not have to worry about your case being handled by a less experienced associate.
Schedule a free initial consultation with an attorney of Lucero & Associates, P.C. by calling (303) 455-7699. Fill out the attached form with any questions you have for us about your case. We represent people through the Denver metro area including the cities of Lakewood, Aurora, Northglenn, and Westminster.

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EL sistema legal es complicada y dificil para comprender, especialmente si uno no habla bien el idioma. Los abogados de Lucero y Associados, P.C. tiene años de experiencia ayudando la gente Mexicano e hispano en las cortes de Colorado. Podemos explicar bien sus derechos legales, las consequencias de de los procedemientos legal, y los opciones que tiene usted. Podemos atender a usted rapidamente y resolver su caso lo mas pronto possible.
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Lucero & Associates, P.C.3030 West 38th AvenueDenver, CO 80211Phone: (303) 455-7699Fax: (303) 458-8249