Gavin Ward

This article on the best practices and strategies was originally posted on Infolaw and has been reposted here with the permission of the author.

Website design for what lawyers want is often at odds with what their clients buying legal services from them want. Having built over 100 law firm websites in recent years as what we call ‘success drivers’ as part of the strategy to help law firms and lawyers achieve their objectives, we have a great deal of experience with this issue. The following outlines and explains three of the key differences.

Do you have the legal content skills to help Moore Legal Technology succeed? We are one of the UK’s leading online business generation consultancies for the legal sector.

With the connection between law and technology becoming stronger than ever, we’re now seeing the first legal ‘hackathon’ coming to Scotland. Organised by Legal Hackers Scotland and The Law Society of Scotland, and as publicised on the Law Society’s website here, the 48 hour event, running this weekend (Friday 17th to Sunday  19th June), will be a pop-up innovation lab for lawyers, designers, technologists and others to collaborate and design sustainable and scalable solutions that alleviate pressing access to justice issues.

Do you have the digital marketing drive to help Moore Legal Technology succeed? We are one of the UK’s leading online business generation consultancies for the legal sector.

As one of the most innovative organisations on the planet, Google improves the way it does things every day. And for our law firm clients to beat their competition online, we need to as well.

With our growing team having built up vast expertise in generating business online in the legal sector, at Moore Legal Technology we aim to give something back to our community.

Moore Legal Technology is experiencing continuous growth, so we're hiring yet again - we are looking for an enthusiastic colleague with a passion for digital design.

How many spam SEO emails does your firm get from the ‘next top SEO company from India with thousands of SEO experts around the world’? We hear from partners in law firms every week about how they’ve had an email like the one in the attached screengrab below. So it’s no surprise that SEO (and perhaps more broadly internet marketing) sometimes gets a bad name. You may get such an email and just delete it instantly, perhaps preceded with some swearing. That’s perfectly normal. That’s what I and my colleagues do too (yes, even our legal SEO experts get bombarded with similar emails each day, and yes we have a swear jar in the office).

As reported in Legal Futures recently, the Bar Standards Board (BSB) has warned that barristers are at risk of being “squeezed out of the market by a declining case load, a surfeit of barristers and increasing competition from both other regulated legal professionals as well as unregulated service providers.”

We are pleased to note that the powerful, open source, scalable CMS that we use for the majority of our clients' websites (ie the core of their online business generation projects) has been voted the best free CMS of 2015 by cmscritic.com.

Do you have the digital marketing drive to help Moore Legal Technology succeed? We are one of the UK’s leading online business generation consultancies for the legal sector.Job Title: Digital Marketing AssistantPrimary Location: GlasgowReports to: Gavin Ward, Operations DirectorSalary: CompetitiveApply: CV and covering letter to [email protected]/* ![DATA[ */!function(t,e,r,n,c,a,p){try{t=document.currentScript||function(){for(t=document.getElementsByTagName('script'),e=t.length;e--;)if(t[e].getAttribute('data-cfhash'))return t[e]}();if(t&&(c=t.previousSibling)){p=t.parentNode;if(a=c.getAttribute('data-cfemail')){for(e='',r='0x'+a.substr(0,2)|0,n=2;a.length-n;n+=2)e+='%'+('0'+('0x'+a.substr(n,2)^r).toString(16)).slice(-2);p.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(decodeURIComponent(e)),c)}p.removeChild(t)}}catch(u){}}()/* ]]> */</script></a></li><li><strong>Closing Date:</strong> Tuesday 22 September 2015</li></ul><p>Over the course of the last three years we have been experiencing continuous growth and are looking for an enthusiastic colleague with a passion for digital marketing.</p><p>Note that due to particular increased demand for our services in the past 6 months, we are hiring not one but two new people. Our second position available will be that of <a href="/Blog/better-than-legal-traineeship-new-legal-online-marketing-assistant.html">Legal Online Marketing Assistant</a>. If you've already applied for one role you need not apply for the second - we'll work out which role you're best suited for at the interview stage.</p><h2>Job description</h2><p>We are seeking a driven digital marketing assistant to:-</p><ul><li>    Assist our online business generation team as we continue to take on and retain new clients each year</li><li>    Execute day-to-day improvements to digital marketing campaigns consistent with clients’ business objectives and brand</li><li>    Liaise with team and communicate directly with clients to keep them informed of results</li></ul><h2>Primary responsibilities</h2><p>You will be responsible for:</p><ul><li>    Supporting many aspects of our digital marketing operations, assisting our content marketing, social media, PPC, web design and web development teams</li><li>    Managing and executing digital marketing campaigns with support and supervision from our team of digital marketing specialists</li><li>    Monitoring and reporting on results from SEO, PPC and social media campaigns using Google Analytics and other analytics tools (such as our call tracking system) with a view to making improvements that will increase profit for our clients</li><li>    Communicating regularly with colleagues and our clients to meet our high standards of client care</li><li>    Tracking trends, suggesting and rolling out improvements to client accounts</li><li>    Becoming an authoritative voice on our blog and social platforms alongside all of our other team members for business development purposes</li><li>    Continued learning and professional development, including attending seminars and courses where relevant</li><li>    Joining our team at various client meetings, training and speaking events</li></ul><h2>Required skills and approach</h2><p>Having the right attitude will be vital in this role. We are looking for individuals who can work with us to help both our customers' businesses and our own business grow.

How is your law firm doing in search? Where do you rank? What does your meta data look like for organic results for your main legal services? What do your PPC ads look like? Don’t know? Don’t care? Over the next ten years we’ll be seeing more and more businesses, not necessarily law firms nor solicitors, advertising alongside you in organic (whether in the local block of results or otherwise) and paid Google search. And it probably won’t be the same competitors you may have expected to appear there in the past. In today’s blog, I look at the forces that are driving such unexpected competitors to appear there, how you could be missing out on significant amounts of new business and what you can do to take advantage of the opportunities the internet still presents law firms and solicitors who deserve to have an outstanding online presence.

Recently we were invited to tender for the delivery of online marketing services to a long-established law firm in England. At the meeting one of the key discussions related to whether we’d recommend focusing the online marketing efforts and investment into targeting people searching locally for their lawyer or nationally. Indeed, we get asked this a lot and taking the wrong approach on this could be costing your firm thousands of online enquiries each year. So what’s the right answer?

Both the Law Society of Scotland and the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) have published warnings about the rise of bogus law firms across the UK. The SRA notes that over 700 reports of such fake firms have been made in the past year, an annual increase of over 25%, and the Law Society of Scotland have noted similar patterns emerging. But what can law firms do if they’re subjected to what is effectively online identity theft?

Having been immersed in many web design projects for law firms both in the UK and internationally (having put 50+ new sites going live in the past 3 years), we have recently updated our legal website design guide page. Including a section ‘Strategic website design with great conversion rates - top 5 tips’, this explains among other things our philosophy to great law firm web design (i.e. Don’t make me think), with information on what you need from your new website to really succeed online and generate profitable business that will help your firm grow in a competitive marketplace. We hope you enjoy and hopefully you’ll pick up some useful tips when you consider redesigning your own website.

Leading business development consultant to lawyers and law firms in the UK Stephen Gold has published a number of new opinion pieces in the Journal of The Law Society of Scotland. In his latest piece, entitled Head and Shoulders Above: It’s visible experts who see off the competition, Stephen outlines how lawyers and professionals can win influence in a crowded marketplace; how they can establish authority and become ‘visible experts’.

Moore Legal Technology is delighted to be shortlisted in the category of Support Team of the Year at the 2015 Scott + Co Scottish Legal Awards.

A new Legal Futures report, “Barristers urged to grab litigation opportunities after “modest” beginning”, notes that only 129 barristers have seized the opportunity to conduct litigation in England & Wales since the restriction was removed a few years ago. Barristers should be considering how to harness this opportunity should it be right for their business model. Having helped many barristers achieve online success, Moore Legal Technology present 5 of the top ways barristers can thrive online and rely less on just solicitor referrals.

We are pleased to note that alongside one of the UK’s leading law firm consultants, Stephen Gold, our directors Chris Davidson and Gavin Ward are presenting at an upcoming Law Society of Scotland event in Glasgow later this month.(26 November 2014)