Five Tips for Lawyers Purchasing Online Lead Generation Services

1.   Find out how much traffic the branded network’s site generates. Check with a company like Quantcast, which provides an estimate of the traffic generated to a single website.

2.   Find out where the company pulls in the leads. An unscrupulous company might be purchasing low-quality leads to funnel to their lawyer network.

3.  Find out how the service operates. For example, does it focus on generating the traffic by purchasing Google AdWords? What is the strategy for generating leads to push to the lawyer network? The cost of the service to your firm is going to depend on its costs to generate the leads to forward to you.

4.   Note how tailored the lead generation service is to your specific practice area and jurisdiction. Some companies may restrict their own marketing to particular states or regions to generate leads for the areas where they have the most lawyer members in their network.

• If the service is attempting to generate leads from landing pages that are too broad, this is going to mean fewer warm leads for you.
• Are you in a jurisdiction where the company has focused its marketing to the public, or will you be one of only a handful of lawyers in your jurisdiction using the service?

5.   Do a cost/benefit analysis based on the return you would get from each lead and how much the company is charging for leads.

• If the service is performance based, then find out if you must pay for leads even if they are not warm leads or if you are unable to convert a lead to a paying client. Most performance-based services will define a qualifying lead as any individual sent to you with a legal need that you have told the company you will handle.
• Factor in the amount that you would charge that client for services and make sure the cost to acquire the client in the first place is the most effective use of that money.
• Some companies with these services offer lead monitoring and tracking tools as well as other forms of support to help the lawyer with lead conversion.

What Is Online Lawyer Lead Generation? More »

The November/December issue of the CBA’s National Magazine featured an article entitled “Workplace Transformation“. The article poses the question of whether the legal profession is ready to focus on methods of practice that emphasize the lawyer’s performance above presence. I was interviewed for this article because of my work in virtual law practice and unbundling. The article does not necessarily pertain to online delivery of legal services, but also focuses on lawyers who want to practice remotely but still provide full-service representation.

The National Magazine article provides a few updated resources and applications to use to deliver legal services online and work remotely. It also includes quotes from lawyers who have chosen to focus more on performance for their clients rather than on their workspace environments. My words of wisdom on the topic for the article:

“Time management and the ability to work independently is key. Technology is great because it gives you more freedom to work when and where you want to — and offers more ways to communicate with clients and with other firm members — but if you can’t manage your time and manage the technology, then it’s not going to work. So I say anyone considering e-law really needs to look at themselves and how they use technology and decide whether this is really something that is going to benefit them and work for them.”

My perspective has always been that a lawyer does not need to be in a traditional office environment in order to be the most productive and effective. As an introvert who does her best thinking and working away from others, the idea of working in a traditional law office environment has always been stifling. I managed to get several good years of mentoring in such an environment, but found that I was better able to work when I had more control over my own schedule.

When I teach law students and young lawyers about virtual law practice, I don’t recommend they start out in a virtual law office environment. Those few critical years of traditional office time were valuable and without mentors starting out lawyers won’t have the experience they need to learn the practical ins and outs of their specific area of practice. While there are some great sources for online mentorship, the best ones in my opinion are still the ones you can meet with in person. But once new lawyers have a few years of training under their belt, each has to figure out how they do their best work and what will best serve their clients. That may or may not include working remotely through the use of cloud-based services.

In order for a law firm to begin the process of deciding what type of model for online delivery it needs and how to integrate online legal services, it must first take a step back and look at its existing practice areas and the services it currently provides to clients in a traditional manner.

The firm should start with one practice area at a time and analyze the typical intake and management procedure for the case through to the termination of the relationship with a client. Noting which individuals at the firm are responsible at each step and stage in a case is also important as well as what technology, if any, is used at each stage.

I’m heading down to Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Florida next week to record sessions for the courses I will be co-teaching for the Center for Law Practice Technology. I’ll be teaching the core course in law practice management with Richard Granat, teaching a social media for lawyers course by myself and assisting Will Hornsby in his course on Ethics of Practicing Law in a Digital World. We will be adding more courses as the project gets underway.

For the past several months we have been crafting the syllabi for these courses, compiling the materials for the students, and setting up the distance learning platform to facilitate the synchronous and asynchronous lessons for each course. It is an enormous amount of work, but something I’m finding really valuable because I’m having to pull from the past several years of teaching law students online for a variety of different schools that each use different platforms for their students. All of the course material we teach has to be updated regularly because the topics are related to technology and new ethics opinions and rule changes are coming out all the time that pertain to the use of technology in law practice management. It’s keeping me on my toes.

I believe once we have many of these courses pre-recorded, the materials and discussion forums set up, and the quizzes and assignments online, this project will be an awesome resource for law students and practitioners who want to dive into it. It will be useful both for those who want that basic legal tech knowledge and skill base that they didn’t get in law school, but also for those who have more of that background and want to obtain more specific knowledge on a more detailed subject in one of the one credit courses, such as my social media course or the ones we are developing for future semesters, such as the e-discovery course, expert systems, document automation, or entrepreneurship in law practice.

As with most of my projects, this one also ties back to improving access to legal services for the public. If we can educate lawyers about how to use technology to be more efficient and to make legal services more affordable and accessible, then in the long-term going forward, that is going to impact the way that services are delivered and the public is able to work with lawyers to have their legal needs met. It’s one piece of the puzzle, but it’s as critical to bring the profession up to speed with the changes in the legal marketplace as it is to be innovative creating new technology solutions for delivery.

Want to keep up with the courses we are teaching and the materials? I’ll probably be posting snippets from the classes on the Center for Law Practice Tech blog throughout the term.

This month I teamed up with Chad Burton and Betsy Westhafer to co-found Curo Legal, a business that focuses on law practice operations. [Side note: Yes, I am still developing my legal games and reforming legal education among other things.] 

For several years, I’ve provided solos and small firms with advice on how to set up virtual law offices, unbundle, or add some form of online or alternative legal service delivery to their traditional law firm models. Chad was in the same boat being called out by other lawyers to provide guidance in setting up their own virtual law firms. So we teamed up. Here’s part of our mission statement:

We want to see lawyers empowered to provide clients with the full value of their expertise without being weighed down by the stress of keeping up with administrative, technology, and other aspects of running a successful law practice. The founders of Curo Legal realize that by freeing lawyers to focus on lawyering and by making legal service delivery more efficient, we increase access to legal services for the public by lowering legal fees and providing lawyers and clients with alternative and complementary methods of working together.

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I will be speaking at the District of Oregon Conference entitled, Innovations in the Law: Science and Technology, on Friday of this week at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. Speakers for the event will have 6-12 minutes to present on a number of topics including “improving the delivery of legal services, innovations in the courts, gaps in the law, and how the public’s use of technology impacts law enforcement.” Many of the speakers on the roster were involved in the ReInvent Law event in Silicon Valley last spring. I will be giving my 6 minute Ignite style talk on the consumer law revolution and how lawyers can collaborate with branded networks to increase access and delivery. If you are in Portland on Friday, consider registering for the event.

This summer I wrote a report for Managing Partner, a UK-based publishing company focused on law firm management. The report is for lawyers who are interested in learning about and possibly adding online legal services to their law firms. Here is the Executive Summary and Chapter One.

This is not intended to be an academic report so there are few citations and more checklists and recommendations for analysis and implementation. It is written for lawyers who want to focus on client-development and customer service for existing clients by adding online services in their firms. The case studies I reviewed are law firms that are successfully doing this. For example, Brilliant Law in the UK and Slater & Gordon in Australia. I’m not focusing on branded networks or companies in this report.

The chapter I wish they would have given me to share is the final one where I take a look at why online legal service delivery by firms have not been as quickly adopted or as successful as many had hoped and what I think needs to be done to see it evolve and really increase access to legal services for the public. I will try to make this the subject of a blog post soon because I think there are definitely some lessons to be learned from this research that need to be shared. You can purchase a copy of the full report here.

This report was international in scope, but I had difficulty finding firms in some areas that were marketing and delivering their services online. Some areas I neglected to write about simply because I couldn’t find anything there (Africa, South America, China, Japan, Russia, and others). I’m sure there must be some innovation in online delivery happening there, but to what extent? Already, since turning in the proofs last month, I’ve learned about a new company in Germany that is focused on online delivery. That’s the nature of this topic and why I should only write easily editable ebooks!

As always, feedback, comments, and connections to others innovating in this space, are gratefully encouraged.

This was my first attempt at creating an infographic using Piktochart. Any feedback is welcome! It’s challenging for a writer to think in terms of graphic design, but I’m trying!

I have been enjoying the debates that have ensued after President Obama’s recommendation to cut law school down to two years. I agree with it personally, but only with the requirement of some form of mentorship or residency program added on. Actually, this practical skills requirement should be in place even with a three year schedule.

My concern is that if the law school length were cut down to only two years, more of the practical courses that do exist in the curriculum would have to be cut. If the bar exam isn’t changing any time soon, then students would still be hard pressed to take all the substantive bar courses and the practice areas they are interested in only in two years. That might push the practical skills, legal writing, law practice management courses, incubators, clinics, mock trial, law review and many other extras further to the side.

However, law schools could start looking at outside solutions to provide their students with this form of practical education. This is emerging in the form of certificate courses and supplemental programs for law students and young lawyers.

I announced a couple weeks ago that Richard Granat and I are now co-directors of the Center for Law Practice Technology. This is our intention: to provide law students and, at some point, private practitioners with the practical business and technology knowledge that they need to practice law in the 21st Century. It is essentially a certificate program. The students will graduate with proof for themselves and prospective employers that they have real-world business and technology skills to practice law or work in any other capacity in our profession.

Obviously, I believe this type of program is a good solution for law schools to consider – regardless of whether they ever go down to a two-year degree. It will help our law students and those currently practicing to get up to speed. I am excited to see what kind of innovation we can come up with in the way that this learning experience is delivered. We are currently working on course design for our project and thinking about user design and experience in how each course is laid out and taught both in lectures, prerecordings, podcasts, videos and other materials.

When I read the discussions around President Obama’s statement, I got very excited that maybe this time the proponents of this two-year concept would be taken more seriously.

To share some of our ideas about teaching this material, here is the online copy of the law review paper Richard and I co-authored. This provides a blueprint for a curriculum for such a program.