Attorney referral or lead services

Attorney/Client lead and referral services claim that they take away the labor, analysis, confusion, and qualification of pay per click campaigns. A law firm pays the service and the service provides the law firm with leads it acquires through pay per click campaigns or organic capture.
In investigating a few of these services, including AttorneySync, LegalMatch, and LegalConnection, I found some good and not some good features.

All three did a good job of showing up on pay per click campaigns.

Legal Match and Legal Connection have a very detailed and long intake form which is good and bad. It is good that any referral or lead that gets to you has a lot of information and is more qualified than a typical web inquiry. It is bad that many potential clients will not have the patience to fill out the form.

The AttorneySync form was more intuitive and less lengthy than LegalMatch and LegalConnection. As you can imagine this is good and bad as I described before.

Once the form is filled, LegalMatch informs the user that an appropriate attorney will be in contact. AttorneySync actually shows the attorney that has meets the practice and location criteria. Legal Connection shows up to 3 possible attorneys that meet the criteria. Which one of these is better? I think all three have their merits.

Ok, so do I like the idea of this lead/referral service? I'll give my generic answer of "it depends". The upside is that these services take the grunt work out of SEO and Pay Per Click. These services have the ability to ratchet up their ad campaign to get your firm a certain amount of leads. These firms do all the research and heavy lifting for the right keywords. The downside is the uncertainty of the quality of the leads. No matter how long an intake form is, the lead may not be what the you are looking for. I especially hear this with Real Estate lawyers who complain they receive far too many Landlord/Tenant leads. DUI/DWI inquiries tend to be a lot more cut and dry. Either the potential lead was arrested for DUI or not.

So should you try one of these services? I would say giving one a shot would not be a bad idea as a compliment to your Law Firm website and Blawg (lawyer blog). You also need the time and the ability to respond quickly to one of these potential leads as these potential clients are in the market and want immediate feedback. I would also be wary to accept any promises of great leads and would be hesitant to commit to a long term contract.

Also, consult your state bar association on the ethics of these services. Some state rules are strict about referral services.

AttorneySync
LegalMatch
LegalConnection

Google Pay Per Click - Adwords

In my previous post I mentioned a great, easy, and effective way to get exposure and market your law practice on the web.
I would now like to give my brief take on using pay per click for law firms large and small.
If you don't know what pay per click is, do a search on Google, Yahoo, or MSN and you can see "Sponsored Results" typically on the very top of the search results page and on the right side of the page. How do you think those results appear there? Advertisers pay Google for their ad to appear when certain search terms are used. The interesting thing, is that advertisers pay only when their particular ad is clicked on, taking the searcher to a desired website or landing page. Advertisers bid for clicks on certain key words such as "car accident" or "asbestos". The amount that is bid is solely up to the advertiser (lawyer/law firm). The advertiser with the highest bid, will appear first in the sponsored results. The second highest bidder will appear second and so on.
On the surface this may seem to be a quick and easy to generate business. My advice, do a lot of investigation before you start. Here are some suggestions/comments before you jump into pay per click:
1. Do you have enough time to research pay per click in general, read the tutorials (Google provides good information at www.google.com/adwords)
2. Do you have the time to be able to bid, monitor, and adjust your pay per click strategy? I think that you should have to at least commit a few minutes per day to review your bid status.
3. Do you have a way to measure your results? I recommend a separate landing page on your website for you ad campaign. This allows you to monitor and measure the results of your sponsored links.
4. Could you be spending more time getting more business from the web by other means? Blog, newsletter, articles.

In theory, pay per click is great for a law practice, especially in the consumer space (family, personal injury, criminal, wills & estates, probate, immigration etc..). If business is slow, ratchet up your pay per click campaign for that month. If business is good, then put the brakes on the campaign.

For everything, the "devil is in the details". I believe a pay per click strategy can help compliment your other marketing avenues, if you do it right.