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October 11, 2010
Vancouver-based science-fiction writer William Gibson, has famously said: “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”Nowhere is this more accurate than with information about the law, lawyers and law firms. The time has gone when there were “family lawyers”, or only a few lawyers in a town. Now, 3 out of 4 people find their lawyers online and that number is growing. (Nielsen Research)
It is no longer enough just to have a website. Websites that are cold, static, boring, uninformative and don’t invite engagement, are obstacles, not help, to lawyers.
To have a successful website, lawyers must recognize where their potential clients are and put themselves and their services right there.
How to do this? Video on the website for starters. And then making sure the website and the video show up in the search engines.High quality video presents a lawyer and the firm in a professional and competent light. The lawyers can appear with the characteristics most likely to attract and engage clients. The client sees, hears and “meets” the lawyer. The client doesn’t have to book a tentative “get to know you” interview.
Legal services have traditionally been offered in response to an event. For example, an employee is fired. A company launches a take-over bid. It’s time to register a trademark or a patent.
And, of course, this still happens. The client meets one-on-one with a lawyer and is charged on the basis of time. But according to Richard Susskind who wrote The End of Lawyers (2008), tomorrow’s legal services will be characterized by proactive information. They will be pragmatic, useful, empowering and have a business focus.
So a good video for a lawyer would provide worthwhile and helpful information. For psychological reasons we don’t need to get into here, the more information you give, the more calls you will receive!
You can do a video by yourself. But you will need more time than you probably have to create a strategy, a script, rent equipment, arrange lighting, shooting, and sound. And then there is the editing: inserting transitions between scenes, color correcting, adding graphics, and music. And that’s just the beginning. Now that there is footage, it needs to be rendered to a quicktime or Flash file, compressed, uploaded. Finally, people have to find it. So there is SEO (search engine optimization), “tagging”, “keywords”, blogging, tweeting, and so on.
I recommend you begin by hiring a reputable video company that has a proven track record of producing high-quality professional videos that are unique and engaging. The video company may even showcase and blog about your video on its own website.
You could plan several videos for one shooting, which would be economical in the long run: an introductory video to your firm, educational videos on your area of focus, and videos that inform about process or procedure.
The legal profession has been slow to get going with this effective method of bringing clients to their sites and encouraging them to contact the lawyer.
Move with the times, use this new technology, and get your message out there. Visit www.videoinvancouver.com for more information.
- Colter
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