Legal websites: a Scots quair

“QUAIR” – can be defined literally as a booklet but in reality usually a collection of jottings or musings. That’s appropriate as this is a relatively personal journey through the highways and byways of the World Wide Web as it applies to Scots law and its lawyers.

A legal website could be almost anything, from a series of links collated by an LLB student for their own amusement, right through to a hard core property sales site, designed to fight off competition in today’s cut-throat environment.

I’ve chosen to split legal sites into two, starting with sites set up by firms themselves and moving on to sites benefiting firms.

So first of all, why should a firm set up a legal site?

Why indeed, do websites exist at all – the main reason is probably rooted in the dim and distant past of the web.

The internet was never designed – it’s grown in an organic way, fuelled by its potential to support commerce, yet guided by the demands of millions of private users. It took the radio 37 years to reel in an audience of 20 million, television managed the same in 20 years but the web snapped up the same number of active users in just three years. It’s a medium for communication. Since its beginnings, people offered freely the information that they had, in exchange for being able to see other information. The main reason for “being on the net” is so that others can see you.

The easiest way to see which firms have stuck their head above the e-parapet is to look at a site that lists them “all”. No single site will ever be able to accomplish this task but the one that comes closest is probably Delia Venables’ Gateway site (www.venables.co.uk). For those of you that don’t know the name, Delia is an IT consultant working with law firms who latched on to the usefulness of the net at an early stage. Her site is a cornucopia of all things e-legal, including links to primary sources, as well as a comprehensive listing of law firms – UK wide.

There’s just so much out there that to be noticed, you have to be special.

So, what makes an impact – for a law firm the most important judge of what’s good or bad is the firm’s target audience.

At this point, I defer to the survey generated by the LRG (Legal Research Group – www.legal-research-group.co.uk). This was produced by canvassing consumers of legal services from companies ranging in size from less than 10 to 1000+ staff – these respondents were asked to grade and mark law firm websites (from the legal 500) based on the criteria of appearance; structure; usability and content.

The survey has appeared in a variety of publications and some of its findings are quite amazing.

Eventually, 420 sites were tested (the implication being that 80 sites were so obscure that they couldn’t be found!) and of those, 104 had to be excluded as for a variety of reasons, ranging from “under construction” to “server error” they could not be tested.

This beggars belief – it’s rather like spending thousands or tens of thousands of pounds designing and producing a brochure and forgetting to send it out or losing the key to the stores cupboard where they’re kept.

That’s simply based on the assumption that a simple “here we are” site (e.g. brochureware) is enough – not so – the respondents were looking for more than just a presence on the web – here’s what the testers were looking for:

Contact information

You would think that this is glaringly obvious - even the most discreet and tasteful business card will provide contact details, not so some of the target websites – 2% (at least six of the 320 working sites plus a proportion of the others….) had no discernible telephone number so that even if the enquirer found the solution to their problem there and then, they’d have to phone Directory Enquiries (or use Yell.com) or send a letter, or more likely pass on to someone else.

The plot thickens as we discover that (perhaps not surprisingly), 5% had no fax number and 20% didn’t bother with an e-mail address – on the basis that someone’s using an electronic medium to look at a website, is it just me or is it generally obvious to assume that the same person might be keen to make contact in the same way – there and then?

A lesser gulf yawned between the desire for direct phone numbers or contact details for partners and senior staff and its fulfilment, as most sites seemed to provide this.

Almost half of the sites managed to provide information on how to find the firm’s premises.

Fee Information

One of the things that all the respondents agreed on was the desirability of fee information, provided by only 7% of the sites tested.

Partner Information

All the participants in the trial wanted to see signs of relevant experience – this is true not just for the UK but also in a global context.

It so happens that the Greenfield / Belser consultancy in the US (www.greenfieldbelser.com) have also conducted a similar survey (in their case interviewing 130 in-house lawyers who regularly instructed outside counsel) which highlights astonishingly similar findings.

In the US context, 70% of the interviewees actively trawled law firm sites looking for appropriate firms to instruct. As far as they were concerned, the prime factor is evidence of experience, gleaned from staff cv’s and case studies.

This is quite logical – the manifestation of the provision of legal services will generally result in some form of public outcome – let prospective clients know what you’ve done and how important it is – not just in the context of a news section, but cross linked back to the relevant individuals as this is where clients tend to look first.

Search Engine

Following on from this, it’s no surprise that on both sides of the Atlantic, the prospective client wants to see a search engine so that they can look for material relevant to their problem or situation without having to dredge through the whole site.

Updates

Well formatter updates may involve a lot of self-discipline to organise but will be well appreciated.

In fact, US seekers of counsel (well, at least 75% of them) were willing to pay!

Prospective UK clients were also keen to see case tracking and update based services, however there was a divergence in that in the UK we seem to be interested in general news, whereas in the US they don’t give a toss whether or not the leading light in the X department has just run a marathon/scaled something.

Unwanted

There seems to be a general loathing of spurious hi-res graphics and flash animation sequences. Does a 360° virtual waltz through of your reception area really say anything of value beyond “someone suckered us into accepting this as a design statement”.

Let’s just call this the 8-second rule, neglected by Boo.com at their peril. Boo’s website was a triumph of technology, replete with dazzling effects and must have looked stunning when presented to them by their design team.

Boo started up when the average PC was a lot less powerful than now and most of its prospective users were connected via a miserable dial-up link, rather than having the benefit of being able to view the website directly on its server via a high bandwidth network. As a result, it was quicker to hop on a bus, wait for a train or even go hunting for a parking space and visit a shop, rather than waiting for retail pages to download. Users stayed away in droves.

Even simple web page design tools allow you to check the download time for your masterpiece and any website that you commission should always be tested under less than ideal circumstances.

Perceived size seems to matter with a URL like www.lawfirmname.com rating higher than www.lawfirmname.co.uk, not forgetting to keep up to date with new domains such as .biz. Extra marks were earned for direct accessibility through ownership of all the most obvious URLs as many users prefer to guess the URL and work from there, rather than hunting by using a search engine. It’s vitally important to maintain the firm’s virtual profile by ensuring that all relevant keywords and metatags have been disseminated as widely as possible. In this way, someone looking for “a jolly good firm that can handle ADR work” isn’t going to find your firm even if this is your specialist field if the only keywords that were used come from the firm’s name.

I realise that all of this may seem blindingly obvious but it would appear to have escaped the notice of many of us.

Apart from anything else, capturing a goodly range of URLs e.g. not just myfirmname.com, but also willsagogo.com, commercial-conveyancers-r-us.com, litigate_to_the_death.com and so forth), indicates a decent working knowledge of the virtual world and how e-commerce operates. Not a bad idea if this happens to be a field of expertise that a firm professes experience in.  

The crunch comes in the guise of a general conclusion (from the respondents / interviewees) running along the lines of “if they can’t run a decent website, I’ll find a firm that can”.

The top ten from the LRG survey are as follows:

Irwin Mitchell www.imonline.co.uk

Linklaters www.linklaters.com

Berwin Leighton Paisner www.berwinleighton.com

Fox Williams www.foxwilliams.co.uk

Burges Salmon www.burges-salmon.co.uk

Clarke Wilmott & Clarke www.cw-c.co.uk

Olswang www.olswang.com

Sidley & Austin www.sidley.com

Weil Gotshal & Manges www.weil.com

The top Scots firm in the rankings (apart from DLA (Scotland) and Masons) was Iain Smith & Co., coming in at a creditable 44.

www.iainsmith.com

That’s quite appropriate as many of you may recall the article in the March edition of the Journal (p.40) where one of the firm’s partners wrote about the sterility of brochureware.

It’s interesting to have a look at these sites and see where the similarities are. I’ve skimmed through most of them (not exhaustively as there’s only so many hours in the day) and accessibility and consistency seem to be the key defining characteristics. Run a search on any of these sites and you’re likely to find items of relevance that are linked to other relevant items. In this way, a search for “dotcom start-up” might lead me to some articles, as well as staff biographies. If I look at any of those items, I’m liable to find that there are tempting juicy links to other potential areas of interest, leading me through the site from one nugget to another.

You’ll remember that the web is a thin tissue of standards, the most definitive of which is HTML or hypertext mark up language which provides the ability to link one piece of information to another. It’s the perfect vehicle for cross referencing and should be used liberally.

This is in stark contract to sites where all this information may exist but it’s carefully stacked in water tight compartments: the press articles are divorced from their dramatis personae; if I see something that triggers a burning desire to get in touch, I have to navigate my way through a series of menus to get to a general info@myfirmname.com e-mail address

Comparisons

1 Document Collaboration

Law firms generate documents, so that it seems to make sense to let clients have access to them whenever they want.

The basic idea is to provide access to a logically organised set of materials, together with providing the capability to discuss those materials, either using discussion threads or some other mechanism to allow clients to get involved in, say, the ongoing genesis of a draft. As everyone seems to be terribly mobile these days, the ability for a client to access the latest version of a draft from wherever is becoming increasingly important as a differentiator between one firm and another.

Collaboration sites used to be the province of stratospheric levels of IT spend, but now it’s possible to take an off-the-shelf product like iManage or even Microsoft’s Sharepoint and with a modicum of cash and expertise, hey presto, here’s my online collaboration suite…

Going a little bit further adds a whole new dimension in usability and usefulness – Linklater’s client access module adds layers of meta-data so that I don’t just have the ability to view a document or find out who drafted it, I’m shown a photo of the culprit and given their contact details – as well as those for their secretary.

This isn’t rocket science at the bleeding edge, merely a careful repackaging of data that’s lying around on the office systems, designed to meet client needs.

2 Know How

“State of the art” doesn’t have to be dangerously high tech - thoughtful and creative count for just as much. In the same way, sites like elexica.com and Blue Flag take existing information and repackage them in an innovative fashion. Reading through turgid documentation isn’t every client’s cup of tea, but sweeten it by turning a descriptive document into a checklist (possibly going the extra mile to make it an interactive flow chart) and now you’ve got something with a much broader appear, guaranteed to make friends.

In the screen shot on the previous page, (an example from Blue Flag, reproduced with the kind permission of Linklaters), data on two separate jurisdictions is displayed simultaneously, presumably based on the proposition that users will want to compare a known scenario against an unknown one. This would, of course, be much more difficult if the information existed simply as monolithic articles that had to be teased out by the reader.

The final example shows an alternative style (once again from Blue Flag) where information is repackaged as an interactive flow chart, leading the user through complex information based on their responses.

3 Stealth Law

Firms can capture a wider audience and at the same time demonstrate a degree of sophistication by cross branding – in this way, the Elexica site is not overtly Simmons & Simmons, and Dotcomstartup doesn’t scream Harper Macleod.

This form of creative branding can be used to present a single entity in a new light that need not reflect the entity’s “traditional” image. It also comes over as a feeling of brightness and being in tune with the new media, as well as providing something shorter and more memorable to type in – e.g. mayhem.com as opposed to run_grabbit_and-Sue.co.uk. This needs to be handled sympathetically but with care can allow a specialist to be noticed more easily by a target audience.

4 Sources

This is where we came in…

Delia Venables’ site is an excellent starting point. Whenever you find a site that is useful, remember to add it to the “Favorites” menu in your Browser.

Former solicitor John Gailey heads a multi-disciplinary team at Pilgrim Systems, responsible for the commercial development of case management software.