There is no denying it; times are changing. The days of scrolling through a rolodex or navigating the yellow pages to find a law practice are in the distant past. For a potential client today, looking for an attorney with a specific area of expertise to help them with their case is as easy as typing a few characters into Google Search. Because of the ease in finding available information online, it’s now your responsibility to develop a strong online presence for your practice. Adding online legal services to supplement your existing practice may be one of the most essential growth strategies today.

The challenge lies not in making your practice’s resources available online, but in making them stand out among the competition and accessible to prospects. Today, anything can be done online; therefore, clients expect to see resolutions for their legal troubles available there as well. Legal practices are just starting to make their transition to be more digitally present. If you want to get ahead of the competition, you should evaluate your practice’s online presence here!

A couple of years ago, if it were 7:00 PM and a client needed to find a practice to help them with an issue, they would likely have to wait twelve hours before being able to call someone and find a solution. Today, because most industries are entirely accessible online, there lies an expectation that legal services should be as well. You want to make sure your marketing is evolving with the times, and that you are establishing yourself as a leading online presence before the competition. There are a couple of basic strategies that can help start this movement.

The first and foremost strategy regards availability. You want the solutions your practice offers to be as accessible as possible. Today, merely having a ‘Contact Us’ page is not enough to increase top-of-the-funnel leads. People are lazy and want solutions as quickly and as easily as possible. The first step to making your practice more available is to have call-to-action (CTA) buttons like, ‘request a consultation,’ throughout your website. Clients want to feel as though you are directly on the other side of the screen. Having call-to-action buttons that direct clients to forms which then ultimately land in your inbox, grants prospects the sensation that they are being looked at and taken care of before you even know they submitted the form. Typically, clients would have to wait to call you, hope you answer, and then perform several follow-ups to begin their auditing process. The idea of the “online lawyer” is supposed to counteract this image and embody speed, efficiency, and availability, and CTAs enable you to be just that.

Next, to be the ideal online lawyer today, you must have as much relevant information to your field of expertise on your website as possible. This is essential to building your brand and reputation in the industry. Writing blogs, posting case studies, and discussing relevant news in the industry all help establish your online firm as a thought leader in the industry.

For example, if a client was looking for assistance on a case surrounding fair representation in a labor relations board, they want to find practices that have done this type of work recently. They also want to see information that discusses specific parameters of these cases in more depth. Posting case studies and blogs that delve into these types of examples and procedures will build up your brand and have clients begging for your assistance. Legal content marketing like this is crucial for your firm’s success.

Finally, you want to make sure you are using social media productively. Now, many lawyers want to be exempt from a “social media circus,” but the absence of law firms’ social media is precisely the reason why you should be on it. Many existing social media platforms are essential in order to stay top of mind with prospects and ahead of the competition.

Two examples of these valuable social networks are LinkedIn and Twitter. Sharing your relevant content with interested audiences on these platforms can increase your web traffic. If you are using social media, but can’t understand the effect it has on your firm there are metrics, such as the number of engagements or click throughs, that can help you evaluate the effectiveness. It’s not only essential to have a presence on social media, but it’s also important to continually assess metrics and the efficiency behind it all in order to gather insights and inform marketing investments.

These are merely a few tactics that can help you become a savvy and effective modern lawyer. No matter what you do, you want to keep up with the evolving times and embody the ideal online lawyer, harnessing speed, efficiency, and availability.