Caring About Your Clients
Client relationships used to be confined to in-person conversations and word-of-mouth referrals. A legal consumer showed up at your door with an issue, you solved it and then they told their friends and family about you. Rinse and repeat.
Today's legal consumer uses a variety of avenues to their disposal. According to the latest Thomson Reuters Legal Needs Survey, 1/3 of those surveyed learned about an attorney online. That means caring about your clients is about much more than face-to-face interactions.
Now, if you were selected to the Super Lawyers and Rising Stars list, you already have support for why you're an accomplished attorney and lawyer potential clients can trust. But you can't stop there. Here's one way you can make sure clients know you care and build real trust in a virtual world.
Embrace Online Reviews
The prevalence of ratings and reviews sites shows the impact of new age word-of-mouth. While legal consumers still trust the recommendations of their friends and family, the importance of strangers' views on an attorney's ability has increased.
According to the Legal Needs Survey, 68 percent of those surveyed said the importance of reviews from former clients were important or very important. In addition, 19 percent thought recommendations from others was the most important factor when choosing an attorney.
The way you treat your clients is crucial to getting more cases and improving your standing offline, but it's also critical to your online reputation. So, pay attention to the online chatter about your firm and don't be afraid to ask for reviews from your clients.
Here's one way to do it:
- Ask the client by name for a review and include case specific information so they know it's not a templated request.
- Provide the client with information about how the review process will help others decide about your firm.
- Request reasons the client hired you or what could help others pick an attorney.
Make sure not to tell clients what to say about you in their review and don't offer any kind of compensation or service for the recommendation. That's either illegal, or at the very least dishonest. Also, verify with your bar association that you can ask for reviews in your area.
Looking to better build trust with your clients? Download the playbook.
Take Advantage of Super Lawyers' Cyber Week Sale
It's important for you as an attorney to target your advertising to reach the right clients at the right time. One of the easiest ways to get in front of your audience as a selectee is with a Super Lawyers Premium Online Attorney Profile.
The increased exposure can help you bring in more cases and here is how one listee did it.
For Claudia Lagos, a four-time Super Lawyers Rising Stars selectee at Scully & Lagos who specializes in criminal defense and represents clients in Boston and throughout Massachusetts, it's about reaching quality clients that fit a niche criminal defense practice.
That's why she recently invested in a Premium Online Attorney Profile on SuperLawyers.com and targeted directory ads to raise brand awareness around specific criminal defense issues that her desired clients face.
"Super Lawyers has a really good reputation and clients care about you being on the list," Lagos said. "Clients see it as meaning I've already been vetted. They can trust that I'm a good attorney."
And it works. She's gained greater visibility among those searching for a female criminal defense attorney in the Boston area. Lagos has experienced 71 clicks-to-call or email on her directory advertisements and a 67 percent increase in views of her Super Lawyers profile in the last year. In addition, the firm overall received 120 contacts and 67 law firm profile visits during the same time frame.
Lagos isn't the only one reaping the benefits of the SuperLawyers.com directory. Each month, 600,000 searches are conducted on the directory and profiles are viewed 800,000 times.
Capitalizing on the SuperLawyers.com directory is the fastest way to leverage your accolades and reach potential clients. And with Super Lawyers running a Cyber Week sale, now is the time for Super Lawyers and Rising Stars selectees to upgrade their online presence. Learn more and invest in your directory presence today.
From the Vault -- "The Mississippi Advocate"
Microsoft. 3M. Progressive Insurance. Wayne Drinkwater's corporate clients--which he tends to defend in multimillion-dollar lawsuits--are household names. But the partner with Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in Jackson, Mississippi, may be best known for the long string of cases he's tried with the goal of enacting change in the public interest. "I think that one of a lawyer's obligations is not simply to do well, but to do good," he told us in the 2007 edition of Mid-South Super Lawyers Magazine.
An excerpt:
One of Drinkwater's most important cases changed Mississippi law and was the impetus for reform in other states as well. He represented Joe Hogan, who had applied to Mississippi University for Women's nursing school but was denied admission because of his sex. The case went to the Supreme Court in 1982, which invalidated single-sex higher education. "My old boss, Chief Justice Burger, voted against us, which was predictable," Drinkwater says. "The case was a lot of fun. Interestingly, my wife had gone to school at MUW, and while I was working on the case we'd get letters from them asking her to contribute to a defense fund for the university."
In another case, this one in the late 1980s, Drinkwater represented the Mississippi Ethics Commission against state legislators. "At the time, there were a large number of public officials who had contracts with the state as schoolteachers or other state workers, and they were voting on their own salaries and authorizing their own contracts," he recalls. "It was not a case of actual corruption, but one of the appearance of impropriety. The Mississippi Supreme Court agreed with us, and I think it had a good effect on the state. People shouldn't be voting in their own self-interest."
At the moment, Drinkwater is deep into a class action suit against the Mississippi Department of Human Services, representing several thousand abused and neglected children. He took on the case after a colleague in New York who was investigating the situation for a national organization called and asked if he'd be interested. "I looked into it and decided it was something we needed to address," Drinkwater says. "Our claim is that the agency isn't giving the kids adequate treatment or housing or foster care. What we've learned is that when the system takes a young kid and then doesn't treat him right, he graduates from the foster system right into a penitentiary. We want these children to grow up to be productive members of society instead."
After three years of litigation, the state finally threw in the towel and agreed not to contest the constitutional violations. "That was a major battle," he says. "Now we're going to try to fashion a remedy for the kids, which will involve the state contributing more money, more case workers, better treatment and better foster care." All the work is pro bono, of course: "These kids don't have any money."
Read the rest of the article on SuperLawyers.com and take a look at the most recent issue of Mid-South Super Lawyers Magazine.
Hard labor and perseverance are nothing new for the man still known as "Willie James" in his hometown of Frierson, La., which had 200 residents, one school for grades 1-12, and a reputation for hard work--children were expected to work in the afternoon. Singleton's job was picking cotton. "I told my God and a few faithful people," he recalls, "that if He ever let me get out of this cotton patch, I'd never be back." He spent high school summer breaks on construction sites with his uncle in Houston, earning $1.25 an hour pouring sewer and water lines. The 5-foot-8-inch teenager was so skinny he had to balance himself carrying two heavy, five-gallon buckets of wet cement. "If I weighed 100 pounds," he recalls, "I had to be soaked."