Lawyers, You Already Give That Answer for Free

The first fifteen minutes of a first meeting at a law firm is a speech.

She sits down with a folder in her lap and apologizes twice for the state of it before you’ve said anything at all. Then you start where you always start.

What happens first, what happens after that, how long each stage takes, what it costs, and when the money is actually due.

You’ve delivered it enough times now that you can tell which sentence she needed by watching her shoulders come down an inch.

Somewhere in the middle you turn the legal pad sideways and draw the timeline. Same drawing, same three boxes, same little arrow off the side for the part that never runs to schedule.

By now you could perform the whole thing from a dead sleep, including the pause you leave after the paragraph about disbursements, because you worked out years ago that people need a second to themselves right there.

You will do it again this week, probably twice, and neither of those people will pay you a cent for it.

Have I got that about right? I’ve sat in enough waiting rooms to think so.

Hold onto that, because 51.9% of the law firm sites I audited publish a blog, 3 of 47 among the trades I count, and hardly any of them have that speech anywhere on them.

I got to that number the long way, so let me walk you through it first.

The order I run it in

I audit websites in the same order every single time. The order isn’t clever and I didn’t design it, it’s the one I learned in, and changing it is how I start missing things.

Does a site exist, and does it open. Then the phone.

Then the code nobody reads. Then the writing. Then the last inch of the page.

Law firms went through that run this summer, 3,849 businesses in the sample across 24 markets, which ate the better part of two weeks and left me with opinions I didn’t have in June.

Two of those stops stopped me, and neither was where I’d have put my money beforehand.

The first three, quickly

Sites exist here, mostly, and they open when I ask them to.

The phone part was fine. Your trade builds pages that behave on a small screen and arrive quickly enough that I have nothing entertaining to say about either one, which isn’t a sentence I get to write about a profession very often.

The code was ordinary. Tags in, tags out, nothing I’d have picked up a telephone about.

Would your own site have survived those three stops? Probably, and a check nearly everyone passes has never told me much about anybody.

So I arrived at the fourth stop with a bet already placed. A profession that bills in six minute increments, publishing careful explanations for nothing, on a page any stranger can read without ever becoming a client? Come on.

Stop one: the writing

The blog number, then. I checked it twice, because a trade finishing that high on writing is the kind of result I’ve been wrong about before. It came back identical both times.

Most trades I audit treat writing as the job they will get around to in January, and 37% of small business sites publish anything at all. So what makes your lot different?

Two things, I think, and the first is that you can’t reach for the excuse everybody else reaches for.

Every other trade gives me the same sentence when I ask why they don’t write. I’m not a writer. You write for a living, in a register considerably more demanding than a web page will ever ask of you, and you know that better than I do.

The second is that your questions repeat. The same twelve, all year, from strangers who have never met one another and each arrive convinced their situation is unusual.

What happens to the house. How long it takes. Whether she has to stand up in a courtroom. What it costs when the other side digs in.

Every one of those has an answer you could give in your sleep, and you’ve probably given three of them since Monday. When did you last stop and count?

What my check can’t see

My check sees a page with dated articles on it. It can’t see who wrote them.

One afternoon I opened the same article about what to do after a car accident on three different firms’ websites, with the same subheadings in the same order and the same photograph of a wet road at night sitting above them.

A company somewhere sells that by the month, and my check counts every copy of it as a yes.

Buying another firm’s article and dropping a bought photograph above it are two of the habits I complain about hardest when small businesses blog, and your trade pays a premium for both of them.

The purchased version answers a question nobody asked, in a voice nobody has, written by a person who has never stood in your courthouse or met a single client of yours. Your speech answers the exact question she’s sitting there with tonight, in the voice she will hear on the telephone tomorrow morning.

Which of those two would you rather she found at eleven at night?

Stop two: the last inch

I expected the same shrug at the bottom of the page, and I didn’t get it.

38.1% of these homepages carry a contact form, where 28% do across everything I audit, and a profession this careful about who it agrees to talk to has no business finishing that high.

So the firms are writing, and the firms are reachable. Where the arrangement falls apart is the line in between, and it’s one line.

A call to action is the sentence at the end of an article that names the next step and asks her to take it, and writing one takes about a minute. The person who should write it is whoever answers your telephone, because she already knows what a caller says next, word for word, in the order they always say it.

Most of the articles I read that week simply stopped. Text, then footer, then nothing whatsoever for the woman who had just read the entire thing on her sofa with her shoes still on.

A moving company owner emailed me to take his blog down after forty posts brought him nothing, and the part that needed deleting was never the writing.

You would never end a consultation that way. You would never let her put her coat back on and walk out of the office without telling her what happens next, so why is a web page allowed to?

What I’d do with the speech

Give the speech into your phone on the drive home tomorrow. Not written, spoken, because your spoken voice is better than your written one and we’ve both known that for years.

Who types things in your office? Start there.

Have it typed up by whoever does it. Cut it into the twelve questions. Publish one a month, in the order that people actually ask them.

That recording is the first thing I ask for now when a firm hands me a website to work on, before anyone designs a single page, because almost everything worth putting on the site is already sitting in it.

A solar installer did that with his own kitchen table answers, and the appointments that came afterwards were shorter, because the reading had already happened.

Then put one line at the bottom of each article asking her to call, with the number written into the sentence instead of hiding down in the footer.

The footer is where this trade’s links go to die anyway. I clicked every one of them on a two partner homepage last spring and the only one that led anywhere else was the map.

Watch her next time

Next time you’re four minutes into the speech, watch her face.

There is a sentence in the middle of it where she stops nodding politely and starts properly listening. It’s a different sentence for different people, but you already know the two or three that do it most often.

Write those ones down after she leaves. You’ve got a year of articles sitting in your desk drawer, and you’ve been handing them out one frightened person at a time.

Would you rather carry on doing it that way, or say the thing once and let it answer at eleven at night while you’re asleep?