Legal Writing

Electronic Business Cards for Law Firms

You join a new law firm, and a few days later, they arrive: your brand new business cards. You open the box they came in, withdraw one card, and study it. And then you discover an error!

A mild case of excitement becomes a small disappointment.

This is an error that MUST BE FIXED!

You are not going to hand out business cards with your name misspelled. Who would?

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Attorneys should apply the same sort of reasoning to their firms’ web sites — those electronic billboards posted along the information super highway. And every attorney, I say, should examine his bio. An error there could be just as intolerable as an error on a business card.

Note: I am still tracking an attorney whose bio (for the past three years) claims he graduated from Hardvard. What does that say of the attorney?

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There are others who serve attorneys, and one of them should make sure his firm’s web site is working OK.

Here are a few things you (if you’re the one responsible for such things) should do regularly:

Check the site’s activity and error logs at least once a day

How many visitors did the site get yesterday? How does that compare to one year ago? Are the errors significant? Are they brand new, or have they been there forever?

Make sure Google is including the site in search results

Copy a line from something that was recently posted at the site. Ask Google to find it. If it does, fine. If not, you may have a serious problem on your hands. It just might be that someone’s hacked your firm’s web site.

Ouch!

Check the site’s latest content

Did someone just post something he should not have? A former staffer who still has administrative access? An associate who has no idea that you can’t just republish news articles?

Check the site’s oldest content

Are you advertising an event that happened a year ago? Why? Does that make a bit of sense? Oh . . . I see . . . you’re caught up in the SEO craze — publish anything and everything on the assumption that more traffic means better results.

Check other sites for your site’s content

Grab a string from some of your site’s new content and from some of its old content. Do a search on both. Does either string show up on some other web site? Which site, and why? Did you give permission?

There’s much more you can do to make sure your site is working OK, that it’s not been hacked in recent days, that others aren’t appropriating your content without your consent, that Google hasn’t stopped reporting results from your site, etc.

PS: If you don’t have the time or the wherewithal, consider commissioning a Webitor’s Audit of your firm’s site.

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An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
– Benjamin Franklin

Full post as published by Set in Style on July 06, 2010 (boomark / email).