Law Firm Web Site Awards
This article describes a recent competition between law firm Web sites that resulted in a tie between Womble Carlyle and Helms Mulliss.
The judges weren’t overly impressed with what they saw. Said one, “I feel like I woke up from a dream where I’ve been walking on dry, arid soil for about 50 years, and I find myself on a Ford Taurus sales lot. When part of your business success is dependent on differentiating yourself in a busy, cluttered marketplace, you’ve got to stand out on a limb and not look like everyone else.”
The other judge said, “it was hard to miss the fact that a large portion of the sites were created by one firm — a vendor that specializes in building sites for law firms. Happily, there were firms that entered the competition that got it. These sites were good sites, but they stood out all the more when contrasted with their template-bound competition.”
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The latest issue of Law Firm Inc. has an excellent article about law firm marketing written by Norm Rubenstein. In it, he says, “Indeed, the lack of differentiation is the common plight of the majority of the Am Law 200.”
Amen!
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Weird: Kilpatrick Stockton just issued this press release announcing that it came in third in this year’s Internet Marketing Attorney law firm Web site awards.
What’s weird is that the link to that press release results in a Page Not Found error.
Heck! As of this writing, all of the links from the site’s News and Events page to the firm’s Featured Press Releases yield Page Not Found errors.
This link works, but it reveals another problem (an all-too-common problem): few of the firm’s press releases indicate the year they were published.
Consider this press release. Was it published last year, or the year before, or five years ago, or ten years ago?
How about this press release?
30 April 2007 at 13:31
As a judge of this Web site competition, it was it was clear that there was a LOT of room for firm marketers to step in and start making a difference. The firms that excelled not only created a positive and differentiated experience, but they also took other steps like creating brief and meaningful content, and a focus on people as their market. I believe we awarded those that understood the importance of the Web as a communications medium–not just an obligatory marketing tool.