Set in Style

If you’re responsible for the content at your firm’s web site, take my advice — do regular maintenance on the site, like it was a car that needed its oil checked every so often.

A web site — a site with lots and lots of content — is the sort of appliance that needs regular maintenance to keep doing it’s thing — attracting potential clients and leaving them with a favorable impression of your firm.

Let’s say a potential client is looking for some information on copyrights, and he discovers this page that looks to have just what he’s looking for.

He clicks this link on the page and gets nothing in return. Ditto when he clicks this link, or this one, or this one.

That’s not good, because this potential client isn’t likely to form a favorable impression of the firm, simply because the firm’s web site isn’t working right.

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Here’s what you should do if you’re responsible for a site with lots of content: establish a regular maintenance schedule that includes a daily, weekly, or monthly review of the site’s error logs.

If you don’t know how to do that, call me.

I can help you prevent potential clients from getting a bad impression of your firm just because everyone’s too busy to keep track of the web site — and that does happen.

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

Why do people attend seminars hosted by law firms?

To learn.

What is the purpose of these seminars?

To teach.

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I thought about that recently.

I was attending a seminar on employment law, and I was wondering why the attorneys were doing what they were doing: for the first hour of the seminar, they were breezing through cases related to employment law.

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Seems as if some law firms are going against the flow.

While companies around the world are following Apple’s lead in making everything simple and easy to use, law firms touting their deep and abiding commitment to excellence are, to some extent, treating their clients like machines rather than people.

When a company (or law firm) really cares about excellence, it shows; and it shows in very many things. If a customer has a question, the company that really cares responds promptly and in suitable style; that is, the answer isn’t just delivered quickly, it makes sense.

And the company that really cares doesn’t confront the layperson with highly technical information.

Here’s an example. If you download the QuickTime 7.2 User’s Guide from Apple.com, you get a file named QuickTime_7.2_User_Guide.pdf.

That makes perfect sense. The file name says the file contains the user guide for version 7.2 of QuickTime. That’s quite a convenience.

Now, download some files your firm’s web site. Download some client alerts, or newsletters, or press releases.

Do they have descriptive names like karvelas-on-US_steel-v-Shell.pdf

or meaningless names like 70c40efd-86ef-4d27-90b5-8d818b15f2fc.pdf?

If the latter, then your firm isn’t really serious about offering superior client service.

And neither are the firm’s leaders.

If they were truly serious about client service, if they had Steve Jobs’ passion for superior service, it would show; it would show in big things, and it would show in the little things*.

As it is, the managers of so many firms are far too busy to really worry about little things.

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* Sure, how you name the files you provide to clients and prospective clients seems trivial, but it’s important. Imagine someone doing research. He collects a folder full of files he wants to review. If the names of the files from Firm A are meaningful and the files from Firm B are meaningless, guess which firm the researcher likes best.

Let’s look at four web sites that use Flash to cycle through comps.

Click a comp to visit a site and watch the show:

Which sites were hard to read and which sites were easy to read?

Which made a good impression, and which seemed inferior?

Did you have enough time to read the copy before it cycled out?

How long did it take to figure out how to control the animation at each site?

Did you notice how the communications company used much less type than the law firms?

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Note: If you enjoyed this post, you should review a recent series I did on Type & Image.

This post is the first in a series on cutting verbiage in
everything from briefs to proposals.

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When it comes to proposals, attorneys need to do just the opposite of what many believe they should: they need to be brief — whether the competition is fierce, or one dark horse.

The shortest proposal has a distinct advantage over all others — most reviewers look at it first, whether they’re pressed for time, or not. Sometimes, it’s the only proposal they read.

Consider what Anne Lee Gibson — someone highly regarded for her ability to help law firms produce winning proposals — has to say in this article, “RFPs – When and how to compete”

“And remember that “the executive summary is the most important chapter in the proposal” because it’s the section most likely to be read. Think “less is more” throughout, because “when asked which proposals they read first, corporate counsel almost always say, ‘The shortest ones.’”

Given the great value in using as few words as necessary — as Robert Browning put it, “Less is more” — let’s devote the next several posts to brevity: how to whittle 50 words down to 20.

How does that sound?

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Here’s the second post.

Have you ever seen a photograph that got fuzzier the closer you looked at it?

If you use the Internet, you have.

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Let’s play Make Believe: Make believe you’re an attorney who charges clients between $500 and $800 per hour. You take considerable pride in your appearance. You wear expensive clothes that look brand new.

And you’re smart. Before you meet someone who might consider paying you $600 or $700 an hour, you tend to your appearance. If you’re about to make a first impression before a very attractive client, you want it to be terrific. Right?

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Forget it!

The very attractive, potential client already has some impression of you.

How is that possible?

Curious about you, this potential client does some research. Before he contacts you, he wants a good idea of who you are, what your experience is, and who you know.

So . . . he sees your firm’s home page, and that makes an impression. Then he looks at your bio page. He quickly focuses on your visage — a photo of you taken when the firm’s web site was revised a few years back.

And that — along with the info in your bio — makes his impression of you much more definite.

That’s how it works. (People form their initial impressions of others in the blink of an eye.)

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Let me ask you this (and remember, it’s still make believe) — does your photo resemble any of these? I mean, in terms of quality.

If so, the potential client’s early impression of you just took a deep turn for the worse, because it seems you don’t pay attention to detail, or don’t bother to fix obvious errors. He’s disturbed by the poor quality of what he sees, and he figures, “Any attorney who accepts such sloppy work can’t be worth $600 per hour.”

You might take great pride in your appearance, but your photo says you don’t. Just for that, you might not get the call; you might not get the opportunity to show the potential client just how sharp you are.

Don’t ever forget the potent power of first impressions.

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That’s it for now, and make believe is over.

Tune in next time, and learn how to make sure photos of your attorneys don’t portray them as fuzzy attorneys.
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This is part of a series titled Type & Image.

It’s about how you can set type on an image so it looks good and is very legible.

The whole discussion began with this comp I found at a law firm’s web site:

Since the firm’s site uses variable text on a variable image, we set a lofty goal for this series: how to set very legible captions to foreign-language films.

If you want to know how we came up with that as our goal, read the series. It starts right here.

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Let’s start out with this familiar image:

This is part of a series titled Type & Image.

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Some firms truly realize how important it is to look sharp — especially when the goal is to charge clients $600 per hour.

When it comes to setting type on a real image, Luce Forward is one of them.

Here’s just one example. It’s from the firm’s home page:

That’s pretty well set.

It would be nice to have more contrast between the type and the sky in the bottom line, but there are only four words in that line.

That’s considerably better than what’s at the home page of Nutter McClennen & Fish LLP:

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Luce Forward presents itself better than Nutter. It seems more professional and classier than Nutter, and that’s the first impression one gets.

If Luce is worth $600 per hour, then Nutter’s worth $225 — just by the looks of it, that is.

Yesterday,  we examined this comp (below) in which copy (foreground) was knocked out of a photo (background).

Obviously, the comp’s a dud: thin white type on a light yellow background is hard to read, and that’s not a very good way to market professional services (or much of anything). Better yet, it’s a terrible way to say what you do.

Compare that to this comp from the same site:

Much easier to read, is it not?

Before we get into it, let me ask you this — Did you look at some TV commercials like I said you should?

You really need to.

If you haven’t, then before you read any further, look at some commercials. Look for type on a real image, static or moving. Go do it now, before you read any further.

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