If your firm has a law website, having a way to instantly communicate with visitors can increase your firm’s intake of new clients.

Live chat software is a smart solution when it comes to your online marketing and advertising efforts. When a visitor engages with your live chat, you can quickly and immediately address their questions or schedule a consultation.

Before going on about the benefits live chat provides a law firm’s website, there are ethical issues to consider. While you may be eager to use clever marketing techniques to convert visitors into your next client, the American Bar Association has outlined some ethical rules for lawyer’s websites.

With an understanding of what you can and cannot do, the following five points will review the top benefits of using live chat.

Easy to Get Started

Worried that installing live chat on your law firm’s website will require technical knowledge?

Many live chat services can get their software running on your website in just a few clicks. Whether you have computer knowledge or not, once live chat is installed on your website, the next thing to do is to get ready for visitors to your website.

When a visitor arrives at your website, they will receive a notification that you (or qualified staff) is standing by to offer assistance. If the visitor engages with the live chat messenger, you will be immediately notified and a live chat session can begin.

All live chat services offer varying packages and features. Some can provide pre-scripted bots which allow you to direct visitors using prompted questions, toward providing their contact information.

Establish Trust and a Good First Impression

In a lawyer’s line of work, you know that most people do not enjoy the legal process. When it comes to finding a lawyer for their situation, people want to alleviate their problems and quickly as possible.

Live chat allows you to set a good impression the moment a prospective client lands on your website. You can quickly engage in a conversation and build trust by addressing their needs. You can respond to visitors specific needs and prepare them for intake.

When your prospective clients end the live chat session, they will feel listened to and relieved. This is a much better alternative to filling out contact forms and waiting anxiously for your phone call.

Differentiate Your Legal Services

Law firms are constantly searching for new ways to differentiate themselves from their competition. With live chat, law firms can provide a 24/7 reception and continue to collect leads for prospective clients after hours.

In certain situations that require legal services, prospective clients are often enduring emotional situations and want immediate assistance. Those recovering from a personal injury, going through a divorce, or on the brink of bankruptcy are looking for a solution as soon as possible.

Imagine being frustrated, sad, or extraordinarily angry, if you can’t find what you’re looking for on a website within a few seconds, you’ll likely go to another lawyer’s website with the solution.

Having live chat on your website is a sure way to address the immediacy and urgency of your prospective client’s situation.

Reduce Intake Time

In case you find yourself preoccupied with client’s cases and your staff is busy with administrative tasks, you can still use live chat to continue intaking.

Some live chat companies offer a unique service allowing you to have 24/7 live chat on a per-lead-basis. This means that whenever a visitor comes to your website, uses the live chat, and provide their contact information (i.e. e-mail, phone number, etc.), you pay the live chat company.

This is both time efficient and cost-effective as you won’t have to hire another receptionist or staff to handle inquiries at odd hours. Often, people are too preoccupied during typical work hours to contact your office. Live chat allows you to collect leads even after you have closed the office.

Another beneficial feature is that should the live chat provide a lead or begin intaking a client, you can receive an immediate notification. This allows you to respond either by email or phone call to that prospective client following their inquiry to your law firm.

Increased ROI and Conversion Rates

This is likely to be the most valued part of any live chat software. When you have a successful website with traffic coming in, converting them into clients is the next thing to do.

All that money you invested in web design, hosting and creative advertisements would be for nothing if visitors weren’t becoming your client. Live chat has a proven ability to increase conversion rates on websites.

Obtaining answers to problems is a high priority for people browsing online. Instead of wasting time search through help forums, FAQs, or irrelevant articles, live chat solves problems quickly.

In addition, live chat providers offer fair pricing and may even go so far as to guarantee an increase in conversions or your money back. Having this kind of promise allows your website to focus on what matters most: finding new clients.

Final Thoughts

If you’re using Facebook Ads or Google Adwords to promote your law firm the live chat icon on your website can improve your ROI. However, the American Bar Association (ABA) has stated a few rules about using live chats on a law firm’s website. To review these ethical rules, please see ABA Rules for Websites and Advertising.

There are some who have it and some who don’t. Having the right set of skills of a lawyer can lead a career of abundance and great success. If you’re looking to brush up your skills, here’s a list of 9 skills to become a better lawyer.

1. Strong Communication Skills

Lawyers must have strong oral communication skills and written communication skills to accurately relay critical legal information. As well, a significant portion of a lawyer’s job is to create strong and convincing arguments which are presented in the courtroom. Judges and juries all have their own opinions, beliefs, and backgrounds so a lawyer’s ability must be able to reach out to all of them and convince accordingly.

In addition, good listening skills are found in a successful lawyer. Every client has their own version of their situation. Lawyers must listen carefully to the details and analyze what their clients need and how to take action.

2. People Skills

Lawyers are in constant contact with people with is why people skills are required. The entire system of law has engagement with people. Judges, clerks, senior partners, barristers, and other legal workers are just some of the people lawyers will encounter on a daily basis. Being able to be relatable, polite, respectful and interesting some skills to consider.

If this is a skill lacking in a lawyer, it can lead to some very nasty situations with clients seeking retribution for their perceived mistreatment. Regardless of how good a lawyer may be at formulating arguments and winning cases, maintaining good relationship develops a deeper sense of professionalism

3. Time Management Skills

Lawyer’s have a heavy workload and can experience demanding deadlines at short notice. Having the right time management and organizational skills allows for a lawyer’s work to be performed more effortlessly and efficiently.

Time management is the core of a lawyer’s work ethics. Lawyers who prioritize their work and stay ahead of their tasks can lead to more time to enjoy extracurriculars or taking on more cases.

4. Research Skills

Lawyers will spend a lot of time digging around in archives and reading up on old cases. Research skills include the ability to read large amounts of information in short time, understanding facts, figures, and charts, and analyzing matter in a way that can be used later are vital features of a lawyer.

Research skills should be honed early in a lawyer’s career. To do so, make a habit of summarizing a few important points from large documents and articles. This is extremely advantageous when caseloads increase which require more background details, legal document drafting, and prepare advice for clients.

5. Detail Oriented

All lawyers have to have an eye for details. Accuracy and precision is needed to become a successful lawyer. If a lawyer makes a mistake on a single word it can change the entire meaning of a contract or a clause. Lawyers must ensure all their communications, such as email, letters, lawyer websites and legal documents, are always perfect for giving them to a client.

Small mistakes can lead to a bad impression on a client and a bad experience for a lawyer. The worst case scenario would be a lawyer getting sued for malpractice for mistakes that could have been avoided.   

6. Creativity

The fundamental part of a lawyer’s job is to win cases for their clients or protect their client’s interests. Being creative is a skill needed by successful lawyers because it allows for flexibility and a wide range of possible solutions when working on a case.

Lawyers have to be both logical and analytical. However, they should not ignore their creativity. Having that creative edge allows for a lawyer to outmaneuver any situation, in and out of the courtroom.

7. Judgement

Although creativity is important, a lawyer also requires strong judgment at the core of their practice. Lawyers need the ability to logically and reasonably draw conclusions based on the limited amount of information they receive.

Throughout a court hearing, lawyers must be aware of the arguments their opponents are making which finding weaknesses and flaws in logic through the hearings.

8. Stress Management

Lawyers spend a great amount of time listening to client’s and trying to solve their problems. There are some clients who have often experienced an extreme incident which creates a difficult and stressful situation for themselves and the lawyer. Mentioned early was the importance of having both people and communication skills. It is during these high-stress situations that these skills are needed to help handle a client’s stress.

In fact, these same skills are critical for lawyer’s themselves. Lawyers will occasionally take on the stresses of their clients. Having the ability to manage stress, both in clients and within themselves, is a valuable skill to maintain a long-lasting career as a lawyer.

9. Business Skills

Every lawyer, whether working at a firm or solo practitioner, must be aware of the business side of their practice. Law is a billable service that receives the majority of their income by the hours they can bill. If lawyers lack the necessary business skills to bill their clients accordingly, it could lead to significant losses for the firm or personal practice.

Being able to explain your hourly rates, additional charges, and contracting with clients is critical for a lawyer to continue to practice law. However, billing is just one aspect that has to be learned. Marketing, networking, and accounting for lawyers are equally important.

If there’s one way to win more clients its by reintroducing your ads after they leave your website. Taking this approach to your Facebook Ads can not only save your advertising budget but also allow you to focus your campaign on the people who are really interested in your legal services.

Lawyers using Facebook Retargeting Ads can take advantage of an affordable and efficient advertising method.

Your Future Clients Are On Facebook

Facebook has more than 1.4 billion active users (avg. for December 2017) which is where many of your future clients can be found.

Facebook Users by Age in 2018

Source

The graph above reveals some really important data on how many people are using Facebook:

• 3 million users aged 25 to 34
• 4 million users aged 35 to 44
• 4 million users aged 45 to 54

This will likely be the age bracket your law firm would be targeting your ads toward, however, some areas of law may focus on younger or older age ranges. The key focus is that somewhere in these numbers are a few new clients that require your firm.

What is a Facebook Retargeting Ad?

Have you ever been on Facebook then later went to another website only to see an advertisement for some CRM company appear at the top of the new website you’re browsing?

This is what is known as retargeting and it is an extremely effective way of bringing potential clients back to your website to contact your firm.

In the digital marketing world, Facebook’s retargeting ads tend to yield some of the highest returns from an advertisers ad budget. For your law firm, this provides you with an opportunity to maximize your budget by getting second, third, or more chances to convince someone that you are the lawyer for the job.

Facebook Retargeting On a Deeper Level

There are a few reasons why a retargeting campaign is very effective for advertising your law firm. An interpretation of Retargeting.com suggests that retargeting works because you can deliver ads again to your target clients which have already expressed interest in your law firm.

You’ll need an attorney website to get the most out of Facebook’s retargeting ads because a snippet of code must be placed on your website. This code places a cookie (a small tracker) onto any visitor’s computer which sends information back to Facebook about the pages they visited.

You would use Facebook’s custom audiences to retarget visitors to specific places on your website. For example, if a visitor went to your contact form, you can retarget them so they return and send you a message.

Another example could be a special offer for a free consultation for people considering divorce. This compelling offer is found on your homepage and in order for a visitor to receive this they must provide you with an email. Your initial Facebook campaign starts off by attracting Facebook users to your homepage. Some users stop by but you don’t receive as many emails as you like. With your retargeting ads, using an image that emphasizes that pain of divorce with more information about the benefits of hiring a divorce lawyer.

Retargeting is a cost-effective way to re-engage with your potential clients. It gives them a second opportunity to decide whether your law firm is the best choice available. Now, if you’re wondering how to set that up, you can learn how in the next section.

Setting Up Facebook Retargeting Ads

Using Facebook retargeting ads provides your law firm with a competitive edge. There aren’t many other law firms doing this which makes this a smart move for your law firm’s market strategy.

Here’s a simple approach to setting up next law firm’s Facebook Ad campaign with retargeting at your law firm:

Install Facebook’s “Pixel”

The first thing you have to do is install Facebook’s tracking pixel on your website. This pixel is what is used to track visitors on your website and sets up the retargeting ad through Facebook’s ad network.

You shouldn’t require any help from a web developer for placing the tracking pixel on your website. There’s an easy to follow explanation on Facebook’s help forums.

Choose Your Audience

The next step is to log into your Facebook Ads account and go to “Audience.” Facebook offers powerful tools to select a specific group of people to target your ads. If you’re a local law firm, you can select which city you’re in, their marital status, employment, the approximate level of income, whether the visited your website, and all kinds of combinations.

If you don’t want to create a custom audience, you can upload your own list of contacts instead. Or, you can merge both your contacts with the audience you want to target.

Whichever you decide, your ads are almost ready to be displayed to your target audience whenever they browse Facebook, Instagram, and other websites throughout Facebook’s advertising network.

Grab Their Attention

Your retargeting efforts will only be effective if you have a compelling message (or image) that can recapture your audience’s attention.

Why should they return to your website? What do you want them to do? Do you want previous visitors to return to a contact form after visiting your page containing a special?

Before you start creating your Facebook ad, it’s important to have a plan. This will help you determine the direction and the design of the overall ad. You retargeting ad has to catch people’s eye and bring them back to your website. Take a look at the example below:

This is just one of many ways you can use Facebook ads to target your potential clients and increase intakes at your firm. However, be sure you don’t make these mistakes with your Facebook Ads.