February 2010 Archives

When you are the most-visited legal site on the web, you think about new ways to engage your audience, to go beyond a simple one-way flow of legal information to the consumer. We know that an audience like FindLaw's has something to contribute. And this month, we are happy to announce our latest community-focused offering, LawBrain.

LawBrain is a legal wiki, a living legal community making laws accessible and interactive. It's a repository of thousands of articles about legal topics and terms from a fortiori to zoning -- and a place where anyone can edit any article.

With so many FindLaw FirmSites out there, a different one for each customer, ever wonder how they get their varied and stylish looks? It's all thanks to the FindLaw Design Group, a team of over thirty design professionals who bring law firm web sites to life.

This dedicated group has won a lot of awards for the sites it builds. Just this past September, sites created by the FindLaw Design Group won five WebAwards from the Web Marketing Association, including one for Best Legal Website (for the Law Offices of Lisa L. Macki).

At the Design Group's own website at FindLawDesign.com -- itself a  WebAward winner in the legal website category -- there are lots more interesting things to be learned about this team and its work.

FindLaw.com visitors know that we are always seeking to provide our readers not only with intelligent information about the law, legal news, lawyers and legal trends, but with real information they can use, everyday. Well respected news providers also look to FindLaw as a reliable source of information about how to apply the questions we all have about the law to what happens in our everyday lives. Here is just one example.

On February 1, Thomson Reuters acquired Super Lawyers, the attorney rating service that recognizes attorneys who have achieved the highest levels of professional accomplishment and peer recognition.

How does the Super Lawyers rating system differ from other attorney rating systems in the marketplace?

For consumers seeking legal information on the web, there is one destination that continues to stand out.

Once again in 2009, FindLaw.com was the web's most-trafficked legal information site, according to comScore data. And FindLaw's Lawyer Directory saw more users searching for a lawyer than any other online attorney directory.

ComScore's recent release of 2009 data from its Media Matrix product, which measures traffic at competing online attorney directories, confirms that consumers seeking legal information look for it at FindLaw far more often than anywhere else -- 1.9 million consumer visitors per month came to FindLaw.com in 2009, more than twice as many as visited any other legal information site.

We've all had clients say 'I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it' in regards to their website design or content. The same can be said with video that is added to our clients' websites. The average person may not be able to put their finger on what makes a quality video, but they'll know it when they see it. That is why having a FindLaw video field producer with you through the creation of your video is so critical; we help the client shine on camera.

Similar to when a designer or writer is given the task of representing the attorney, the field producer is also given the task of bringing the attorney's personality and experience to life in a captivating and professional way via our studio or custom shoots. While each producer may have their own unique way of eliciting the best out of our clients, like all FindLaw products, you can guarantee quality and an excellent customer experience will be part of the final product.

It's probably the most underrated part of a website. It's not flashy like the design. It doesn't have cool colors and flashy logos. It's not like the content which delivers important information to the client. Simply put, it's the workhorse of every site FindLaw develops. It's a multi-tasking giant, churning hundreds of lines of code into something people can see and recognize as a website.

It's easy to see how a great design can add value to a site. It's easy to tell someone how FindLaw optimizing their site for search engines will add value to their business. It's not so easy to tell someone how the standards we code our sites to will benefit them. Below are just a few examples of how using standards set down by the W3C (which stands for World Wide Web Consortium and is the main standards organization for the internet.) adds value to every site we develop.