A Law Office Site With a Wall of Logos

The site

A three-lawyer employment law office in a suburban office building, acting mostly for employees who have been dismissed and for a few small employers.

Its home page opens with the firm's name in a narrow header, then a grid of fourteen logos that fills the screen.

The law society, two bar association sections, a trial lawyers' group, three directory and peer ratings, a magazine list, a readers' choice award, the chamber of commerce, a university crest, a sponsored charity and two newspapers.

Beneath the grid sits a line of three adjectives. The phone number appears only in the footer.

The inference a visitor makes

Most people arriving at an employment lawyer's site have just lost a job, or fear they are about to. They are anxious, often searching late in the evening, and they want answers quickly.

They want to know whether the firm handles their kind of problem for people like them, what happens if they get in touch, and roughly what it might cost.

The logo wall answers none of that. What it says, to somebody who cannot read it, is that this firm is approved by other lawyers, which sounds expensive, formal and possibly not for them.

A visitor unsure whether a firm takes individual clients rarely phones to ask. They go back to the results and try a firm whose first screen says so.

What fills the first screen

• Memberships every lawyer must hold, shown as if they were distinctions.
• Ratings from legal directories most clients have never heard of.
• Awards whose terms and years nobody explains.
• Organisations the firm supports, which say nothing about the work.
• Newspaper mastheads implying coverage from a single quotation.
• No statement of what the firm does, or for whom.

The last is the one that costs the call. Everything else on the list is merely unhelpful; the missing sentence about the work leaves the visitor to guess, and guessing about a lawyer feels risky.

Memberships that cannot distinguish

Every practising lawyer in the province must be a member of the law society. Showing its logo first tells a visitor nothing that is not true of every firm in the search results.

Visitors who know that read the logo as padding. Visitors who do not may take it for an honour, which is the wrong impression for a firm to give, however accidentally.

Bar association membership is similar, since a great many lawyers hold it. It deserves a line on a lawyer's profile, not the top of the home page.

Ratings written for the profession

Legal directories and peer ratings are read mostly by other lawyers and by in-house counsel choosing outside firms. In that world they carry real meaning.

To a dismissed warehouse supervisor, they are unfamiliar names decorated with stars and laurels. A badge lends weight only when the visitor recognises whoever issued it.

The mastheads have a subtler problem: two newspapers that once quoted a partner suggest coverage the firm never really had.

Fourteen images on a phone

On a phone, the grid becomes a column. Fourteen logos, two or three to a row, take several screens of scrolling before anything else appears.

Each is an image, adding to the load time. A screen reader announces each by its file name, or skips it, depending on how it was added.

The phone number, the one thing a worried visitor wants to tap, sits at the bottom of all of it.

What should come first

The first screen belongs to one plain sentence: who the firm acts for, in what kinds of matter, and where.

Beneath it, how to start: what a first consultation involves, how long it lasts and what it costs. People who fear a lawyer's bill often will not call without knowing.

Then the people. Three lawyers, each with a photograph, their years in practice and the cases they take, reassure an anxious visitor more than any badge.

And the phone number, in the header, written so that a tap on a phone starts the call.

A worked example

The firm's managing lawyer noticed a pattern in first calls. People opened by asking whether the firm handled employment law at all, and whether it would see an individual rather than a company.

The answer to both was yes. The home page said neither.

The rebuilt first screen says the firm acts for employees who have been dismissed or mistreated at work, in the city and its suburbs, and that a first consultation lasts an hour at a fixed fee shown on the page.

Below it come the three lawyers, then a short list of what to bring: the termination letter, the employment contract and recent pay stubs.

The memberships and ratings moved into each lawyer's profile as plain text, with the year of each rating. Two awards whose terms nobody could find were dropped, and the mastheads became links to the articles themselves.

How lawyers may advertise

Law societies have rules on how lawyers market themselves. In general terms, they require marketing to be accurate and not misleading, and they limit claims that cannot be verified, including some about expertise and comparisons with other lawyers.

A wall of awards and ratings, shown without dates or explanation, is the kind of content those rules have in mind. Each item should be checked against the firm's own law society rules and the terms of the award itself.

That is a question of wording, not a reason to hide every credential. The lawyers' profiles are the place to set them out accurately.

The counter-case within the site

Some credentials do belong near the top.

For a firm whose clients are businesses, in-house counsel and executives may read directory rankings, and one line naming a recognised ranking can help there.

A certification clients ask for by name, or a membership with a complaints process they can use, earns its place because clients recognise it.

But the first screen belongs to what the firm does and for whom. Credentials support that statement; they cannot replace it.

What to change

1. Write one sentence saying who you act for.
2. Put it first, above every logo.
3. Explain the first consultation and its cost.
4. Move memberships to the lawyers' profiles, as text.
5. Check each award's terms and your law society's rules.
6. Link press mentions to the articles themselves.
7. Put the phone number in the header.

Step one is the hard part, because a firm that does several kinds of work has to choose what to say first. Once that sentence exists, the logos find their own place beneath it.

Another first screen given away to things the visitor did not come for is covered in a site where three boxes cover the phone screen.

Frequently asked questions

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