A positive online reputation to a lawyer or law firm is key. The earlier you realize this, the quicker you will take steps that need to be taken and get your legal business to the height you intend.
Your online reputation is important because it will dictate whether potential buyers of legal services will choose to patronise your business or not.
Online reputation is critical to lawyers because most of their potential clients start their search from the Internet.
95% of consumers said reviews matter in hiring an attorney when searching online. 90% of consumers would like to go ahead with the lawyer with overall 5 star reviews.
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What is Reputation for Lawyers?
Before the internet and everything that makes up the internet, there were Yellow pages.
These yellow pages are usually listings of businesses, their hours of operation, and other useful details.
These days, however, the yellow pages have been replaced with online business listings and legal directories for lawyers and law firms.
These directories offer the service offered by yellow pages, often with even more visibility and other useful services that help law firms and lawyers get the best of their online practice.
There are also online review websites, google search engines (and others), among other services that help a lawyer or law firm get their online reputation improved and properly managed.
If you need help managing your online reputation or want to remove something negative online, get in touch with us through our email [email protected] or call us (970) 458 8143
Why is online reputation management important to Lawyers and Law firms?
Like most other lawyers, you might be considering how managing your online reputation is of so much importance to your business and success.
There are justifications for online reputation management, but we will briefly touch on a few of them.
- Visibility: If your legal service provision business will really bloom and become visible to potential clients, your online reputation is of utmost importance. When people (prospective clients) search online for available lawyers and attorneys or law firms, search engines and lawyer directories will provide results or suggestions based on each firm’s reputation or attorney. Therefore, the more positive your reputation is online, the more visible you and your business will be to buyers of legal services.
- Trust: One other reason you might want to take your online reputation seriously is that the more positive your reputation is, the greater the trust your business wields. Every lawyer understands the importance of trust in building a legal service to a place of prominence and success. When you successfully manage and keep your reputation on the high side, your customers will trust you and will most likely refer others and create reviews that can help you win a new customer over.
There are many other reasons why reputation management is essential for lawyers and law firms. Ultimately, however, the goal is to ensure that your business continues to stay relevant, get more customers and become successful.
Ways to Manage Online Reputation
Now that we have looked at the reasons and importance of reputation management for law firms, it is high time we looked at some of how you, as a lawyer or law firm, can effectively manage your online reputation.
We have curated below some tested and trusted methods guaranteed to give you a better managed and positive reputation online.
Do Searches About Yourself
If a client who doesn’t know about you or your service before will get to hear about you, there’s a large probability that search engines are some of the most common ways to do this.
Therefore, to be sure that this method is to your benefit, it is advised that you search for yourself online. Imagine yourself as a client looking to get the service of a lawyer or law firm.
Search online for your name, your firm’s name, and other pseudo names that customers might search for when looking for your service online.
Paying special and detailed attention to results on the Google search engine, looking through images, reviews, and so on is essential.
The process you’ve embarked on is what your customers will also go through when looking for your service.
Once you put yourself in their shoes, you will be able to understand where your business stands, how visible it is online, and your reputation level.
This information will allow you to make adjustments and fixes as might be required to ensure you make it easy for clients to get your business information when they search online.
Save Your Discoveries
While going online to search for your business, there are some things that you might discover. All these discoveries should be duly saved for easy referencing and to enable you to work on them.
Doing this (i.e., saving every good or bad discovery) will enable you to revisit each item easily to address them.
Saving your findings will also help you develop more focused plans and help you present your information in a way that boosts your online reputation.
Therefore, if you are truly dedicated to keeping your reputation well managed, you will do this with all due diligence, noting how each of the items in your discovery will impact how a client or potential customer will view your service (i.e., the opinion clients are most likely to form about your firm from the information).
When you do this, you will be able to envisage and put in place measures that will help you get a better online reputation for you or your law firm.
Note: To get a even broader perspective, you can make searches on your competition and see how they are doing against your business online.
Create Alerts
Now that you know how your business is viewed (or most likely to be viewed) by customers and potential clients and have made moves as required to help your reputation further, the next thing to do is to ensure you get new information immediately are available.
To do this, you can set up or create google alerts for your name, the name of your firm, or keywords that you have employed in your search (keywords related to lawyers and law firms)
When you watch out for and become aware of each of these new results online, you will be able to stay on top of information available on your service and make decisions based on this information to benefit your business.
Important of Legal Directories for Lawyers and Law Firms
Legal directories are no new phenomenon.
They have been in existence since the 19th century.
According to records, the first legal directory was the Martindale-Hubbell Legal directory.
It was created as a platform for lawyers and law firms to exhibit their services and help legal service buyers make a credible and perfect choice of who or which law firm to work with.
Soon after, new and modern forms of these legal directories sprang up in the 1980s and the 1990s. Ever since then, legal directories have come to mean a lot to the legal industry.
This aspect of the legal system records annual transactions in the $250 million range, entrenching them as a vital part of the legal industry as a whole.
Legal directories are, however, different from each other based on their offers.
There are legal directories that just serve as a listing service, while some offer peer review.
Some provide research services and many other services.
The slight differences, notwithstanding, every one of these legal directories has the sole purpose of connecting buyers and sellers of legal services.
This is why, as a lawyer or law firm, having your service listed on one or more of these directories has a lot of potential positive results that you should embrace.
Getting your legal service provision information upon the top directories, most especially, might be just what you need to get your business flying and acquire a good number of patronages.
This piece will give you the list of the top 80 recommended legal directories where you can list your legal service provision outfit to put yourself in the view of potential clients.
We will also explain the top 20 legal directories in detail.
Top 80 Lawyer Directories with Domain Authority
The legal directories play vital roles in lawyers’ reputations. If you can submit your profile on at least 20 to 30 lawyers’ directories, we can say you may have won the half battle.
Even better, sometimes, lawyer reputation can be revived 100% through these online legal directories.
Google gives a lot of weight to legal directories after 2014’s pigeon algorithm updates.
Justification for Legal directories
Before we go into the list of the top legal directories recommended for you, let us look at some reasons why you should consider a legal register for yourself or your law firm.
Since the establishment of the first legal directory, there have been many praises for the service.
A lot of reasons and importance accrues to the use of the service by lawyers and law firms.
As well as the buyers of legal services.
Some of the justification for a legal directory includes but not limited to the following:
Influence: Legal directories have a very high level of power within and outside the legal industry. This results from the extensive database of users and traffic that they boast of.
The large and increasing number of law firms today has necessitated lawyers and law firms to look for innovative ways to win a fair share of the available clients.
To achieve this goal, lawyers and law firms can list their legal provision services on these legal directories.
By doing this, they will tap into the already extensive database of customers and the massive influence enjoyed by such lists.
This will give the law firm/lawyers easy access to potential customers that might have otherwise taken a long time, energy, and resources.
Thereby, one of the primary reasons for using a legal directory is to enjoy and benefit from their influence.
Customer Trust: According to research, about 41% of potential buyers of legal services will first check a legal directory before choosing which law firm or lawyer they want to patronize.
These clients and prospective buyers have great trust in these legal directories as the go-to place for the best recommendations before deciding which legal service provider to employ.
The faith that customers have in these directories is a perfect justification for legal directories by legal service providers.
Before You Choose a Legal Directory
Since we have established the fact that having a legal directory listing for your law firm is highly beneficial, there are things that you should look out for before you decide on the very directory (or directories) to list your legal service provision outfit.
Choosing the right legal directory is as important as deciding to use a legal directory service itself.
Using a wrong or spam list might hurt your firm.
Therefore, you must consider the following points when choosing a legal list.
Popularity: This is not excusable. To get your service into the view and consciousness of as many potential clients as possible, it is pertinent that you list it on a top-rated legal directory.
A popular directory will not only give you exposure and customers; it will shorten the time it would have taken to get your first client.
Popular lists are those well known to people and have a vast database of users and a substantial amount of regular traffic to the directory.
These directories will open your business up to many potential customers, unlike the less popular ones.
Reputation: The reputation possessed by any business will affect the business either negatively or positively.
The same applies to legal directories.
A legal list with a negative reputation (such as spamming, misinformation, and so on) will give you or your firm a negative impact.
Spam-infested directories can lead to low SEO results and search engine rankings.
Sometimes listing on an ill-reputed legal directory can cause a total absence of your business on potential clients’ search results. Therefore, you must ensure that you chose only reputable directories to get the best result.
Free/Paid: One other important consideration when listing on legal directories is to ascertain if the service is open or paid.
And to determine if you’ll prefer a paid or a free service, this will guide you in choosing the listing service that will fit and benefit you the most.
While free directories necessarily are not bad options, the best choice is paid services.
Paid services usually offer extra services that will be beneficial to you or your law firm.
Once you have carefully put all of these into careful deliberation and evaluation before making your choice of legal directory, you will discover that you’ll get many definite perks from listing on legal directories.
Top 20 Legal Directories for Lawyers and Law firms
After looking at the reasons for listing on legal directories and how to determine the right index, we have created a list of the top 20 recommended directories for lawyers and law firms below.
- Martindale.com
- Avvo.com
- FindLaw.com
- Justia.com
- SuperLawyers.com
- Nolo.com
- Lawyers.com
- HG.org
- LawGuru.com
- LawTally.com
- Lawinfo.com
- Best Lawyers
- LegalShield
- LawyerLegion.com
- Legalmatch.com
- LegalZoom
- Thelawyersglobal.org
- Legal500.com
- JouwWeb
- Legal directories
We understand that there might be variations in the list and measurement for the top and recommended legal directory from one service to another.
However, to ensure this list of the top 20 recommended directories is as accurate as required, we have taken a couple of things into consideration.
Aside from the already stated things to look out for in a legal directory, to make a proper decision about the top 20 law firms, we also looked at the Alexa rankings of these directories for 2019 and this year’s current rankings.
Therefore, this list is truly representative of the top choices as much as possible.
- Martindale: Martindale started very early. It began initially as a one-person business in 1868. Gradually, it grew into one of the favorite and top recommended directories in the legal space. It provides avenues for lawyers and law firms from different parts of the world to list their services and get recognition and patronage from buyers of legal services. Martindale has a wide range of services to lawyers and law firms, and customers alike. Martindale boasts of growing monthly traffic of over 25 million visitors. Also, Martindale is a member of the Martindale-Avvo legal marketing network. For new and existing legal service providers, the Martindale directory is undoubtedly one of the best options.
Our rating: 100
- Avvo: A member of the Martindale-Avvo legal marketing network, Avvo, like Martindale, has many loyal customers and access to very generous traffic of legal service buyers. The popularity of Avvo is further enhanced by its reputation of providing enough and accurate information to customers to allow them to make informed decisions. Also, Avvo boasts of a large number of lawyers. As well as an extensive database of over 8 million monthly visits to the website. It is a favorite destination for those looking to get the best legal service available, thereby making it a highly recommended directory for lawyers and law firms.
Our rating: 98
- FindLaw: FindLaw, like the first two directories on this list, is worthy of consideration for listing your service or firm. Aside from FindLaw’s directory service, it also offers legal resources for law students and professionals, among others. Also, they provide internet marketing solutions for law firms or lawyers that are interested in such services. They give the firm everything needed to help them grow and gain popularity and patronage. FindLaw operates a Freemium service like most of the other top directories.
Our rating: 96
- Justia: Justia makes it to the list of top legal directories recommended for lawyers and law firms due to its versatility. The directory boasts of a diverse list of lawyers and firms separated along with different categories and jurisdictions. With a presence in Southern America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, Justia offers listed legal service providers access to many buyers and potential clients in their locality and even internationally. Justia offers freemium service to its customers. i.e., it has a free service, as well as a premium subscription-based service with extra offerings.
Our rating: 95
- SuperLawyers: What sets Superlawyers.com apart is the ease of navigation and user-friendliness offered by the directory’s interface. Coupled with this is the large number of monthly traffic enjoyed by the service, making them a favorite stop among lawyers, law firms, and people in need of legal service provision. The directory is divided into states and field of expertise lines. For lawyers and law firms looking for a top directory to list on, SuperLawyers is an excellent choice.
Our rating: 94
- Nolo: 48 years of delivering the best customers to legal service providers on the one hand and providing the best attorneys to customers in need of their service on the other, Nolo has come to stay, establishing itself as a force to be reckoned with. What makes Nolo further attractive to potential clients is that they provide DIY legal services, provide FAQs and answers, and many other services that benefit their users. All these offerings by the directory ensure it attracts and retains a large amount of traffic MoM. Therefore, it is a good directory for any lawyer or law firm to list their service and access new and potential clients.
Our rating: 93
- LawTally: Boasting more than 58,000 lawyer profiles, 100 thousand organic visitors a month, and over 1500 call-to-actions a month, LawTally has established itself as a go-to place for every person looking for the best available legal service providers from all around the world. LawTally also records a high growth rate of its organic traffic monthly, which gave the service a large forward leap on the Alexa rankings of March 2020. LawTally allows lawyers and firms to showcase their qualifications, field of expertise, and success stories on the directory. It also allows the service providers to cite previous cases, contact details, and other information that a potential client might require to make excellent choices. The top-notch service offered by LawTally makes it a top choice among buyers and sellers of legal services alike.
Our rating: 90
- Lawyers: This directory, like most of the other directories on this list, enjoys a very high number of monthly visits by users and buyers of legal services. They operate a freemium service that allows you to list on their service without paying a fee or subscribing to their premium service for added benefits and perks.
Our rating: 88
- HG: Climbing a lot of steps up on the 2020 Alexa rankings from its position in 2019, HG.org continues to remain relevant as a worthy directory. Established in January of 1995, this directory has continued to stay as one of the most important legal directories in the world. It is a favorite destination for those looking to hire an attorney or a law firm for various reasons. The website enjoys high monthly traffic and offers users an easy-to-navigate directory interface. Therefore, as a lawyer, it is important to tap into the position of this directory and enjoy an increase in visibility.
Our rating: 87
- LawGuru: LawGuru is a free service that is highly recommended for every lawyer and law firm. Despite the free service offered by this directory, it is well optimized for searches, easy-to-navigate, and user-friendly. Making it a top destination for those looking to get legal aid.
Our rating: 86
- BestLawyers.com: Present in 78 countries around the world, with over 11 million evaluation of lawyers by peers, best lawyers has established itself as a worthy legal directory. The belief by which Bestlawyers operate is that the best lawyers always know who the best lawyers are. Therefore, it runs a peer review-based practice to help legal service buyers make an excellent and informed decision about their choice of attorney. Also, the best lawyers enjoy a high level of traffic to its website, making it an excellent place to list as it offers quality services.
Our rating: 80
- Legal500: Legal 500 has been around for more than 33 years. They have, since inception being providing top-notch law firm ranking and analysis services. To get the list of the top law firms for recommendation to users, this directory has in place a couple of metrics that allow it to assess and examine lawyers and law firms. They then make this ranking and analysis available to consumers to enable them to make well-informed decisions. This makes many users have a strong belief in the service, thereby regularly patronizing it whenever they need the assistance of legal personnel or a firm. As a lawyer or a law firm, listing on this directory will be the right step to client acquisition. Also, for in-house legal service providers, Legal500 offers a range of beneficial services like roundtables, clients’ insight reports, and other information to help them grow.
Our rating: 80
- LegalZoom: LegalZoom is another directory that has made it to this list. This directory offers its personal class of service. It provides buyers and potential buyers of legal service with an easy reach to carefully selected, vetted, and proven attorneys and lawyers. It also provides customers with simplified self-guided services, as well as helping them handle every necessary paperwork. LegalZoom has an outstanding amount of traffic, and it’s definitely a directory worth exploring.
Our rating: 75
- LegalMatch: With over 20 years of experience connecting legal service providers and buyers, 4 million posted cases, and 91% satisfaction rates, LegalMatch makes it to our list of the top 20 directories. LegalMatch, asides from the generous clientele rate it boasts of, also have a very impressive and easy-to-navigate user interface. This makes it a choice destination for those looking to get the best recommendations for choosing a lawyer or law firm. This impressive resume possessed by the service makes it a perfect place to list your service as a lawyer and tap into their traffic.
Our rating: 70
- Lawyerlegion.com: Apart from being a top destination for people in need of legal aids or attorneys, lawyer legion offers a lot of essential services to the lawyers and associations that are listed on the directory. The directory has a highly comprehensive list of lawyers and law firms around the world. It also enjoys excellent regular traffic, making it the right place for lawyers and law firms to list their services.
Our rating: 70
- LawInfo: Asides from being a legal directory with a strong reputation, lawinfo also provides free legal resources to users like articles and videos to help them understand the law better. Also, lawinfo is a subset of a more extensive Thomson Reuters Legal network that provides a range of legal services for its users. The usefulness, resourcefulness, and reputation of lawinfo have set it up high among the highly-rated directories in the world. Therefore, it is recommendable for new and already established lawyers and law firms to get their service listed with lawinfo.
Our rating: 70
- Thelawyersglobal: Like what is found on their website, thelawyersglobal offers an innovative, high-value service to its customers. They do this with professional commitment and dedication to value provision. They help people that are in search of excellent law firms find the best available option. Their service includes ranking the lawyers and law firms and providing recommendations for the clients about the service providers that have proven their worth. This makes clients and potential customers put very high trust in the service provided by thelawyersglobal directory. The directory also enjoys a very generous traffic of customers every month. This is a good reason for you to list your service or your law firm’s service on this directory and tap into the benefits it presents to users.
Our rating: 65
- LegalShield.com: This is another one of the top 20 legal directories globally with a distinct mode of operation. Legalshield helps users get the very best attorneys at considerably affordable prices. It does this by charging its users a monthly fee in exchange for getting the very best attorneys. This directory’s continued sustained good reputation has made it a popular service for quite a generous amount of users. This makes the service one of the most trafficked directories. It is for this reason that listing on the register is a good step towards customer acquisition.
Our rating: 60
- JouwWeb: JouwWeb is probably the largest online database of injury lawyers. Unlike most of the other directories on this top 20 list, JouwWeb is dedicated solely to helping people involved in personal injuries (like accidents and the like) to find the best available personal injury lawyers close to them. Therefore, if you are a personal injury attorney or your firm provides personal injury service, JouwWeb is a recommended directory to explore and exploit to your benefit.
Our rating: 60
- Legal directories: legaldirectories.com is the last directory on our top 20 list. Like every other directory on this list, this directory offers lawyers and law firms access to millions of active monthly visitors and potential clients. It efficiently connects buyers of legal services with the service providers and has maintained a strong and robust reputation since its inception. Therefore, the service is also among the recommended services for interested lawyers and law firms.
Our rating: 50
Aside from the directories that made it to this list, there are many useful legal directories outside that are worthy of consideration for legal service providers.
However, these directories have been carefully picked and evaluated to help you as a lawyer or your law firm make an informed decision about your choice of a legal list.
We have done this from the realization that choosing the wrong directory might hurt your visibility and credibility and have created a guide to help make the right decision.
However, it should be noted that as a legal service provider, listed on more than one of these directories is allowed and recommendable.
Therefore, you should not be restricted to a particular list.
If you need help managing your online reputation or want to remove something negative online, get in touch with us through our email [email protected] or call us (970) 458 8143
5 Best Legal Directories for Lawyers to Get Listed (Must)
The below infographics contain the top 5 legal directories for lawyers to get listed today. These are the vital legal directories for lawyers, and it is the foremost thing a lawyer must do.
Claim Your Profiles
To ensure that you control every aspect of your business online, you are advised to claim all your profiles and accounts online if you haven’t done that.
Ensure you claim all web domains associated with you and your firm, all accounts on legal directories, review sites, and other possible places related to your legal service business.
When you claim all these accounts and domains, you put yourself firmly in the middle of your reputation management process and keep your online presence secured against potential online attacks.
Collect Feedback
Feedback is a great way to measure your firm’s performance and the level of your service delivery to clients.
A plus here is that many customers are always more than willing to give feedback about your service (either to you, on reviews sites, or any other third-party service or platform).
When you ask for and collect feedback from your past clients, you can use their provided feedback to build further and improve your brand’s standing online.
Make regular requesting of feedback a major part of your service delivery, as this will ensure you continue to provide the best service.
Ensure Your Website is Always Up To Date
While the situation of your personal website is less consequential than your reviews on google and other legal directories, it is no less important to your online reputation as a lawyer.
Keeping your website easy to access and navigate for customers (customer-friendly user interface and experience) and updating your website with useful information and contents will naturally boost your standing on search result rankings and the customers themselves.
Incorporating a blog on your website, where you create and share positive content for clients and potential clients, is another foolproof method or way by which you can manage your online reputation.
Creating quality and useful content will naturally portray you as an authority in your field and give you more trust.
Augment Your Reviews
Reviews, as we have touched on earlier, are critical to your online reputation.
It is, in fact, the backbone on which your reputation is built.
To this end, you must be deliberate about your reviews and pay special attention to them.
Many clients will create reviews about your service on various review platforms, and you must be on the lookout for such.
Positive reviews are good for the business. When you get a positive review, you can provide short answers and gratitude towards such reviews.
Thanking a positive review online will make people see that you appreciate and give you more trust and a positive reputation.
Also, you can share these positive reviews on your website to allow visitors to see them.
As for negative reviews, never let any of them slide without attending to them duly.
For every negative or bad review you or your firm gets, provide a short apology and allow the reviewer to get in touch with you and try to solve their problem.
It is worthy of note that you should try to defend yourself on a negative review for no reason whatsoever.
Doing such will only paint your reputation bad.
Keep it short and simple, be apologetic, and offer to address any issue.
Responding to all reviews – negative and positive – sends a powerful message to others about your professionalism and interest in client feedback.
Lawtally.com
Augmenting your reviews is very important for your legal service and should therefore be treated as such.
Employ Best Practices
Always ensure that you stay abreast of the current best practices in the legal space.
Doing this will ensure that you treat your clients the way you are supposed to. Every sector or service has its general practices and best practices.
Getting knowledge of these legal best practices and employing them to provide service to clients will ensure that you deliver the best quality of service at all times. This will positively affect your reputation online (as well as offline).
Set Realistic Goals
It is common for firms and businesses to set goals and aims for themselves. This is a good strategy to employ, as it enables you to stay on a particular track towards achieving your set goals and objectives.
You must, however, be careful of setting unrealistic goals as this may affect the way you do business, and ultimately, your reputation online and offline.
Therefore, to make the best use of your online reputation and to ensure that you adequately manage your reputation online, you must endeavor to set realistic goals and work actively towards achieving these set goals.
Never Stops Learning
You most probably have come across this phrase several times.
Well, you should definitely incorporate it into your delivery of legal service to clients.
To stay relevant and up to date with practices in the legal world, continue learning about things that will benefit you and your legal provision business.
Taking all the above steps will ensure that you and your legal service provision business flourish and your reputation duly and efficiently managed.
However, to ensure that all these steps give the desired results, you must deliver quality service to clients.
Be passionate about your service, and attend to client’s legal needs with all your dedication.
The more you help your clients achieve their objectives, the better your standing and the higher your service rating.
Also, ensure that you regularly prepare for worst-case scenarios and plan for any negative or bad occurrence.
If you need help managing your online reputation or want to remove something negative online, get in touch with us through our email [email protected] or call us (970) 458 8143
