Few law firms have done much to exploit the internet, and your firm should be able to gain significant competitive advantage even through modest developments. In benchmarking your site and planning your next steps, you should focus on four key actions:
-as the dust from the dotcom crisis begins to settle, take stock of the internet environment, and listen to your clients;
-segment your online audiences by setting up industry-specific home pages and dedicated domain names;
-ensure usability and user-friendliness – particularly for visually impaired users (to whom you may owe legal obligations); and
-use extranets to cement client relationships.
The internet environment:
do your clients care if you are online?
“E-commerce is likely to have a huge impact on the way we do business,” begins the Office for National Statistics (ONS) e-commerce enquiry report published in May this year (available free at www.statistics.gov.uk). But its findings suggest the opposite.
Only 2% of the UK’s total sales happened online last year, according to the ONS, and of the £56bn that represents, £43bn was from finance or insurance. And that figure looks set to remain low. A quarter of the 9,000 businesses surveyed were not even planning to obtain internet access in the coming year. Only 16% of businesses currently use the internet to make sales, and 70% of businesses have no plans to start. The Legal Research Group (LRG) (www.legal-research-group.co.uk) has provided the first empirical evidence on the views of buyers of legal services for business.
Although 80% would reconsider their choice of law firm if it had no e-mail, only a third would do so if the firm lacked a website. None of the respondents (who included company secretaries, finance directors, and in-house lawyers) visited law firm websites daily or weekly, and only 2% did so once a month. Seventeen per cent would visit in a tender situation but 70% would never visit a law firm website at all.
Where do these statistics leave you? Your priority in reviewing your site will be to ensure that you talk to clients and users, to ensure that you can offer high quality content, relevant to users’ needs.
