Stem Legal is pleased to welcome another new client this morning, product injury firm Hissey Kientz LLP, who are based in Austin, Texas.

The firm is led by Michael Hissey and Robert Kientz, both experienced medical mass tort practitioners, whose areas range from the recent Digitek Recall, to Asbestos exposure injury claims and mesothelioma law.

In the coming months, the firm is looking to overhaul the look and feel of their website, increase content publishing, and continue the production of content portals related to their product claims experience.  Examples of these firm mini-sites range from the Ortho Evra patch, the Kugel mesh hernia patch recall, to their onging work as mesothelioma lawyers.

The other exciting part of this project is working with Justinian Lane, who readers might recognize from his writings at Tordeform.com or his personal blog Corp Rerform. Justinian is currently a summer clerk at Hissey Kientz LLP; and is soon to be an up and coming consumer rights attorney. We often talk about fit when it comes to law students and law firms. And at least from outside optics, this looks to be a good one.

So a big welcome to Hissey Kientz. I’m really looking forward to working with you!

Erik Mazzone over at Law Practice Matters has an excellent post on developing & quantifying a lawyer’s referral network needs.

The entire post is worth reading, but check out Erik’s rough methodology for calculating those needs:

Here’s the math for Hypothetical Larry the Lawyer:

1) Larry’s average case (divorce lawyer) is worth $5,000.

2) Larry’s best referral source refers 2 cases per year to Larry.

3) A good referral source for Larry is worth $10,000 (per year).

4) Larry’s annual revenue goal is $150,000. $150,000 revenues/$10,000 referral source = Larry needs 15 very good referral sources to a completely referral based practice.

Simple, but not by any means easy. If you don’t have enough data to complete the calculation, just start tracking it now.

Tracking, of course, is the basic foundation. Everything from the yellow page ads, to web marketing, to industry association memberships & speaking engagements should be evaluated. ROI isn’t the only part of the equation when it comes to evaluating marketing efforts, but it better be in there somewhere.

As I commented on Erik’s post, the preferred placement for this kind of tracking is within your accounting software. Even some rough standardized categories for referral sources, combined with the knowledge of client & matter billing history, can provide enormous value to tracking your marketing investments.

Either that, or you can consider Erik’s rationale for the answer being “10″. It’s pretty compelling… :)

Tom Mighell and Dennis Kennedy have launched a new companion blog and wiki to go with their book - The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools & Technologies.

Both bloggers have been long time favourites of mine, and if they can rekindle some of the Between Lawyers magic with a collaboration tool slant, I’ll certainly be all ears on this one.

Congrats on the new book, blog and wiki gentlemen! Subscribed.

Most in-house law firm Marketers were aware of the Findlaw PageRank sales scam long before it hit the blogosphere. Mostly because they were the target of a huge email blast from Findlaw a few weeks back. Which is how I found out about the offering, when clients then forwarded the program details to me for review.

[If you're looking for some background, please see the preceding link from Todd Friesen who originally broke the story, and the follow up critique from Kevin O'Keefe.]

My response to clients (admittedly in hindsight) was the right one… “decline it”. Google’s hit bigger sites than Findlaw in the past including the Economist, the Times of London, and the Wall Street Journal (link cite).

I don’t want to re-hash the details of the situation in this post. And really, it’s well covered in the above links… but, I was asked recently on Twitter how I see things, and if I would be commenting. I do have some thoughts, so let me share.

• First, Findlaw selling link-based advertising isn’t the issue here. To be clear, the issue is that Findlaw used the Google measure of PageRank as the basis for selling those links. And that has long been off-side when it comes to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
• Second, Google’s response of a PageRank reduction penalty isn’t new. It’s similar treatment to what a group of prominent bloggers received just a few months ago. The penalty is likely temporary and probably will last until Findlaw kills the program.
• Third, the reduction (PR7 to PR5) is for the visible PageRank displayed in the Google Toolbar. Does it effect the actual rankings? As of today, in Canada, when you search for ‘find lawyer‘, I’m getting Findlaw as the No. 1 result. I repeated the search over the phone with a US client, and Findlaw was No. 2. If Google had hit Findlaw with a true penalty, those results wouldn’t be happening.
• And related, the reduction of visible PageRank was the objective here. Lowered PageRank removes Findlaw’s ability to sell its pages as a commodity using the Google PageRank measure. Google have been consistent and clear: they want PageRank to be a measure of authority, and not the basis of a link marketplace.

Finally, I’d just like to add one personal opinion. Findlaw’s biggest crime here may just be how blatantly overt they were. It’s almost as if they were tempting Google to hit them? or naive? dumb perhaps? Take your pick.

Here’s why I think so. Google themselves say: “Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results.” Findlaw easily falls into the class of a legitimate advertising opportunity.

Was it their choice to provide raw links? Not likely, or at least not by itself. There are lots of websites with raw links; and if that alone were the factor, paid sites with low editorial standards like the Yahoo directory (sorry, that’s how I feel) would have been hit long ago.

So what tipped Google off? It was the whole package. Those spammy marketing materials, unsolicited emails, selling links based on PageRank, training lawyers how to show ‘link love’ and apply link text, and just generally having the feel of a total Machiavellian manipulation of the system. Frankly, it was arrogant.

Now, let me tell you why those firms are wasting their money. Unless you are in a completely uncompetitive search market, 3 links and a few articles from one website won’t make a dent in your ranking equation. You need links from lots of websites; in some cases, thousands. Those links need to be from a wide range of authorities (think: government, education, professional associations, libraries, conferences, magazines, journals); and increasingly, those links should be from websites on the same finite subject including blogs and social networking groups. Subject specificity is making great strides lately. What’s the topic of the page linking in? what about the pages linking to that person? All parts of the puzzle that must be considered.

Do I think this will all blow over? Sure, and Findlaw will likely get some or all of its PageRank back… after they terminate the program. Or perhaps they won’t terminate it and the Lawyers will get involved? Either way, it should prove interesting to watch Thomson Reuters and Google - old publishing economy vs new publishing economy - stand off. Get the popcorn! :)

Law.com has a new article up that addresses the business value of SEO for law firms; including some good tips on how to get an in-house program up and going.

But what really caught my eye here, was the great personal story about Araceli Parra, a legal assistant about to lose her job who learns some SEO skills, and ends up helping her firm dive a ton of new business off the web! Check out the opening paragraphs:

Araceli Parra was about to lose her job.

The legal secretary’s Oakland, Calif., firm — a DUI specialty practice — was struggling to land clients, and she saw the writing on the wall. But instead of resigning herself to the inevitable, she decided to improve the firm’s marketing efforts to keep herself employed.

Her strategy? Create a killer Web site and make it the most popular site on Google.

“I didn’t know much (about the Web) at the time, so I started going to the library and studying online and went to a seminar called Webmaster World,” she says. “I learned a lot.”

The research paid off. Parra took the firm’s “really bad site” and tore it apart, improving the design and completely reworking the navigation. Most importantly, she created a huge amount of content and fine-tuned the site using guidelines and techniques approved by the major search engines.

The end result? Jackpot. “When I finally launched the fully optimized site, it only took seven days to hit the top of Google,” she says. And the clients began to pour back in. That was two years ago; today, Number1DUIoffice.com is still the first result returned in Google for the keywords “Oakland DUI lawyer.” And all the firm’s eggs are firmly in the online basket, says Parra: “We’re entirely Web-based, and we don’t do any other advertising.”

That’s a great success story, and a testament for anyone looking to take the initiative on a project outside their area of expertise. Not everyone always thinks this way, but they should. Good things happen when you create your own opportunities.

Many people would be surprised to find out how many SEOs first learn their skills on the job, and that includes the legal industry. Over the past year, I’ve had a number of LAs, Paralegals, and Librarians email me and tell similar stories; that they’re doing SEO in-house, or have been tasked with trying to better their firm’s Google rankings. And while I think Araceli Parra’s story isn’t as unique as one might first assume, I do think it was a story that needed to be told.

So bravo to Law.com and freelance writer C.C. Holland for digging a bit deeper. Nicely done!

I’ve been in the process of writing an article for Slaw that critiques the ROI of paid search advertising, and ended up conducting a bit of a research project.

My task? I wanted to know exactly what the average cost-per-click was with Google’s Adwords for search phrases that contained the word ‘lawyer’.

Using the Google keyword research tool, an item I blogged about back in July, I was able to turn synonyms off and then export those terms into a CSV file. That file was then imported into a spreadsheet. I tallied up the sum, and divided by the total number of terms, and…

The average price paid per click over the past year for all searches containing the word ‘lawyer’ was: $9.49 per click!

That’s close to $10,000 per 1000 monthly visitors received. And since it’s my research, let me be the first to say it - Wow!

This also comes on the heels of April’s Tamar 2008 Search Attitudes Report out of the UK, that said “91 per cent prefer using natural search results when looking to buy a product or service“.

I’ll have much more to say when my Slaw article comes out, but the short story is… give me strategic SEO and content marketing any day over those numbers.

Kevin O’Keefe wrote an interesting post over the weekend about how some lawyers are using blog comments to market themselves. The problem with the post, and with Scott Greenfield’s original assessment, is that blog comments have absolutely nothing to do with Google rankings.

Let me explain…

Back at the beginning of 2005, Google introduced the ‘no-follow’ attribute for links. This was done so Google’s indexing spiders would ignore ALL links coming from within blog comments; and more importantly, according to Google, “those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results“.

That announcement was then followed by the insertion of of the ‘no-follow’ attribute on almost every blogging software out there: wordpress, typepad, blogger, livejournal, drupal… In fact, I can’t think of a blog software that doesn’t use no-follow’s for comment links.

So, ethics and optics aside, which should be good enough reasons not to drop comment spam, let me say this. No SEO worth his or her monthly fee employs these types of tactics. If your firm is employing an SEO company recommending these tactics, that person or company is a shill, a shyster, a fly-by-night’er (I’ve got more, those are just the nice ones…), who will do more damage than good.

Not only do spam comments make your practice & ethics look disreputable, but this is a tactic that’s been completely ineffective for almost three years!

I don’t have a problem with Lawyers publishing blog comments on the posts of others. I recommend it as good way to introduce yourself and your blogging presence. But doing so in a contrived way, lacking authenticity, or forbid, hiring others to do it for you? Those are some of the quickest ways to deep-six your professional profile online.

What did your mother say about your inability to say something nice? That’s right. Step back from the keyboard, and go take a walk before hitting that submit button.

And please, don’t blame this shady tactic on SEOs. Most SEO companies know better.