Episode 163 – An Effective Idea For Getting More Reviews For Your Law Firm

There’s no denying that reviews have become very important for any business and specially for law firms. Today’s episode reveals an effective idea for attorneys to get more reviews from their current and past clients. Listen to the audio below to discover how this is done.

 

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I was talking to a friend of mine, who is in the marketing business for attorneys. He runs an ad agency over in Florida. His name is Al and he is a great person to bounce ideas off of. He really understands the market for his clients. He tends to focus on the personal injury guys. I noticed because I worked with him and one of his clients. His client had been getting a lot of reviews lately. Yelp and Google and all over the place. I said to him, “Hey Al, what’s up with the reviews. I see that Attorney so and so has been getting a lot of reviews.” He says, “Yeah.” I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “In office they started a contest, where the person that gets the most reviews from clients gets a $200 gift card and then there are runners up and all that stuff.”

I said, “Wow! How many reviews have you gotten?” he said , “We had 2 up to a month ago and now we have 40.” “Wow! that’s crazy! That’s great Al.” I told him. I started thinking about it and I asked Al what was happening before. He said you know the deal, you ask your staff to get reviews, you try to get reviews but there’s not much incentive there and they just don’t get done. People feel bad, they think the clients don’t want to review them etc. but just with this incentive, they are really getting a lot of them. I said they are not offering incentives to the clients themselves to review. No, no, no. We are offering incentives to the staff. I said, “Well Great. There are no problems with that. It’s now part of their job and they are happy to do it.”He said, “Yup it’s working really well.” He said we’ve gotten three calls in the past month alone that said I want to hire your attorney because of the reviews.

So the reviews are definitely helping and I’ve heard this comment from many attorneys myself that have what I call enough reviews. So reviews are just becoming super important online. If you look at Amazon, which has hundreds of thousands of products, nearly all of them have reviews and of the best sellers, I recently saw a statistic that 99.3% of them have good or bad reviews. I just thought that was very interesting. when I buy at Amazon, just to let you know, I look at the best reviews and I look at the worst reviews because it gives me an idea of what the product is or hidden problems with it. But I buy anyway even though every product pretty much has bad reviews.

So this leads to another aspect in getting reviews. A lot of attorneys I’ve talked to, they are afraid to get reviews, they are afraid to ask for them because they think Oh, what happens if I get a bad review? Well I want to tell you that it happens. This particular attorney that I am talking about that my friend Al is working with, he had a couple of bad reviews. But they took action, they did this contest and now they are doing it ongoing and now he’s got thirty some positive reviews in context with a few bad ones. As you can see from his comment to me that he is getting clients and the clients are seeing the bad reviews. they are seeing them but they are seeing them in context. It doesn’t look so bad. I want you to remember that. So don’t be afraid to get reviews because you tell me what’s worse; to have 10 good reviews and two bad ones or to have one bad review and no good ones? The one alone is far worse.

A lot of attorneys that I speak to, if they don’t make any effort to get reviews, what happens is eventually you are going to have someone that’s disgruntled and they are going to put something online and then it’s going to make you look bad. For some reason it seems to be easier to get someone on their own to put up a bad review than to put up a good review on their own. so don’t just leave it to chance. don’t be afraid, solicit reviews from your current and past clients so when a bad review comes and they will, at some point in the future. Someone is just not going to be happy no matter what you did for them. Even if you won them a million dollars or you got them off their 4th DUI.

Someone is going to complain. There are always people out there who do and if they do post a bad review, it will be in context with all your good ones and it really won’t be that bad of an impact for you. So, that’s today’s lesson. Make sure in your office that you are asking your personnel to solicit reviews. You can have a contest or you can have an award even if you have one staff member. Even if you just have an admin and you and that’s it. You are a small firm and pretty much you are solo. tell your admin, Hey Susan or Hey Mike, we really need to get reviews. I want you to start calling past clients, current clients we have. I want you to ask them and if you get extra reviews in a given month, I’m going to give you a bonus. That’s a nice incentive for them to go ahead and do that.

Just like my friend Al’s example, you may be surprised at the results. The last thing I’ll tell you is what it’s done for this attorney is that he is getting into what I call the unassailable position. In any given market, I talk to attorneys about this, when they see that guy or that gal that has 20,30 or 40 reviews, they think, “I can’t get that many reviews, my clients won’t review me. I can’t compete.” Then they feel demoralized and that happens a lot especially in the PI world. People feel demoralized by the big PI guy spending a hundred thousand a month or a million a month. Good reviews and a whole bunch of them are a good way to demoralize your attorney opponents and your competition because they’ll feel like they just can’t do that. So the threshold to get to that point in the market is far lower than you think.

It may only be 10 reviews on Yelp or Google+. It may be even 5 in your area if nobody has any reviews. So the thresholds really aren’t that high. If you were a restaurant, if you were a hotel then sure, you need hundreds and thousands of reviews but you are not in that game, thank goodness, so you just need a few. Look at who is ranking in your area for the keywords you want and then look at what you need to do to get to that level and above it. You will be surprised. You will see in many areas, again, it could be 5 reviews, 10, maybe in some areas as much as 20. But you know what, that’s like a year of work. If you are going to be an attorney for 10, 20, 30, 40 years in the future or even 5 more years, that year of work is going to be worth a lot to you.

It’s going to pay you back 20, 50 maybe a 100 times. that’s how powerful reviews are. I hope this pep talk helps you. If you need any help with the mechanics of doing this, of getting this done, we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve to talk to past clients and even current clients and to get reviews from them in an ethical way but in a way that actually gets it done, let me know.

Email me at Richard.Jacobs@speakeasymarketinginc.com or go to the website speakeasymarketinginc.com or call (888) 225-8594 and last thing, if you would subscribe and rate the podcast, that would be a great help to us to get this message out to more attorneys like you. Thank You.

 

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