Attorney Lead Generation: Tips & Best Practices
By Trent Fowler
Aug 25, 2023
| 8 min read
Managing a legal firm is the same as running any other business. You need clients to keep the lights on, and that means you need a system for finding new clients.
There are many ways of doing this—word of mouth, for instance—but among the most reliable is establishing a lead generation pipeline. If you do this successfully, you’ll have the best chance of generating a continuous flow of prospects and clients.
In this article, we’ll provide a brief overview of attorney lead generation, how it works, and how you can use it to build a profitable legal practice.
What is Lawyer Lead Generation?
As its name implies, lead generation is any process you put into place for finding new prospects. It is still surprisingly common for law firms to use word-of-mouth referrals, mailers, and billboards as their only method of legal lead generation. However, by relying on these methods alone, your firm is missing out on a wider net of potential client prospects. Studies have found, for example, that writing a blog can boost leads by as much as 88% per month; but to do this well, you’ll also need some way of lead tracking, such as by using lead management software like MyCase.
Why is Lead Generation Important for Law Firms?
It’s essential to setup a robust pipeline for legal lead generation. One reason is that having many different sources of leads will protect you from a dry spell in any one source. Another is that people are spending much more time on their computers, with around half of the U.S. labor force working from home at least once per week. Then, there’s also the overall growth in online shopping; it’s expected that by 2023 as many as one in five purchases would occur online.
All this adds up to a pretty compelling argument for utilizing a broader portfolio of lead-generation practices. Besides making you less vulnerable to downturns of one kind or another, you can also better meet potential clients where they are (which more often is online).
Attorney Lead Generation Best Practices
In the sections that follow, we’ll discuss a number of excellent ways for you to optimize your legal lead-generation practices. Some of the most common are search engine optimization, email marketing, social media, content marketing, and PPL services.
Search Engine Optimization
It’s a safe bet that you are familiar with search engines. You’ve probably used one today for research or to find a place to eat nearby. But what you may not have spent much time thinking about is how pages are ranked.
Most of us don’t venture beyond the first page of search results, and that means if you have a website, you want it to show up as high as possible on page one, where more people will see it.
The process of ranking higher in search results is known as “search engine optimization” or SEO. SEO is a pretty involved topic, but the two major variants we’ll discuss today are technical SEO and on-page SEO.
Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website’s link structure, tagging, etc., so that it loads more quickly and is easier for search engines to index. Unless you enjoy tinkering with code, technical SEO is generally best left to professionals who specialize in it.
On-page SEO, however, is very different. It is concerned with the content—the words and images—on your website. As a legal professional interested in attorney lead generation, putting out regular content related to your field helps to build your brand and bring in potential clients.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an umbrella term for any lawyer lead generation that results from words, graphics, videos, etc., that you produce.
One of the best forms of content marketing for a law firm is regularly publishing blog posts about the field of law. Utilizing your background, knowledge, and experience, you can publish articles that answer basic questions that people might be searching for, i.e., “What to do first if I get injured in a car accident,” for example (if you’re a personal injury attorney).
But in recent years, content marketing has begun to expand far beyond blog posts. More people are opting to post short videos on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok alongside their writing.
And it’s not hard to see why; just shy of 3 billion people use Youtube monthly, the number of TikTok users climbed from 100 million in 2017 to 1.6 billion in 2023, and Instagram’s users have increased 10-fold over the prior decade.
Which path you should take depends on your circumstances and goals for attorney lead generation. As a legal professional, you’re capable of writing a blog post, and it is one of the easier ways to get started with content marketing.
But if you enjoy making videos or want to try your hand at podcasting, these are also effective strategies to establish yourself as an expert that others turn to when they need legal assistance.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a variant of content marketing, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Once you’ve set up your website, you can start collecting email addresses from those who enjoy your content and want to be updated when you publish.
There are several ways to encourage subscription to your content. For example, you may consider offering a free e-book in exchange for an email address. An active, well-established email list can be an important source of lead generation for attorneys.
Social Media
Social media is an important means by which people communicate, search for services, and connect with others. For these reasons, it’s becoming a common source of lead generation for attorneys.
Above, we mentioned that professionals are using social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to post videos. But you can also use other platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter to post regular updates on articles you’ve written, interact with your growing audience, and share any deals or promotions you’re running.
When used properly, social media offers nigh-unlimited opportunities as another source of lead generation for lawyers.
PPL Services
Pay-per-lead (PPL) campaigns are another common way for attorneys to generate leads. As the name implies, PPL is generally a form of online advertising in which you pay some service for a list of leads. Where attorney lead generation is concerned, you’ll likely be using a platform like lawyers.com or Avvo, which is aimed directly at legal professionals.
One thing to be aware of, however, is that you’ll often get mixed results. There may be some high-quality leads (those likely to hire you), but there can also be many low-quality leads (those unlikely to hire you), and you’ll have to sift through them all to find the gems.
That doesn’t mean PPL can’t be a worthwhile strategy, it’s just something to be aware of as you decide how you want to spend resources.
Lead Management Software
At first, you may find that there are so few leads that you can track them in your head or with a spreadsheet. But as your audience, blog, and email list begin to grow, this will be a less viable option. Lead management software, such as MyCase, that can streamline this part of your business.
Lead management software can also have other features to help your business succeed, such as case management, legal client relationship management (CRM), automated billing and invoicing, and ways of automating your communication with your clients.
MyCase offers all of this functionality and more, which is why it’s become an industry-leading solution for forward-thinking legal practices.
Lead Generation for Lawyers Is Crucial (But Doesn’t Have to Be Difficult)
Your law firm is a business and needs a continuous stream of clients and prospects. Even if you establish long-standing relationships with your existing customers, the fact is that people will move on, their cases will be resolved, and you’ll need to have some way of ensuring a supply of future clients in order to remain operational.
Lead generation becomes much easier if you’re using the right software.
Sign up for a 10-day free trial or schedule a MyCase demo today to learn more. We offer affordable monthly and yearly subscriptions. Plus, no commitment or credit card is required, and you can cancel anytime.
