Twenty-odd years ago I paid a marketing company a monthly retainer to bring me cases. I could not tell you what they did. I got a report every month with a lot of green arrows on it, and I got roughly the same number of calls as the month before. When I asked which of those calls came from their work, the answer took three emails and never quite arrived.
So I cancelled it and decided to learn the thing myself. Not because I am technical. Because I wanted to know what was actually happening, and because at that stage of the practice, the retainer was real money.
What follows is not a strategy. It is what a lawyer who taught himself this the slow way would tell another lawyer over coffee.
The first thing I got wrong
I wrote for other lawyers. Every page on that early site was written the way I would write a brief — precise, hedged, technically correct, and completely useless to a man sitting in his truck in a parking lot with a hurt shoulder and no idea whether he is allowed to see his own doctor.
He is not searching for Connecticut workers’ compensation representation. He is typing hurt at work do I have to use their doctor. Those are two different languages, and only one of them was on my website.
The moment I started writing the second language, things changed. Not because I had found a trick. Because I had finally written something a worried person could read.
Keyword research is just listening, written down
Everyone makes this sound arcane. It is not. It is a transcript of what your clients are actually worried about, ranked by how many of them are worried about it.
I keep a note on my desk. Every time a caller asks me something, I write down the question in their words, not mine. Not the legal issue underneath it — the sentence they actually said. After a year you have the most honest marketing document you will ever own, and it costs nothing.
Nearly every article on this site started life as a question somebody asked me on the phone.
Write the answer, then give it away
The fear I hear most from other attorneys is that answering the question online means the person will not need to call. In fifteen years I have not once seen that happen. What happens is the opposite: they read the answer, they understand that you understand, and they call you instead of the firm on the billboard.
The person who reads three of your articles and then calls is a different caller. They arrive informed, they have already decided they trust you, and the consultation is about their case rather than about whether you are worth hiring. Those are the best files I have.
Give away the answer. The value was never in withholding it.
The unglamorous parts that actually mattered
Nobody sells a course on this, which is how you know it is the real work.
Speed. My site loads fast because I refuse to let anyone stack it with things that make it slow. Half your readers are on a phone with two bars in a hospital car park.
The phone number visible without scrolling, on every page, clickable. It is astonishing how many law firm sites make you hunt for this.
Writing consistently for years rather than intensively for one quarter. The compounding is genuinely dull to live through and impossible to fake afterwards.
Doing the same thing for reviews as for articles: ask every satisfied client, once, plainly. Then leave it alone.
That is most of it. There was no clever manoeuvre.
What it actually gave me
The traffic is nice. It is not what I would tell you about first.
What it gave me was a business I understand. I know where my cases come from. I know which page brought them in. When something stops working I can look at it myself, on a Sunday, and change it, rather than filing a request with an agency and waiting for a report with green arrows on it.
And it changed how I practise. Writing four hundred words for a frightened person about what happens at an independent medical examination forces you to say it in plain words. Then you find yourself saying it in plain words in the conference room too, and the client relaxes, and the whole file goes better.
I did not expect the marketing work to make me a better lawyer. It did, mostly by curing me of the habit of speaking like one.
If you are starting now
Write ten pages answering the ten questions you are asked most often, in the caller’s language, not yours. Make the site fast and the phone number obvious. Then keep going for two years without checking the numbers every week.
That is the whole method. It is unfashionable, it is slow, and it is the reason a small practice in Connecticut has been found by the people who needed it for the last fifteen years.
This is a personal account of what worked for one small Connecticut practice. It is not legal, marketing or business advice, and nothing here creates an attorney-client relationship.
James F. AspellConnecticut workers’ compensation lawyer, author and lifelong sailor.
