Law Firms Online — Rebranding and Client Tracking

July has been a busy month for me in chatting with legal reporters about the law firm world online in 2015, starting with Gina Passarella’s piece for The Legal Intelligencer on Morgan Lewis’ controversial rebrand. Little did she know when our conversation started that I was involved in Morgan Lewis’ first website, some 18 years ago or so and in the firms’ shift from mlb.com to morganlewis.com shortly thereafter.

A few weeks later, her American Lawyer Media colleague Lizzy McLellan followed up with Online Rebranding ‘Not Just for the Big Guys’ in which we discussed rebranding issues impacting midsize firms–where there is not likely a large marketing team with a wealth of resources, yet still needing to deliver a unified message.

In “Firms aim to track clients on websites,” California’s Daily Journal staff writer Joshua Sebold spoke with me about a topic beyond site development and branding–the way web traffic can be tracked and analyzed in strategic business development. From web cookies to analytics analysis, tracking open rates on e-mail legal alerts, online advertising, social media hooks and tracking URL clicks, the beauty of the online world is still that it offers much greater hard data to identify return on investment than almost any law firm branding effort–online or off. You’d have to go back to tracking phone numbers in a Yellow Pages ad to find anything close. Or as my kids would ask you, “What are the Yellow Pages?”