Avoiding Online Embarrassment

I found myself tonight looking up local attorneys… online of course. I got a list of the usual suspects, names that I’ve heard around town, shingles that I’ve walked by dozens of times.

As I clicked through the list provided by that wonderful Google Local, I noticed something crazy. Attorneys are masters of minutia – trained to catch the small stuff that business owners, real estate buyers, and other professional miss. They are paid hundreds of dollars per hour to be your second and third set of eyes, to catch the easily missed, to think of the questions you didn’t ask.

When I’m ranking an attorney, or even more important, qualifying attorneys to hire for a single project or a long-term relationship, I’m looking for specific experience, reviews, and overall first impression. A lot of that first impression comes from attention to detail.

When I visited the website of a local Keene law firm – one with a great reputation – I was shocked to find not one but FOUR typos in one attorney’s profile. Hilariously enough, one of the items misspelled was “docotrate” as in Juris Doctorate – the J.D. at the end of licensed attorneys’ names!

Needless to say, I will not be working with this law firm. Will they survive? Sure, I’m a small fish. For me, it’s egregious for two reasons – first, I’ve already covered that attention to detail is where good attorneys make a huge difference for their clients.

Second, when is the last time you typed ANYTHING that didn’t have a spell check? Or better yet, when was the last time you typed “adn” instead of “and” and your platform didn’t automatically correct you? This just screams that this law firm has a website created in an archaic html hard-coded boiler plate. It’s lazy. For God’s sake, update your website. It probably hasn’t been touched since Al Gore invented the internet.

Laziness and lack of attention to detail are not the greatest traits of a law firm.

As T. Harv Eker said “How you do anything is how you do everything.“