The lawyers are streets ahead

Courtesy of Philip Hodgen, a tax lawyer in California I’ve come to know and count as one of the ‘good guys,’ I learned about Clio, a practice management system built on the saas model and priced accordingly. From the company’s blurbs:

Themis was formed out of a partnership with the Law Society of British Columbia (LSBC) for the purpose of addressing an identified need within the North American legal community for a practice management utility tailored to the needs of lawyers in firms comprising one to ten professionals.

The service includes document management, scheduling, time tracking and billing. These are the basics a small firm would need. What would be even more impressive? Links straight into something like Merchant’s Mirror, the soon to be released accounting service I mentioned yesterday.

I’m not a legal systems expert but I wouldn’t mind betting that what Clio is doing is not far off similar requirements in the UK. So given that I’ve not seen anything comparable in the UK for professionals, whether  legal or accounting, it’s not beyond possibility that an offering of this kind in the UK could do extremely well.

There’s a snappy 3 minute video explaining the service and in the US, it is already receiving solid attention.

Elsewhere, Steve Matthews talks about the importance of more finely grained Search Engine Optimization strategies for lawyers using the web to gain business:

Five years ago, on-page optimization factors were enough in many legal markets to create a competitive search presence. Now of course, this is simply par for the course.

Where there used to be two or three pages of optimized results for a competitive search phrase, in many markets that number can now span eight to ten pages. Which supports a point I’ve been making for a while now – good search positioning is at least 70% about a website’s incoming link network (and likely more).

Most firms should be asking:

• Do we know what websites are linking to us?
• Do we have a strategy to improve the quality (& to a lesser degree, quantity) of those links?
• How closely aligned, subject-wise, are those links with website content?

This is the kind of useful discussion I like to see rather than many of the limp ‘come buy me’ pieces I tend to see in the UK.  The same principles apply to accounting professionals so there is no reason not to take a leaf out of the lawyer’s book.

What’s interesting to me is that the legal profession in the US seems far more attuned to technologies that will heklp them in the future than their accounting brethern. Given the competitive pressure in the UK coming from many directions, I am surprised that more practitioners are not waking up to the advantages offered from taking very simple and often relatively low cost steps.

The economy is unquestionably tightening. The sooner practitioners think about adopting these alternatives, easier it will be to help manage client affairs. The links below provide plenty of extra information that should help you make up your mind about which SEO strategies are likely to prove most beneficial.

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Tagged as: Law Society of British Columbia, Search Engine Optimization