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There are five things your law firm website must do well to attract and hold the attention of in-house corporate counsel. If your website is junked up with Flash, a wall of text and a lack of a call to action, you need to change it, according to Ruth Davis, the Senior Director of Web Services at LexisNexis.

She was the luncheon speaker at the LMA Legal Marketing Tech Conference West in San Francisco.  Her pointers are based on a new survey of US corporate counsel performed by uLab | Participatory Design and commissioned by LexisNexis about the preferences and behaviors of in-house lawyers when they browse law firm websites.

Her tips included:

1. Informative, well designed attorney profiles. It is not sufficient to list only your name, law school and jurisdictions admitted. Clients want to see your "elevator pitch: (1) who you are, (2) whom you work with and (3) what problems you solve.
2. Clear and easy navigation throughout the site.  Visitors should not have to spend any effort learning your navigation system. Call things by their familiar names, for example, "lawyer bios" should not be named "who we are."  One GC said, "I'm here for a reason and it's very specific." He liked law firm websites where he "could get what I needed to get at quickly, and it gave me an impression of who they are and what they're about."
3. Detailed case studies and client lists.  It is essential that a website tell stories about results and successes that the firm has achieved. Case studies are what sell the law firm to potential clients. Law firms also must put a list of representative clients online, because clients want to see names that they recognize.
4. Integration between practice areas and attorney profiles.  Viewing a lawyer bio should make it clear in which areas the lawyer practices, and link to practice group descriptions that list the lawyers with the related expertise.
5. Clarity of expertise – both for the firm and the attorney. "The main reason I am on a law firm website is one of two things: either to try to find expertise into a subject area, or to look up a specific attorney and see that attorney's credentials and experiences," a GC told the researchers.

What to stop doing

1. Make it difficult to find whom to contact and how. Every lawyer bio should have a v-card, phone number, email address and land address.
2. Use extensive flash, graphics or auto-starting video. "These [moving images] are just a distraction. Just get me to what I'm looking for," an in-house lawyer told the researchers.
3. Leave visitors guessing about the firm's personality.  Don't let your website look like a travel agency site. "I want insights into people at the firm and what it's trying to accomplish as a law firm," said a GC.
4. Overwhelm users with content, especially irrelevant content.  "If there's too much going on and I have to put too much energy into it, I'm going to get a little frustrated," an in-house lawyer said.
5. Ignore the needs of key constituents. Address the site to whom you're targeting, be it students, clients or prospective clients. Make sure to give visitors what they want.

Click the link to get a free four page synopsis of the research.