Lawyer biographies are the most underutilized real estate on any law firm's Web site. According to Web site analytics studies, bio pages are the "most visited" pages on any site - and yet they are often thrown together as an afterthought, rarely updated and rarely enhanced with an RSS feed to atttract the attention of search engines. This is a serious mistake! Most lawyer bios will rank far below the same lawyer's profile on sites like LinkedIn, JDSupra or LegalOnRamp.
There is no better way to differentiate you and your firm from your competitors than a persuasive Web site bio. The best new bios will function almost like mini-Web-sites for the lawyer involved -- offering a wealth of links to text, audio and visual samples of that lawyer's actual work product.
This is the first in a series of posts on Web site bios for professional services providers. In this post, I would like to discuss the bio as a persuasive document. According to Aristotle (and all modern advertisers), effective persuasion relies on three factors: logos (logic), ethos (values) and pathos (feelings).
Most lawyer bios consist of a long, dry list of qualifications. In other words, these bios are using only "logos" to persuade -- and not very well -- completely ignoring the persuasive value of client values and client feelings. In the courtroom, any trial lawyer knows how to use values and feelings as well as logic in order to persuade a judge or jury. Why do they forget this lesson when it comes to persuading clients via their bios?
A good bio is interesting -- putting the compelling "news" about a particular lawyer up top rather than a dull list of areas of practice. A good bio includes brief, interesting case studies that engage the reader and demontrate how a lawyer solves problems for clients. A good bio lets you know what kind of person the lawyer is -- by including outside interests and first-person quotes.
I like to call this the "bumper sticker effect." When you are caught in traffic behind another vehicle, you can tell a lot about the person in front of you by the vehicle's bumper stickers. You can pretty much tell if you could have a civil conversation -- much less a relationship -- with that person.
Law is a relationship-based profession. Your bio is your vehicle. What do your bumper stickers tell a potential client about what it would be like to work with you?
