A person needs help with an employment dispute. They visit a law firm's website and find a page titled "Employment Law" with two paragraphs of general text, no mention of fees, no names and a form with twelve required fields. They close the tab and try a firm whose site explains exactly how it helps, what it costs and who they would deal with.
Law firm websites often lose clients through mistakes that are easy to fix. Here are the common ones.
Mistake 1: vague practice area pages
"We offer a full range of employment law services" says little. Prospective clients want to know what kinds of problems you help with, how you help and what the process looks like. Specific examples, in plain language, work better.
Mistake 2: no fee information
Fees are one of the first things people want to know. A site with no fee information raises doubts. Even where fees vary, explaining how they work helps, as covered in fee questions that decide which firm gets the client.
Mistake 3: legal jargon
Terms that are routine for lawyers can be baffling for clients. Write for someone who has never used a solicitor before.
Mistake 4: no people
Clients want to know who they will deal with. Team profiles with experience and a photo help people feel they are contacting humans, not a faceless institution.
Mistake 5: long intake forms
Long forms with many required fields put people off, especially on phones. Keep first contact short.
Mistake 6: no answers out of hours
Many people look for legal help in the evening. If the site cannot answer questions or capture enquiries then, they contact another firm. The cost is shown in what a missed legal enquiry costs a small firm.
Mistake 7: no explanation of what happens next
After submitting an enquiry, people want to know who will contact them and when. Say so clearly.
Mistake 8: no urgent route
Firms that handle urgent matters should make their urgent contact route easy to find. Firms that do not should say so, so people can find help elsewhere.
Mistake 9: outdated content
Old team members, old fees, old news. Outdated information undermines trust. Schools make many of the same mistakes, as covered in education website mistakes that lose applicants.
Mistake 10: no reassurance about confidentiality
People worry about who will read their enquiry. A short note explaining how the firm treats enquiries, and that details are kept confidential, helps nervous visitors make contact.
Fixing the mistakes
Most of these can be fixed without a redesign: rewrite practice area pages in plain language, add fee information, add team profiles, shorten the form, explain next steps. Then make sure the site can answer questions and capture enquiries at any hour.
SpideyChat for law firms answers from your own pages and captures enquiries in conversation. It does not give legal advice. The time it saves on unsuitable enquiries is covered in chatbots for law firms qualifying clients without billable hours.
Reading it as a worried client
Ask someone outside the firm to imagine they have just been handed a redundancy letter. Give them your homepage on their phone and ask them to find out whether you can help, what a first meeting costs and who they would speak to. Their pauses and wrong turns are your to-do list.
After the rewrite
With clearer pages in place, the assistant has good material to answer from. The guide to installing the widget covers adding it to your site, and training your bot explains how to refresh it whenever a practice area page changes.