Full disclosure: we compete with the likes of a Findlaw.com, and the following post is my opinion based on 20+ years of experience and numerous cited sources agreeing with the same. While we’d love your business, we’d be must as happy helping law firms make better choices with their website and marketing needs regardless if it’s with us.
Anytime someone tells you to not use a competitor of there’s, of course you should have some skepticism. But take a few minutes with us on this blog post, and you’ll see that regardless of whether you consider us, you should most definitely stay clear of FindLaw.com. And don’t just take our word for it. See here, here and here as well. More competitors of ours…all better options than FindLaw.com.
Here are 5 reasons why you should ditch FindLaw.com or work with another provider:
1. It’s Overly Expensive
On average a website through FindLaw.com can run you $1,400 – $5,000/month based online research and previous clients. That is unnecessarily expensive. At most, you should be paying a few thousand dollars upfront for design/development, then no more than $50-$100/month for hosting and maintenance.
2. Your Website Isn’t Really Yours
Just a quick read of their service agreements (specifically section 2) details how much of your website you don’t really get to keep if you decide to leave. The bottom line is, your website, all of your website, should belong to you…every element of it. This includes full control of where, how and what you do with it. It’s just not good business practice to “rent” a website.
3. Cookie Cutter Design & Content
A business like FindLaw.com is successful at scale; simply meaning they make money by signing up as many law firms as they can and building in as much repeatable process as possible with their work output. Wash, rinse, repeat. There’s very little customization, personal attention, or uniqueness to what you will get out of it.
4. Their Own People Question The Value
Want to really get good insights as to whether a company is one you should do business with? Check out what their own people have to say about them. Look, you always have to take reviews with a grain of salt, but there’s strength in numbers and when you see a very low score and high volume of people commenting negatively, you need to take notice. Especially when much of the negative feedback is realted to customer service, value of the offering, etc.
5. Long Term Contracts
We are and have been one of the pioneers in no long term contracts when it comes to marketing services. A contract tying you to a service serves only one party, the one making you sign it. If you do great work, it speaks for itself and you don’t need to force a client into committing to one. You earn the work every month. A long term contract does nothing but create an environment of complacency for a service provider.
If you take nothing else away from this article, I leave you with this:
- The content you create should be yours. You should own it. Period, full stop, end of discussion.
- If it can’t be canceled easily and without significant expense, run, don’t walk away.