P2P

29 I L T A N E T . O R G G lobal buyers of legal services have similar expectations whether they are evaluating the lawyers and services of a firm in Brussels, Belfast, Bangkok, Beirut or Boston. They all quickly want answers to these initial four questions: 1. What specifically have you done? 2. For whom have you done it? 3. How did you do it? 4. What can you do for me? Of course, the most efficient and ubiquitous information delivery tool today is the law firm website. If your professionals' biographies and service and industry pages aren't meeting your visitors' very clear expectations, they won't waste another minute on your website. And if they conclude that you are wasting their time, you may have lost them forever. Have you tried to get your firm to invest in a more modern, high functioning website – only to hear one or more of your law firm partners say, "No one ever hired me because of our website!?" This attitude fails to recognize today's digital sophistication of buyers of all ages (yes, even buyers over 60 and 70) and ignores the fundamental shift in how business-to-business buyers buy – regardless of culture, language or specific needs. Two important statistics will hopefully help your lawyers understand the exponential rise in digital B2B decision-making: According to Forrester, "67% of the [B2B] buyer's journey is now done digitally" and Gartner highlights, "B2B buyers are typically 57% of the way to a buying decision before actively engaging with sales." In law firm parlance, "engaging with sales" means contacting the lawyers who can provide the services they want and need. The likelihood that the buyers' research is done 100% online is high (especially during and post- pandemic) – meaning, your website must prove that you are capable mind-readers and that you have anticipated the relevant details about you that will prompt them to contact you to learn more. How can you ensure that your site is performing at its highest level? Regardless of the size and reach of your firm, study the Ten Foundational Best Practices for global law firm websites and the attributes that are contained within them. They scale to a firm of virtually any size and jurisdiction. Stop guessing about what's working and what's not. For 15 years, the strategy, design, content and technology agency, Content Pilot, has analyzed law firm websites based on Ten Foundational Best Practices. These are the must- have features and functionality that visitors and buyers of legal services demand today and that your website must include if it is going to work its hardest for you. Analyzing the websites of AmLaw 100 firms in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2013, and then the AmLaw Global 50 law firms in 2016 and Q4 2019, Content Pilot researchers ranked how well the world's largest law firms were managing their presence in this universal medium. Each Foundational Best Practice has several "attributes" and in this most recent Study, we evaluated 71 of them for each of the Global 50 websites for a total of 3,550 data points. What are the AmLaw Global 50 firms doing particularly well? CONTENT Interestingly, as a body of firms, "content" as a category has improved from its lowest score of 59.6 on a 100-point scale (2007) to 83.0 in our Q4 2019 study. The visitors are the beneficiaries of this significant uptick in firms working to make visitors smarter and happier.

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