Stop Copycat Marketing: Build a Distinct Law Firm Website (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey y'all, it's Zach and this is episode 610 of the Lawyer's Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I talk with Karin Conroy about websites, marketing, branding, and why now more than ever it is imperative that you don't take shortcuts and just do copycat marketing. Newsflash it's because of AI. Well we're doing this episode right now because Karin was actually one of the people that started the Law Firm Websites contest and yesterday, the 30th, we started that contest once again for the 16th year in a row of the Best Law Firm Websites competition. So submissions opened yesterday, March 30th, and they close Friday, April 17th, and we will announce the winners of the Best Law Firm Websites 2026, Monday, May 4th. So head on over to lawyers.com and you can put your submissions in there. Submit your website. Submit a website you thought was pretty amazing. Submit a website you thought was really amazing. Submit a website that you made with artificial intelligence, which it'll probably not. I mean, I don't know. If it's good, it's good, right? And we will look at all of them, figure out which ones are the best, and come back with a top 10. So make sure you get your submissions in by April 17th. Now here's my conversation with Karin Conroy.

[00:01:55] Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Karin Conroy, and I am a legal marketing consultant who I feel like I start every episode by saying I've been around lawyers forever, but it's a good start.

[00:02:08] Speaker 1: It is. It is. Well, good to see you again. Welcome back to the Lawyer's Podcast. Thank you. I love having you on at this time of year, especially. Always like having you on, but love having you on at this time of year, especially because of that history with the Lawyer's Podcast. As it relates to this episode coming out tomorrow, we're going to start our 16th year of the Best Law Firm Websites contest. We're going to open up. Yes. We're going to open up the contributions and all that, and we'll get going with that. But as people who follow the show would know, you started that. You've been here since day one of that competition. I did.

[00:02:44] Speaker 2: Since day one in 2010, I decided to throw together this post. If people have been around that long, they'll know that it used to be this, Lawyerist was this basically a contribution blog where it was just all these guest contributors. And so I put this post together and I was like, you know, a lot of my clients ask me for inspiration. Actually, they don't really ask for inspiration. What they're really asking for is who can I copy, right? And they find nice words around that. And so we're going to talk about that a little bit, but there have always been some sites that I referenced back to. And it's actually kind of interesting because where I always started with my clients was not other law firm websites. It was, let's take a broader scale view of who is doing beautiful work in website design and what can we learn from them. And then it just got boiled down to, okay, who's doing that in for a law firm? And then we, and then we, I created this contest and it just ballooned. It went bonkers for years and years and it's still around. So I wanted to talk first about like, why, why did, why is it such a big deal? And I have some thoughts on that, that tie back to this whole idea of copycatting.

[00:04:02] Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the thing is like, why, why do people look at the, you know, why do you want quote unquote inspiration? And at best it is inspiration. Like that's the idea is, is going, oh, I didn't know I could do that. But at worst, at worst it is high, you know, legal marketing company. Can you make me a website that looks just like this?

[00:04:24] Speaker 2: A hundred percent. I've literally had people contact me and say, can you slap my logo on this? Maybe change the font color. And how much would that cost? Like, because the part of the problem is there is a bunch, so much garbage out there and there are these templates. And so in fairness, people are like, can you just make that a template? And so, you know, I don't want to be totally fair to these copycatter type people.

[00:04:53] Speaker 1: That's not what we're here for. That is not what we're here for. No, we're going to dog cuss them the whole time. Absolutely.

[00:04:59] Speaker 2: Exactly. Yes. But here's what I always said is, you know, no.

[00:05:06] Speaker 1: I will not do that. Yeah. That's not what I, that's not what I went to school for.

[00:05:10] Speaker 2: So you're a lawyer and there are these things called copyright laws to begin with. So yuck. Like that's problematic. So no. Second of all, what does that do for your firm? And what does that say about you that, well, it says nothing. It says nothing about you. It just says we're a law firm in X city doing Y practice area. And here's our phone number. And like, fingers crossed, something's going to happen. You know, like back in 2010, that would have worked better than it does now. You know, it may or may not have worked, but it would have worked better than it does now.

[00:05:44] Speaker 1: Right.

[00:05:45] Speaker 2: Listen, we used to, when I used to run a marketing department and we used to walk around saying inspiration in air quotes, you know, like what are we, we would look at the competitors. I worked for century 21. So we look at the other big real estate companies and like, what are they doing? That's working. And like, let's go get some quote inspiration, which meant like, what can we copy? So this is not a totally new idea, but it's, it's garbage, right? Like we're, we're not going to do that. We're not going to start with garbage.

[00:06:13] Speaker 1: Well, the, I think the bigger issue there is, is not the inspiration, the air quotes inspiration. The bigger issue is why, like, are you, if you're just copying something because you're just trying to copy and paste something, you know, we're really getting into this. And I think we're obviously going to get into this concept a little bit, a little bit more like that's, that's AI slop before there was AI slop.

[00:06:38] Speaker 2: Exactly.

[00:06:39] Speaker 1: You know, exactly. It's just, it's just crap. Why do you want to copy that person's website? Well, because it looks pretty. Is it going to do anything for your company?

[00:06:48] Speaker 2: They seem successful. So maybe that'll make me successful.

[00:06:51] Speaker 1: And so that's part of my, right, exactly.

[00:06:55] Speaker 2: So, but you know, I think this is a lot of what happens on social media. This is what happens kind of in the world generally. And so I think that was one of the things I wanted to kind of bring up is that this idea of copycat is not new. Like a lot of people think that's the way forward in marketing. Let me go find someone that I think looks like they're doing it right. And then I'm not quite sure what to do. So let me try to save money and time and effort and whatever, and, and I'm not sure what that next part is. So I'm just going to try to jump over that and do the same thing. Just short cut it. Right. And so what we're trying to say is let's, what would that look like if you didn't? What would it look like if you, if you actually use the inspiration?

[00:07:39] Speaker 1: Go on a follow me here. What if you didn't do that?

[00:07:43] Speaker 2: Let's not. Exactly. This is, it's complicated. I know. But the starting point is no.

[00:07:52] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:07:53] Speaker 2: Yeah. And I also want to start by saying this is not anti-AI. This is not like, you know, I am definitely not that. I want to talk about some ways you can use it that are different and probably different than what we were talking about in the past, because a year ago, AI was in a different place. Websites were in a different place. So I do want to talk about all that stuff. But I wanted to start with this core idea, like get this into, into your bones that what we're not doing is copycatting because that's the opposite of marketing. The point of marketing is to differentiate, to stand out, to position yourself as a different option that's clear and obvious so that when someone lands on whatever it is, even if it's AI, if they ask a question to AI, social media, Google, your website, the answer is clear and you don't have to work so hard for it because you know what happens when the answer is not clear? Now you're competing on price. So when, whether it's AI or what we were seeing 10, 15 years ago, what firms were coming to me and saying, and still come to me and say is revenue is down. And sometimes they'll say stuff like traffic is down and, you know, they don't really know what that means, but numbers are down. Things are not going good. They're not calling me if like everything's great, you know? If you're competing on price, you're all of a sudden hearing everybody's saying like, how much is this going to cost? Or even when I first started and people were saying, can you make that website a template? How much would that cost? That's a signal to me to say, oh, wait a minute, what am I presenting to you that makes you think this is about money, right? So let's reconsider all that so that now all of a sudden people land on your email or in your phone or, you know, those, those leads come in and they're ready to go. So that's where we're trying to go. That is what the point of this is.

[00:09:53] Speaker 1: So I want to go down a really, hopefully short, but really weird tangent.

[00:09:57] Speaker 2: I love it.

[00:09:58] Speaker 1: If you look at shampoo in Walmart or Kroger or, or whatever place, and you've got the brand name shampoo and then you've got a shampoo that looks just like it for the most part, but it's cheaper.

[00:10:12] Speaker 2: Yes.

[00:10:13] Speaker 1: And that's, so like, that's a good point. If you're going to copy, then you're competing on price and that's not generally what, what attorneys are going to want to do. But I want to add another thing here so I can bring us out of this tangent quickly. Users now, users continue, users of websites, users of our services continue to get more technologically savvy.

[00:10:35] Speaker 2: Yes.

[00:10:36] Speaker 1: Yes. And so they're expecting more out of these sites. They're not expecting some BS like, okay, well here's my first page. It's got no information. I can't help you. You know, I can't help you in any way. Yeah. It's got a phone number. It's got a picture. It's got, I'm a lawyer.

[00:10:53] Speaker 2: Some columns and a gavel.

[00:10:54] Speaker 1: Yeah. So they're, if they've gotten to your website, they don't want information. They want to act, right?

[00:11:03] Speaker 2: Right. They want to feel actually, the first they want to feel something, first they want to feel like this firm gets me this, you know, I feel like I might've said this before too, but let's just say for your shampoo analogy, let's just say you go to the Nordstrom site and you are looking for shoes and you land on the website and all of a sudden there's this whole dialogue about where Mr. Nordstrom went to college. And you're like, what in the world? I need some shoes, right?

[00:11:41] Speaker 1: He's published some amazing stuff on how to make shoes. Seriously.

[00:11:47] Speaker 2: Yes. In the law review in college.

[00:11:51] Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:51] Speaker 2: With shoemaking. Yes.

[00:11:52] Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:53] Speaker 2: Okay. And you're sitting there thinking, why would I care about where you went to college? I don't. Yeah. You got to make me care and you got to show me that there's something in it for me. So first show me the shoes. And for a law firm, the shoes are your, that I know what you are going through. I have done this before. I have this experience, right? So number one on the, because we're going to come back to the web. We need to keep kind of coming back to the website idea and like the contest and how this all relates to an actual website instead of just marketing theory. So let's talk about it because I could do that all day. I know we got a limited amount of time.

[00:12:35] Speaker 1: Welcome to the marketing theory podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

[00:12:39] Speaker 2: Okay. So we're on your homepage. We're on the website. Number one, that people, you got three seconds. Okay. Yeah. You used to have three seconds. Maybe you don't even have that anymore. Yeah. And those three seconds may not even be a human. This may be a bot. Right. So you got to connect to either a human or a bot saying, I practice this thing, but you don't start with that. It's, I understand the problem. I understand.