How important are reviews for your law firm? Simply put, they’re crucial to your law firm reputation management, and, consequently, your success as a firm.
Star ratings don’t only help decide where to dine out on date night. They function as a virtual starting point when anyone needs to make a decision. How many times have you reached an impasse only for a higher star rating to become the deciding factor? The same logic exists in pretty much every industry. I’ve gathered some best practices to keep in mind when you decide to start keeping a closer eye on your reviews.
Reviews are an emotional reaction
They also tend to naturally elicit more of a negative bias. There’s a reason for this, though. While reviews have recently become more of a forum that discusses genuine recommendations, they still function as an outlet for people to air their grievances. A negative experience tends to bring about a review more often than a positive one.
Let’s take apartment complexes as an example. How many people do you believe have been absolutely blown away by a positive experience in an apartment? Most reviews for apartments read like horror stories because these experiences sway people to leave reviews, while the positive reviews typically consist of single-sentence responses: “It was fine” or “I had no troubles.”
There’s no harm in asking
The simplest way to mitigate the emotional reaction is to simply ask people. There are a multitude of tactics to consider when you decide to ask, and you’d be surprised by how many past clients are genuinely happy to help you back. As an attorney, you’re usually helping people during one of the most stressful times in their lives. If you can help alleviate some of their strain, they’ll often want to return some of the favor. Your request for a review simply provides an outlet for them.
People can leave reviews for your law firm pretty much anywhere
Online reviews are the key factor when handling your law firm reputation management. Wherever your law firm shows up on the internet, you can generally assume there will be a rating for it. You can think of it like your credit score. Different lenders will rely on different scores through different aggregators. While we may pay attention to only Google or Facebook for our reviews, there are a ton of different sites specializing in providing user reviews for businesses. Most industries even have niche review sites that only include businesses in a certain category. Yes, there are even a number of sites devoted to law firms.
But fear not…
There are a number of possible solutions to help wrangle in all of these review sites. Keeping track of so many review sites and star ratings can often feel like playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, but software exists that can help. And, of course, if this process proves too exhausting, contact an agency to take this load off your shoulders.