Survey Results: COVID-19 Impact Assessment on Legal Marketing

In Gittings’s short April 2020 “COVID-19 Impact Assessment on Legal Marketing” survey, we uncovered several interesting findings:

1. 1. Respondents reported a “major increase” (scoring 10 on a scale of 1-10) in: visits to the firm website, visits to and views of lawyer bios, and visits to the news pages. Marketers reported that practice and industry pages were getting essentially the same traffic as before the pandemic. There is an opportunity to keep this traffic high as the COVID curve flattens by ensuring that your content is tailored to your strengths, is differentiating, a crisp read, and timely.
   2. More than 2/3 of legal marketers believe that lateral hiring will decrease throughout 2020. This is consistent with other reports we hear, while law firms will continue to make lateral hiring a priority, they are saying they will be much more cautious about partners they consider. According to The McCormick Group’s Lateral Partner Report, “…they will limit their consideration to those partners with a so-called ‘sure’ book of business, and will overlook the perceived high-risk, but potentially high-reward candidates that can often be game-changers.”
   3. 40% of the respondents do have 2020 website projects scheduled and 75% of those marketers expect they will move forward once things get back to “normal.” We can’t predict when “normal” will occur, but we expect it will be more likely in 2021. 80% of survey respondents believe their current lawyer bio photos make a strong first impression. In the current age of little or no travel to conferences or face-to-face meetings, warm and engaging website portraits are more important than ever. Even for existing websites, if there is no budget to do a full redesign of the website, a refresh of the lawyer photography and bio-design can do wonders. Since 45-75% of all visitors to a law firm website are viewing lawyer biographies, these pages are critical to get right. Relationships with current vendor-partners are, in most cases, on solid footing. 70% of respondents said they would “probably” or “definitely lean into current relationships” during this time. This is good news for the loyalty that marketers feel for their trusted vendor colleagues.

We hope this bit of data is helpful to you as you continue to identify ways to excel during 2020 and beyond. Screenshot the graphic below with a summary of our findings!