FindLaw Reviews: Read This Before Going With FindLaw (2024)

What is FindLaw?

FindLaw is legal marketing company, founded in 1995, and owned by Thomson Reuters. They have one of the largest legal directories on the web and provide website design and other legal marketing services (such as SEO, content development, etc.).

What services do they provide?

FindLaw offers a relatively wide range of services, but we’ll focus on the most prominent.

FindLaw Legal Directory

This offering has a large inbound link profile and listings in the FindLaw directory tend to rank well organically. In my experience, this is the most enticing and worthwhile product that FindLaw provides. Having said that, making proper use of their directory requires that a client do their due diligence and ensure that the listing is receiving traffic, ranking well in organic search, and placed near the top (to warrant the investment and clicks). As lawyer directories go, theirs is very competitive and among the best available.

In some geographies and practice areas, I’ve seen FindLaw do very well: the directory page ranks well for direct intent practice area searches and receives a decent amount of organic traffic. In others, I’ve done competitive analysis on a URL from FindLaw that does not rank as well as you might expect. While it may be receiving traffic, it does not stand as high a likelihood of converting a visitor into a client.

In every single situation where I have requested information for a sponsored directory listing, I have never received the analytics before receiving the quote. It’s imperative that you request analytics and do your own competitive analysis to evaluate the investment. This is critical because (as we’ll discuss) FindLaw makes it difficult to break contract, so you don’t want to make a long-term commitment on something that won’t generate an ROI, but this is especially true if doing so also requires a restrictive agreement.

From a numbers perspective, you may spend $150 per click for “car accident lawyer” on Google AdWords. If you were paying $1000/month for a FindLaw car accident lawyer listing that received 20 clicks per month, then yes, a FindLaw directory would appear to be a sounder investment ($50 per click). However, something to take into consideration: with AdWords, you can bid on the exactphrases that you want. With FindLaw, you’re bidding on organic position and placement (casting a wide net, if you will, rather than a precision strike with AdWords).

Here’s a listing that may be worthwhile, depending upon the price:

Why? It ranks incredibly well for direct intent personal injury SEO (e.g., “personal injury lawyer,” “personal injury attorney,” etc.) phrases. This listing could generate conversions, so dependent upon the price, this could represent a worthwhile investment.

On the other hand, here’s an example of a listing where the analytics may be misleading:

Why? Even though this listing may have historical traffic analytics, its current rankings for direct intent phrases are relatively poor (on the second page, at best). This is risky in general, but depending upon the price, it could be very much so.

FindLaw Directory and SEO

One thing to consider is that making an investment for a premium profile (the last quote I received was $299/month), with the intention of it helping improve the SEO for your website (as opposed to being a lead generation source), is always an option. You can receive many of the benefits of a FindLaw profile from the backlink alone, as it’s a DR (Domain Rating) 90 niche link and has a tremendous amount of authority.

Website design

Overall, FindLaw websites have a tendency to be very cookie-cutter, a complaint that is also true of their peers at Justia. That is, they have a consistent design aesthetic and they apply it broadly across their entire client base; if you see enough FindLaw sites, you begin to notice that they kind of all look the same, to an extent.

That said, I won’t hold it against you if you like their designs. That is, after all, a completely subjective thing. FindLaw sites are much like a Prius: they aren’t designed for flash and flair, but rather for functionality and efficiency. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but it does make it exceedingly difficult to stand out. Just like a Prius tends to blend into the traffic around it, a FindLaw site won’t make any waves for its overall “curb appeal.”

Now, let’s get to the legitimately bad parts of FindLaw website design:

First of all, their sites are built on a proprietary CMS (content management system). This means that it’s impossible for you to make your own changes (both while you’re a client and most definitely afterwards). They are, essentially, handcuffing you to their platform. In fact, one of our legal marketing peers (Conrad Saam) even has a “Jailbreak Guide” for escaping FindLaw.

Secondly, value judgments about aesthetics aside, the FindLaw websites that I have seen/analyzed have been uniformly lacking in proper SEO optimizations.

Marketing services

In my experience, their lawyer marketing services are abysmal, to put it lightly. Their primary form of link building is foundational directory submissions. Content is outdated and thin, as well as missing SEO best practices. Customer support is frequently slow, based on my first-hand experience with their marketing team.

One explanation for why this has been my experience can be found at GlassDoor. This review (on May 24th, 2019, from a current employee, no less) says:

And here’s another doozy (this time from former employee, in December 2017):

And here’s one more short Findlaw review from a former employee:

Do you own your website and its content?

Technically, you do own your website and content. That said, I have to mention that the website is built on the proprietary CMS. You own something that only FindLaw can update. It’s like owning a house, but not owning the land on which it’s built.

The same has been said about content. I’ve encountered many situations where FindLaw retained the rights in regards to website content. I won’t go into expansive detail regarding the specifics and fine points of a FindLaw contract, because another legal marketing peer, Gyi Tsakalakis, has done a tremendous job of that here.

The FindLaw client agreement is very vague, stating:

8.1 Ownership. The parties agree that, as between Subscriber and West, (i) the
Service Interface, West Materials, West Content and any improvements thereto
created under this Agreement are the exclusive property of West, and (ii) the
Content is the exclusive property of Subscriber. During the term of this
Agreement and thereafter, neither party will use, disclose or provide to any
third party the other party’s property, except as expressly provided in this
Agreement or as necessary for the parties to perform their obligations or
exercise or enforce their rights hereunder.

In short, this seems to suggest that while the text itself is owned by the client, the means to update or alter that text is owned by FindLaw. Essentially, you own the front end, but FindLaw owns the back end. You own the car, but they own the keys.

To be fair, there are some website elements not included in any files that FindLaw provides to its clients who have parted ways. FindLaw is not able to provide access to these files due to proprietary or licensing agreements. This includes things like WordPress themes, plugin files, and licensing used for features and functionality of a website.

We asked 30 attorneys what they like best and least about FindLaw legal marketing

All of the above is based on both our personal experience with FindLaw (both first-hand and on clients’ behalf) and those of current/former employees. To provide a wider view, we conducted a round-up of 30 attorneys.

Note: while this article purports to show the opinions of 30, we are only displaying 29. We did receive responses from 30 attorneys, but one requested a retraction, due to their pending litigation against FindLaw.

It’s worth noting that even this round-up cannot be considered to be completely unbiased: most of the attorneys who spoke to us have FindLaw sites. We wanted to be sure that the opinions we solicited were from attorneys who were (at some point) active users of FindLaw legal marketing solutions. It’s the only way to be sure that we’re collecting the authentic views of genuine FindLaw users.

Is it worth it?

tl;dr: No.

The FindLaw directory still ranks incredibly well, so a sponsored directory can be a viable option in many cases. I would, however, highly recommend that you choose another provider for website design or ongoing marketing solutions.t of interest. Also a revolving door of representatives so no personal relationship and personal accountability.

What services do you wish FindLaw would offer?

Findlaw offers almost everything I can think of. I just wish there was some accountability between optimization personnel and firm. Maybe an incentive program to actually give reps a reason to perform better for clients instead of making us feel like one of many all getting same product.

FindLaw review (1-5): 2

Is it worth it?

tl;dr: No.

The FindLaw directory still ranks incredibly well, so a sponsored directory can be a viable option in many cases. I would, however, highly recommend that you choose another provider for website design or ongoing marketing solutions.