FindLaw Shutting Down Free Firm Sites; Justia Offers Free Migration Solution for FindLaw’s Law Firm Web Site Clients

Yesterday, Chris Fontes, the Senior Director of Strategic Marketing at FindLaw, notified law firms that FindLaw was shutting down their law firm web sites. In his e-mail, Fontes explained, “For the last several years, FindLaw...

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Yesterday, Chris Fontes, the Senior Director of Strategic Marketing at FindLaw, notified law firms that FindLaw was shutting down their law firm web sites. In his e-mail, Fontes explained,

“For the last several years, FindLaw has been hosting a Web site for you at no charge…. Because of technical and business constraints, we are no longer able to provide this service. We are writing to inform you that this site will be removed from our servers on August 1, 2005.”

Since you only have 2 1/2 weeks to find a new online home for your law firm, here’s a checklist on how to smoothly handle your web site eviction.

• Make a Back-Up Copy of All the Content on Your Web Site. Building a new web site takes time. You need a paragraph to describe your law firm. Another paragraph covering your own experience and achievements. You may also want to display some articles that you have authored just to showcase your knowledge and areas of expertise. Preparing all these elements for a web site can be a time consuming. However, if you’ve already done it once before, you should take full advantage of your prior work. Either copy and paste the content from your FindLaw FirmSite to a Microsoft Word document, or save each individual web page (control-S) from the web browser itself. Now you can refer to your web site even after FindLaw evicts all the free law firm web sites from their servers.
• Sign-Up for a New Search Engine Optimized Law Firm Web Site. Justia offers Free Search Engine Optimized Web Sites for lawyers or law firms. Their free package includes:
  • Template Web Design
  • Search Engine Optimized Pages, covering one practice area, one city and one state
  • Firm Home Page
  • Firm Profile Page
  • Firm Location Page
  • Practice Area Profiles
  • Attorney Profiles
  • Web Resources Page
  • Legal Articles Section
  • W3C Web Standards Design & Layout
  • U.S. 508 and W3C’s Web Accessibility Guidelines

• Set-Up Your New Justia Law Firm Web Site. Law firms that have an existing web site really have an advantage here. By copying-and-pasting their content from their old site to their new one, law firms can quickly launch their new online presence. Here’s an actual free web site built by one of Justia’s clients:

Does your existing free (or even paid) web site appear as stylish as the one above? With free web building tools and free web site designs, Justia offers FindLaw’s Firm Site clients an easy migration path to a new search engine optimized law firm web site from Justia. Start building your new search engine optimized web site today by visiting http://freedom.justia.com/.