Law Society of Upper Canada Currently Reviewing Referral Fees and Advertising Rules for Lawyers

On February 23, the Law Society of Upper Canada released a Fact sheet that discussed the new referral fee policy. The Convocation agreed that in addition to further strengthening advertising rules for lawyers there was also a need to establishing a cap on lawyer and/or paralegal referral fees.

While nothing has been finalized, the Working Group will return to Convocation in the near future with recommendations as to what the cap amount should be along with additional requirements for lawyers to increase transparency in their marketing and adverting efforts to ensure proper consent from clients with respect to referral fee arrangements.

Capping Referral Fee

In an effort to enforce transparency and proportionality in referral fee arrangements, the Law Society of Upper Canada is aiming to set a limit on the amount that can be charged for referrals and enforcing requirements to ensure that clients fully understand the process. In principle, this would ensure that clients would stay informed on the arrangements as well as have an opportunity to carefully consider referrals to the lawyer or paralegal best suited to assist them. The new regulatory framework would include:

• The amount at which referral fees will be capped;
• Enforce additional measures such as:
  • Lawyers being clear in their advertising as to whether they will be performing the legal services;
  • Ensuring standard referral agreements are signed by the client which would include having the referring licensee and licensee accepting and signing the agreement; and
  • Ensuring that clients are provided with more than one choice of lawyer or paralegal in the referral.

New Advertising Requirements

In an effort to instill new public protection measures, the Convocation also strengthened rules related to advertising legal services. Here is a summary of the newly proposed amendments:

• Amendments and further clarification is required with regards to the type of awards that may be used for marketing purposes including what types of awards are permitted and prohibited;
• Having a license in place for identification purposes in advertising that would indicate if individuals are lawyers or paralegals. This would ultimately allow the public to make a more informed choice of legal service provider;
• Enforce the prohibition of advertising of second opinion services. The Working Group found that the public is informed enough on the right to seek a second opinion and that advertising of this service should not be required; and
• Explicitly indicate what lawyers and paralegals may not advertise with regards to the work that they are not licensed, competent or intend to do.

More information on the Fact Sheet dated February 23th, 2017 can be found here: https://www.lsuc.on.ca/uploadedFiles/Advertising-and-Fees-Fact-Sheet-CAP.pdf

In addition to word of mouth referrals, a website is your law firm’s greatest lead generating channel. In order to track the effectiveness of any marketing campaign you’ll need to make sure that the desired actions you wish users to take on your website are always monitored and reported in Google Analytics. These desired actions are typically referred to as “conversions” in the digital marketing world.

Here are 3 conversion points that every law firm website should be implementing and tracking:

Live Chat
Every law firm website should have a live chat provider. These live chats are either fielded in-house or by a third party customer support center who have been trained to answer basic questions but then take down user’s information in the event there are specific legal questions that the support agent cannot answer. These live chat inquiries are considered soft leads – and can be reported on in Google Analytics. Having live chat on your website gives users (especially mobile users) an additional medium to communicate with you on that is very convenient as well as instant.

Form Submissions
You should have a contact us form on at least every page of your website – and preferably in an area above the eye fold – especially on desktop and table devices. We see that websites that have contact us forms in the header image space on the right hand side have increased form submissions given the prominence of where the form is placed along with the convenient access to it. Form submissions too can be tacked in Google Analytics and should be considered leads.

Phone Calls
Using a call tracking provider can give you great insights with regards to the volume of calls that are coming in to your website. We recommend implementing a third party call tracking provider – and then linking up the call tracking with your Google Analytics to give you a holistic view of the source of each calls. This is also great because in addition to the medium source of the call,  you can also drill down what campaigns or ads drove the phone calls.

A good marketer would ensure that these three conversion points are continually trending month over month. If these trends are stagnant or decreasing – it’s time to switch marketing providers.