SEO Grades for the Top 20 BigLaw Firms
There has been a long-standing argument that SEO is unimportant for BigLaw because purchasers of BigLaw services, in general, do NOT use the web to make a hiring decision. I tested this hypothesis through some detailed discussions with in-house counsel and upper management businesspeople. It became clear that SEO being irrelevant to BigLaw is an outdated perspective. Business executives and Joe Consumer both use the web when seeking counsel, albeit in different ways.
Based on those conversations, when scoring BigLaw’s SEO capabilities, we graded them on three factors important to potential BigLaw clients:
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1. Some prospective clients of BigLaw start their search entirely on the web, especially when looking for a very specific skill set.
2. When given a referral to a firm, many prospective clients use the web to validate that firm’s subject matter expertise.
3. Most prospective clients (corporate and consumer) research their potential attorney through a name search.
We broke these factors down into 22 specific items and audited the 20 largest firms based on the AM Law 100 by gross revenue. As an example of the things we looked at, we noted that only one of the firms used SEO optimized alt text on their lawyer images. From the grades below, it’s pretty apparent that BigLaw is not proactively guiding the online conversation about their capabilities and their attorneys.
| Sidley Austin | B+ |
| White & Case | B |
| Weil Gotshal | B |
| Morgan Lewis | B |
| DLA Piper | B- |
| Sullivan & Cromwell | B- |
| Reed Smith | B- |
| McDermott Will & Emery | B- |
| Jones Day | C+ |
| Mayer Brown | C+ |
| Dewey & LeBoeuf | C+ |
| Cleary Gottlieb | C+ |
| Skadden, Slate, Meagher & Flom | C |
| Latham & Watkins | C |
| Kirkland & Ellis | C- |
| Paul Hastings | D+ |
| K&L Gates | D+ |
| Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher | D+ |
| Baker & McKenzie | D |
| Greenberg Traurig | D |
