OUR eLAWYERING SLIDES FROM ABA TECHSHOW

Here are slides from a presentation I did at Techshow with Will Hornsby, the American Bar Association's guru on marketing and advertising ethics as well as eLawyering expert Judge Monty Ahalt.

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Comments

[R. Lawson]

Interesting slide on the "latent market" and how you are using the Internet to reach low and middle class customers.

Politics aside, I think the working poor are at this point in time part of the digital divide, so reaching them will be difficult. They may need to use public Internet access (the library).

The middle class and upper middle class may not be so inclined to use the Internet for professional services because the percieved value of services over the Internet.

People see Internet based content as "cheap". So I think a challenge in selling any professional service over the Internet is to somehow make the consumer percieve it as having the same value.

I have taken online courses, and the instructors intentially made the course hard in order to avoid such a reputation. I have a friend who is a psychologist - and was offering online counseling using webcasting software. The target was rural customers or immobile people. The business problem was that the rural lacked highspeed Internet access and disabled or elderly people are usually on a tight budget.

I would be apprehensive about using online legal service for the same reason I would be apprehensive about buying "prepaid legal services" sold by people who aren't legal professionals and have no knowledge of that business. How do you overcome the "cheap effect" for lack of a better word? Is there a way to make your customers feel like they are getting equal value online that they would get in your office?