Nashville, TN (PRWEB) July 25, 2011
Amid fueling speculation in the online legal services industry, LegalHub.com, aimed at becoming a key player in the lawyer search market as well as the attorney marketing and lawyer advertising market, is set to launch its beta program on Monday, August 1st. The project has been a 9 month collaborative effort between Robert B. Trussell, Jr., former CEO of Tempur-Pedic International, Shane Messer, a managing partner at The Incubator Group (a Nashville business development collective), and AdDaddy Networks (a national leader in legal marketing and lead generation for attorneys).
Messer, LegalHub's front man and platform architect, has stated that the project has been under wraps for about 9 months due to privacy concerns regarding trademark and patent registration issues. Extensive time was needed for the complexity in creating such a unique platform. "There have been nearly a dozen programmers working on this project since late last year, and we've had to work through two complete rewrites based on one, evolving feedback from early-stage user interface testers, and two, complex social/algorithmic issues." Messer brought in his Nashville website design firm, Made To Order Websites, to assist in the initial core programming of the patented algorithms used in the site. He has also assembled a separate team of long-term programmers expected to take control of the site after the initial beta launch.
Messer, who has won numerous awards from organizations ranging from BusinessTN to the United Nations, has predicted a grim future for attorneys unwilling to embrace online attorney lead generation. "I'd say that within 10 years, 75% of an attorney's non-referral prospects will come from either Internet PPC marketing, Internet organic traffic flow from social media and search, geo-targeted impressions via mobile devices, and/or impression advertising, such as billboards, that consumers see along the roads they drive to and from work each day. The Yellow Pages, TV, and radio are going to die. People's nose's are pointed at Facebook, Google, and their iPad/iPhone during a serious amount of their waking hours. Our goal is to ease the impact on attorneys and help transition them so that their practice's marketing funnel remains full of qualified prospects."
Other members of the team include Raychle Searfoss, a noted SEO guru who, along with LegalHub's Marketing Director (and CEO of the lawyer marketing powerhouse, AdDaddy Networks), Barrett Sharpe, helped propel nearly 800 legal web sites into existence for clients of Lawyer Search, LLC (backed by RBT Investments) within 24 months. The dynamic duo have built a platform generating thousands of dollars in leads each day for hundreds of attorneys around the United States. "During beta, we won't be releasing all the features just yet, but instead will be really looking at our online footprints, as well as the impact of our pages in search and PPC. Like our other properties, we have to monitor daily the effect we are having not only on the lawyer search market as a whole, but also the indexation patterns that are so critical in this industry, which is dominated by Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Not to mention the impacts caused by their updates, such as the recent Panda algorithm shift," states Searfoss.
In fact, it was the success of LawyerSearch.com which drove the then-CEO Barrett Sharpe to contact Messer and inquire about building the LegalHub algorithm into an online platform, a place where lead generation could occur naturally between attorney and consumer. "We originally started out with Lawyer Search contracting one of my firm's daughter companies to assist in the build out," says Messer. "I was a bit skeptical at first because of his [Sharpe's] foray into online dating and the issues he faced in that space. However, as he and Raychle started working together more, I realized that somehow he'd managed to really become what I'd consider an oracle of knowledge in this legal space. The guy's talent in lead generation is so good that it's scary; my main question was whether he could translate that talent to the acquisition of attorneys en masse. We talked about me coming on as a partner to manage the development of the platform, so I got an extra office in downtown Charlotte so the Nashville business development team could be closer to the project. Everything just rapidly evolved from there. Needless to say, it was a good decision."
For anyone interested in signing up for the LegalHub beta program, they may visit http://legalhub.com beginning August 1st.
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