Law Question Website

I wrote about a site called AskingLaw several months ago. The site is a law Q&A website that is taking off in the right direction. In fact they are generating between 6K-10K unique visitors a month (they supplied me with their traffic reports). Great for a site that has been around for less than a year. I have their RSS feed on my site.

The site caters to consumers looking for answers to their legal related questions, very similar to this site, however we don’t have the ability of allowing our viewers to ask questions. The reason for my post isn’t so much for the reader but for the attorney.

We write marketing pieces every now and then on this site. Something that we’ve not mentioned is your ability to market your firm on Q&A sites. The great thing about AskingLaw is you don’t have to have a log-in to ask or answer questions. They even allow the person answering questions the ability to link to their site and put their full contact information on their answers (great for exposure and picking up new clients).

There is no doubt in my mind if I were a practicing attorney ,I certainly would be participating on this site to market my own practice. The other nice feature that they offer is the ability to upload their RSS feeds. I like RSS feeds for several reasons. As an attorney you could upload one of these feeds to your site or even bookmark it on your browser. For instance, if I’m a practicing personal injury lawyer I may want to bookmark their personal injury RSS feed. Check it once a day, answer a few questions and get some nice link exchange which ultimately will lead to new clients.

There are other services on the internet very similar such as lawguru and findlaw. I think it would be advantageous to look at all three services, however, a free service without having to sign-in is ideal.

If anyone else has any other cool legal sites, please feel free to share.

Breaking out legal practice areas

We are going to try something new here at legalcatch.wordpress. I’ve made a decision to break out each legal practice area. I am going to create the ultimate legal portal with your help.

Calling on all lawyers. If you would like to supply content for your legal area please email me at rcartwell24 (@) yahoo.com

I am going to make a full practice page and link out to the different areas within that practice area.  For instance, if I’m a personal injury lawyer, I can submit content for car accident, suv accidents, slip and falls etc. I am looking for content and a lot of it.

The main topics will include:

• Bankruptcy
• Business Law
• Civil Rights
• Criminal Law
• Family Law
• Employment Law
• Estate Planning
• Immigration Law
• Intellectual Property
• Personal injury
• Real Estate Law
• Social Security Law
• Workers Compensation

I would also like to continue with the legal marketing section as well. I’m willing to listen to other recommendation you may have to make this blog easier to navigate. I would like to break each one of these practice areas out. If you want to be part of supplying information for this please email me. You can provide one link back to your website as usual. I would prefer linking back to the specific practice so my readers don’t have to search around your website for the information they are looking for pertaining to their legal need.

Open to other ideas!

Lawsuit Funding Website

As most of you know, I report on new and cool services relating to the legal industry. I had the opportunity to talk to the folks at LawLeaf on Friday. LawLeaf is an online legal funding service that matches people looking for pre-settlement cash advances, structured settlement annuity advances, commercial litigation funding and law firm loans. Based upon my conversation, LawLeaf does not provide the cash advances rather they match you with their “network” of lenders.

What does this mean to you? According to them, most people that apply for legal funding will search several companies before applying to only one. There are some people that do apply to multiple companies but usually this happens after the first company denies their request. With LawLeaf, you apply once and they will send your application to several different lenders increasing the chances of an approval. LawLeaf also said that many times the rates and payouts for each company are different so it makes sense to shop around rates and payouts for a cash advance. Their value proposition is that their lenders are ready to compete for your business.

I’m not too familiar with legal funding but apparently its a huge business. While legal funding is not for everyone, it oftentimes may help if you’re in financial distress and can’t wait for your personal injury case to settle.  I guess the way the economy has been of late, legal funding is certainly an option to consider for some people.

For me, I hope that I’ll never need to use legal funding as an option. The rates for most legal funding loans are typically a little higher than the standard loan. The reason is that most companies provide what they call “non-recourse funding” meaning you don’t have to pay them back if you don’t get a settlement. Very much like a personal injury attorney, you don’t pay unless you get compensation.

In closing I really like the idea that you can submit once and your information is sent out to several companies that are willing to compete for your business. It also behooves you to seek funding from several lenders so you can shop for the best rates.  With LawLeaf they will evaluate your case and send your case to selected lawsuit funding companies. Those lenders will take it from there and get the necessary information from your attorney to determine the amount of money they will loan (if approved) and the rate you will have to pay back if you get a cash settlement from the lawsuit.

This to me is a win / win for those seeking a lawsuit cash advance. Check them out at http://lawleaf.com.

Minor Updates in the Future

I want to give you a quick update on what is coming and what to expect over the next couple of days.

First, thank you to all that has contributed to this blog thus far. It has been a huge success and I intend to put a little more effort in getting your articles up on a more timely basis! I have been swamped over the past few weeks with vacation and catching up on my real work. I have found over the last 11 months that there are actually people out on the internet that find our (your) work helpful or at least that is what they say. As Pacino said in Scent of a Woman, Whoo AAAA. I love that movie.

As some of you know I am as technical savvy as my 3 year old daughter. I have little understanding of how this works and why so many people hit this site. I have been trying to figure out how to make this into more than just a blog and with some help from you we have been somewhat successful or somewhat not. A few complaints / recommendations over the past several months are as followed:

• There is no place for profiles or top contributors
• Somewhat hard to navigate
• Want more interaction
• Easier way to submit articles without emailing them
• Open up more topics
• Do a Question and Answer section on the blog
• Create more of a research tool and less of a marketing tool
• Accept articles that are not so spammy
• Create a better looking site

There were others that landed on my to-do list and I will get around to them later. I first appreciate the feedback and will do a better job trying to respond quicker. Let me comment on all of these items.

There is no place for profiles or top contributors – WordPress (the blogging service I use) tries to keep SEO tactics to a minimum and why I know that you probably want certain posts linking back to you for credit, I am going to take a pass on this for now. As you already know you can link to your posts but I think if we started opening up profiles they may consider it spam and that is not what we are all about here. I don’t even get paid for this thing. If you want a link that bad I posted a few months ago about putting certain contributors in my blogroll just as long as the sites were relevant and you are an attorney.

Somewhat hard to navigate – What can I say, you are right. I have tried countless amounts of time to change the code on this thing (I have no clue what I’m doing) but it doesn’t allow for it since its a free service. There are certain things you can do and not do on this service and that is one thing I can’t do. So my quick fix is the following. I plan to make the front page (default page) into a portal page with links out to your information. This will make it much easier to navigate. I’m still working on how to set it up because it will require some tweaking but its doable. Check back in the next few days for the change. However, if it doesn’t look right I’m changing the default setting back.

Want more Interaction – Interaction for what? I’m assuming you mean interaction with people that have questions regarding certain blog posts? If you want me to open up your posts for comments let me know. I tried to keep them close for several reasons, one being I don’t have time to answer questions, and I’m not the one that should be answering these questions. The posts that I do on this blog I keep open for comments, but the articles are up to you. It would also require to track your posts so that if someone comments or has a question, you can answer them.

Easier Way to Submit Articles – I’m working on it. The only problem is putting the code into a page. I will keep on trying so check back. I am also investigating the user options on this thing and may just start passing out a username password so you can publish these posts yourself. It does give me an option to assign contributors and this would really help me out to boot.

Open up more Topics – Suggest them and if they make sense I will open them up. I have about all that I could find and many are still sitting blank, so if you have suggestions, I’m all ears.

Q & A on this Blog – I tested it and got bombarded with emails. Its just too much to handle. I went out and found a site, which I think was recommended by someone here. I would love to have some sort of Q & A on this site but if it requires me to post every single question its not going to happen. On a given week I get around 10 – 15 questions and I don’t even promote Q & A. Could you imagine the time it would take me if I did! So my recommendation would be to use the site that I recommended at least for now. Again though, if it can be done without having to monitor it every single second tell me how to do it and I will consider it. In the meantime jump over to that other site.

Create more of a research tool and less of a marketing tool – I’m not in the research nor marketing business. This comment mainly came from visitors i.e. dissatisfied visitors I guess. That is just out of my scope. I also never considered this a marketing tool. I feel like this is a blog of legal information and nothing more. I guess if you consider the links going to the contributors a marketing tool than I suppose you may be right. For now I don’t have the time to gather all the laws on each state nor barely write this post. If someone would like to create a small research tool, send me the content and I will post it in a research category.

Accept articles that are not so spammy – If you guys think these are spammy you should see what I don’t publish! I have done a better job in looking over all the submissions. I also have a guy that is gathering other articles and sends them over to me. As a team effort, I would call it a success thus far. My suggestion would be to tell me which articles look really spammy and I will remove them if I agree. I personally know about 90-95% of these posts are good posts with a ton of helpful information. Tell me what the other 5-10% and I will look at them.

Create a Better looking Site – I recently changed out the template and I think this looks much better! I love the look and got some decent feedback from many of you. I made the change about 3 days ago.

For the most part all positive feedback accept from a few, although I did enjoy the emails from all. I will begin making changes asap. I am also looking for other cool and exciting sites that are geared towards the legal community so I can make people aware of their options when looking for legal information. If anyone has recommendations continue to send them. Also, let me know how you feel about this template.

Ask a legal question

As some of you know I opted out of posting legal questions on this blog, at least for now. Its hard enough for me to keep active with everything else. I posted a few months ago regarding a legal service for ask & answer questions for the legal industry. Very much like yahoo without all the crazy point systems etc. I have since sent them about a dozen or so questions that I get from this blog.

If you have a legal question visit this site www.askinglaw.com and ask it. You can now post a question without having to log in or sign-in. It seems like it would be pretty easy. The other nice thing about this is the fact they monitor the Q&A so you don’t get a bunch of spam and nonsense.

I highly recommend if you are looking for additional information regarding your legal needs, you visit this site and ask a question.

BTW- for those attorneys and legal experts and whomever else that submits posts and articles to this blog, I am taking a needed vacation at the end of the month. So if you have things that need to be added to the site, email me them within the next two weeks. I will have limited access to emails and probably won’t do much with the site for the 2 weeks I’m gone.

Back to homepage for Law Information

TargetLaw’s Lawyer Search

Lawyer Search

Are you having trouble locating the right attorney? Have you searched through legal directories only to find out the attorney no longer practices law, changed their practice areas or even location? Are you annoyed by the fact it is taking so long to locate the right attorney or perhaps confused on which type of attorney you should hire? If you have answered yes to these questions, you now belong to an elite group of people searching for lawyers online. Unfortunately the number is on the rise.

TargetLaw is an all lawyer search engine consisting of only lawyers, law firms and attorneys. Our concept is to make it as easiest as possible for a consumer looking for a lawyer to search and find the right attorney each and every time.

Why is TargetLaw so unique?

There are hundreds of lawyer referral programs available on the internet. These programs are set-up mainly to make money on your referral. Unfortunately it makes no difference on the experience and qualifications of a lawyer, if an attorney is willing to pay the company fees for your referral, they will receive your name. There are some programs in which you get placed in a holding tank and your name is handed out to several attorneys. These programs can be called “first come, first serve.” Again, makes no difference on how good the lawyer may be, ultimately you are just another number to a referral company.

Lawyer directories although can be useful, they also can be frustrating. A lawyer directory typically consists of those attorneys willing to pay a fee to be listed in a lawyer directory. Again, makes no difference if you are qualified or experienced in a practice area, if you are willing to pay the company money, you will get listed! Furthermore, a lawyer directory can not be tailored to attorneys retiring, changes practice areas and changing location, unless the attorney manually goes in and changes his or hers listing. This can result in information that is outdated and ultimately causes frustration to the end user looking for the right lawyer to handle his or her case.

So why is TargetLaw so unique? TargetLaw is a lawyer search engine consisting of only lawyers, law firms and attorneys. When performing a search within the attorney search engine you will be presented with all lawyer websites. Depending upon your searches depends upon the relevancy of each search. Search for location and practice areas and the search result will present the best results for that search. Furthermore, each attorney can submit their lawyer website for free. The reason we don’t charge to be listed in our lawyer search engine is because we don’t want to limit people looking for attorneys only to those who pay. This gives the consumer more choices and the comfort that they can locate an attorney in an unbiased manner.

Furthermore, TargetLaw allows the end user to locate that attorney within 2 clicks; put in your search ie. “New York Personal Injury Lawyer” and the second by clicking on a website. Less time clicking through directories or filling out your name for call backs through a referral program and more time looking and investigating the right attorney for you case. With TargetLaw, you now have more time to investigate each firm and less wasted time actually locating an attorney.

TargetLaw’s lawyer search is the quickest and easiest way of locating an attorney for your legal issue. If you are currently looking for legal representation, visit TargetLaw today.

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NEED A Lawyer? Check out our Lawyer Directory!

Lawyer Search

TargetLaw is a leader in Lawyer Search

If you are searching for legal representation where do you turn? How do you know if the lawyer is qualified to handle your case? The simple answer to these questions is simply by looking at their website and finding out if they are qualified to handle your case.

People today rely on the internet for all sort of products and services. Seeking legal representation is no different. On average a consumer will investigate an attorney prior to hiring him or her. People tend to look at the content of a website and make an informed and educated decision on whether to hire the lawyer or not. This is why so many attorneys are focusing more of their marketing dollars into their websites now than ever. The decision process starts with the consumer looking for information regarding their legal need. Once they found the information they are looking for, many will search for a lawyer that handles their case.

It was not long ago that the only way to find an attorney was either through the local bar association, yellow page ads and possibly a referral from a friend. The internet has made it much easier for those people searching for legal representation. Still though, it may be a daunting process locating a qualified attorney in your area. TargetLaw is a lawyer search engine consisting of lawyers and attorneys located around the United States. Currently the search engine has close to 50,000 lawyer websites from attorneys located around the US. The search engine consists of only attorney websites which allows the end-user to easily locate an attorney by practice area and by location every single search. If you are a consumer looking for an attorney a great place to start is TargetLaw!

If you are an attorney and have not yet submitted your lawyer website into TargetLaw’s Lawyer Search Engine, do so immediately.

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NEED A Lawyer? Check out our Lawyer Directory!

Law Q&A

Just the other day we posted a few questions that I received from several people looking for legal advice. We had several people respond to the questions and I’m not even sure whether the information that was provided is correct but you did respond and I will keep it up on the blog. As most of us know, this blog is really only a legal information blog and I don’t think I feel like housing legal questions on this blog because of several reasons. First, keeping up with the articles is almost like a full time job for me. Second, as you can see I don’t make dollar one from this blog. With that being said, I just don’t have the time to keep up with all the legal questions from our readers. So I went out and posted a message on this blog about a week ago stating that I would at least send these questions somewhere for others to post. Well I received an email almost immediately from a site called AskingLaw. This is a legal blog for Q&A. I decided to include them on my blogroll because its actually a pretty cool concept. The way it works is you email them the question, they take a look at the question, and if its a legitimate question they will post it for you and send you back an incoming link to your post. Than either they answer the questions or maybe some other people answer them, I’m really not too sure. So my point is if you have legal questions head over to their site and email them your questions. From the looks of some of these questions I think the only requirement is explaining the case in detail. In any event you can still send me your questions, but I’m probably not posting them on this site. I will email all questions to them. Over the past week I think I sent close to 15 questions to them. I’m not really sure whether they posted the questions, but for those people that emailed me questions, look at their site, perhaps they have your question/questions posted.

If anyone else has a cool blog, site or product, I’m all ears. Send me your link and I will at least check out your site. If I think its a decent product and adds value to this blog, I will post a comment on this blog.

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Wilmington Delaware Personal Injury

My husband was involved in a slip and fall accident inside a grocery over the weekend. His knee swelled up and he is having a hard time supporting himself. We ended up going to the emergency room the same day and he didn’t break the leg but instead it was a serious sprain. Because he involved in construction he isn’t going to be able to go to work for the next week or so. Unfortunately if he doesn’t work we don’t get paid. My question is, can we somehow get compensated for both the hospital bill and for him losing time away from work, loss wages? I know we can probably get money for the hospital visit but I’m not too sure for him being out of work. How much will it cost and is it even worth us filing a lawsuit against the store? If there is an affordable lawyer or law firm in Wilmington DE can someone please let me know? I was considering contacting an attorney and a referral would be great. Any suggestions please!!!

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Divorce Attorney in Pembroke Maine

I reside in Pembroke Maine and I’m looking for a lawyer referral for a good divorce lawyer. I caught my husband of 20 years cheating on me. He apparently was having a relationship behind my back for almost 2 years. We have 2 kids both of which are still in high school, we own a house and have other assets in which I would like to protect. What I need is a Lawyer located in or around the Pembroke area which will aggressively represent me for child custody, divorce and to ultimately get me whats rightfully mine.

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