How People Find Lawyers in 2015

Curious about how people find lawyers in 2015, Moses & Rooth Attorneys at Law partnered with Mike Blumenthal to survey over 1500 people nationwide who recently hired a lawyer. Taking into consideration survey participants’ gender, age, location, urban density, income, and parental status, we wanted to share the survey results and hope you find the data as interesting as we did.

Most Common Way: Through a Friend

People turn to their friends for a lot of reasons, including legal problems. Across all demographics, the most common method of choosing a lawyer was through a friend. There were only two exceptions to this trend:

  1. Survey participants ages 18 to 24 years-old were more likely to search the internet to find a lawyer. In fact, 17.8% of survey participants in this age category said they had retained a lawyer via the web compared to only 12.1% who indicated they had chosen a lawyer based on a friend’s recommendation.
  2. Survey participants earning more than $150,000 per year were more likely to choose an attorney based on an internet search, than via a friend.

With the help of NiftyLaw, we put together this visualization to represent the data.

Additional Insights

  • Friend recommendations, referrals and word of mouth continue to dominate in lawyer marketing.
  • More women retain lawyers than men based on friend recommendations.
  • The use of the internet is growing and appears to be giving word of mouth some legitimate competition.
  • People with higher income rely heavily on the internet to find lawyers.
  • Younger generations also rely heavily on the internet.
  • Lawyers can expect continual increase in traffic to their sites as younger generations grow older.
  • Among the least sought out methods were recommendations based on TV, using the phone book, being in jail and using LegalShield. All other methods were much less prominent than a friend, referral and the internet.

*the question that consumers answered in the survey was an open ended question.