Chat widgets have become a go-to tool for law firm marketing and web development, boosting engagement the moment someone hits a website, and supporting client intake. This “chatbotification” of law firm websites with live chat features or conversational AI interfaces has its benefits, but quietly could be tanking your conversions.
Imagine this. You are a victim of a car accident. Frazzled, potentially injured, and busy with claims, phone calls, doctor’s appointments and everyday life, you set out to find a lawyer. There are hundreds of firms in your area, and countless websites to browse as you seek one who feels like the right fit.
And as you search, you start having the same experiences:
Almost every website you visit greets you with a pop up, chat window, or a loud audio message. In your quest to find a good lawyer, make a phone call, or speak to a person who can help and empathize with what you’re going through, some law firms seem more focused on pushing you into a sales funnel. And in the process, the features and website design, especially on mobile websites, make it difficult to find what you need or cover up valuable information that helps you make your decision.
After playing whack-a-mole with the ‘x’ to close the boxes, you decide to save time and use the chat bot. By then, however, you now feel frustrated and the valuable first impression with that firm isn’t off to a good start.
Why law firms use chat plug-ins
Chat plug-ins provide significant value to both law firms and clients. They offer immediate responses to prospective clients while automating portions of the intake process. When integrated with your CRM, they help create a seamless process for both your clients and your team. They can even assist with follow up communications, including appointment reminders, status updates, and client satisfaction surveys.
According to research from Hennessey Digital, 60% of law firm websites have a chat feature, with little change in the number of firms using on-site chat over a three-year period.
There are plenty of good reasons to have a chat plug-in on your law firm website, but the way many chat bots operate by default can annoy the site visitor and deter their user experience – and conversion.
How chat pop-ups shape user experience for law firm websites
A chat tool should enhance the user experience, not disrupt it. You don’t want a teammate who steals the ball or plays goalie against their own team. When implemented properly, your chat plug-in becomes a better teammate.
Last year, I wrote about over-optimization and how it can hurt your law firm’s reputation and conversions. Well-intended chat features are another example of how chasing perfect optimization can backfire. By default, many chat plug-ins over-optimize for chat engagement metrics at the expense of phone calls and form fills. Since third-party chatbot companies are often paid based on volume, their incentives are aligned with increasing chat interactions, not necessarily generating more phone calls, or form submissions. As a result, they sometimes take over up to ~40% of the mobile layout and interrupt the user to prompt them to engage with the chat.
Taking over “The Thumb Zone”
In UI design for phones, the most important part of the screen is “the thumb zone”; the area most easily reached during one-handed use. 75% of users use one thumb to operate touch screen phones. Hennessey Digital’s website design team takes this into account when designing law firm websites. Our solution is elegant without being intrusive.
Today, many chat plug-ins commandeer the primest real estate on the phone screen. They often overlap other buttons, key UI elements, and in some cases, actively interfere with users filling out forms. Users often end up using the chat because the plug-in interferes with every other option they have.
In one case study, a new client came to us concerned their lead volume had dropped. Upon analysis, we determined their lead form was almost impossible to fill out because their chat plugin overlapped the form. When someone was on their website and tried to fill out the lead form fields, the chat would pop up instead.
Many law firms allow the chat plug-in to take over the whole bottom part of the screen, and move their call and form buttons to the top, where those buttons see very little to no engagement. This can create the illusion that people prefer to chat, but in reality, the buttons are simply out of reach for the one-handed phone user.
Chat pop-ups can increase your bounce rate
Having a chat window can be helpful for those who prefer to engage that way, but it can also intercept your other conversion points and cause people to bounce before they have a chance to contact you. And when too persistent, chat features can break trust and leave a bad impression. Hennessey Digital’s chat performance data shows that when chat plug-ins pop up to disrupt the site visitor, the person tends to press the back button and go back to Google, not engage with the chat bot.
SEO penalties from pop-ups
Google’s algorithm also has picked up on the fact that users don’t like pop-ups, so they penalize websites that have intrusive pop-ups. The bounce caused by pop-ups can also hurt your website’s domain rating. So not only can these plug-ins be hurting your conversions, poorly-implemented chat features can also your ranking. Another thing many website designers often overlook is that chatbots can cause layout shifts when they load, which is a specific core web vital metric Google tracks and could cause a site to be pushed down further in search results.
Accessibility
Overriding people’s communication preferences and forcing them into one way creates barriers for people with disabilities. A non-verbal or mute person needs text communication, while someone with dyslexia, visual impairment, or limited hand mobility may need to talk on the phone.
As I discussed in this post on website accessibility for law firms, a personal injury lawyer’s target demographic is injured people traumatized by a very recent life-altering event, who sometimes are now living with a new disability. Loud noises and sudden pop-ups on a website can trigger symptoms of PTSD, and people with mobility challenges may find it difficult to navigate the cluttered UI that chat plug-ins create by default.
Missed Opportunities
Most of our law firm clients prefer receiving phone calls, because a person is more likely to convert to a client if they’re able to speak to a live person right away. If a chat plug-in intercepts phone calls before the user can make them, your firm might get more chats, but fewer cases overall.
Chatbots are designed for engagement, not conversion
Companies like Intaker, Juvo Leads, and Ngage provide robust tools with promising features such as more automated intake and streamlined client information. However, a fundamental conflict of interest exists within their business model – they’re often incentivized to prioritize their specific revenue channel (chat) over your firm’s overall lead generation. And do their stats take into account misclicks, bounce, or overall conversion rates? Even if your conversion rate goes up, how many $100k+ cases are you willing to miss because a person wanted to call your firm, yet instead bounced because of pop-ups interrupting that conversion?
The data you get from your chatbot provider may leave out key information, which makes them look more effective than they potentially are.
For example, during our research on chatbot performance, we saw a statistic showing that over 70% of users clicked yes instead of no on this popup:
This stat may lead you to believe that the pop-up is effective at driving engagement, but that statistic doesn’t tell you how many users bounced after, or clicked “yes” only to immediately close the chat once it appeared. In most cases, that data isn’t tracked. It doesn’t tell you if the user was in the middle of filling out your contact form when it interrupted them, or about to click your call button. It can’t tell you if you lost a great lead by frustrating the user or making the site inaccessible, and it won’t tell you if you would have captured that lead without paying their fee.
The Solution: How to successfully use chat on your law firm website
Chat plug-ins can enhance the user experience on websites for law firms while respecting your site visitor and driving conversions for your firm.
The solution is not to uninstall your chat bot, contain it.
Let your website design and content do the job of convincing people to contact you.
As Web UI designers, we care about performance design for our clients’ websites. We want to synthesize the needs of the users and the needs of our clients. If you look at modern web and app design, there’s a clear trend: key elements are arranged in a neat row along the bottom. Youtube, Instagram, Spotify, all the big apps on your phone have a bottom bar navigation. They put the most important and most common features along the bottom of the layout.
Our solution for improving your website’s performance and conversions is to remove pop-ups, and present contact buttons as equal options that are always accessible, but never intrusive.
This design we call our “3-Up Contact Button” design. We put the chatbot into the chat button, right next to a call and form button. Users who prefer the chat can still connect, and you still get to use the lead organizing tools provided by the chat plugin.
| Standard Chat Plug-ins On Law Firm Websites | Hennessey Digital’s 3-Up Solution For Law Firm Website Design |
| Blocks ~40% of mobile screen | Zero layout interference |
| Forces chat as the only option | Gives user the choice (trust the user) |
| Risks SEO “Intrusive Interstitial” penalty | Clean, compliant mobile UI |
The benefits of Hennessey Digital’s website design & chatbot integration
- You get data about the communication preferences of your users as well as all of the performance benefits on the back end
- Chat remains available, but doesn’t compete for attention at the wrong moment
- Eliminates the SEO penalty of pop-ups
- More accessible to users with disabilities or mobility issues
- Respects your potential clients and leaves a better first impression
- Gives you the ability to highlight your firm’s preferred communication through how it’s presented in the design, while leaving options for users who prefer lead forms or chat
Our research shows that different law firms in different practice areas see different proportions of contact methods, even with the same layout. This is useful information for your law firm to more effectively market your firm and communicate with prospective clients, because you know from your data and client base which client personas which contact method is overall preferred by your client base and who are more apt to prefer a phone call, prefer an email, or engage with chat.
For example, let’s compare two of our law firm clients using the same 3 contact button design.
The personal injury lawyer’s clients show a clear preference for phone calls, while the investment fraud lawyers’ clients overwhelmingly choose to chat.
This understanding of your engagement and intake data can guide future business decisions about intake and client communication.
Your homework: A 2-minute audit
Open your law firm’s website on your phone and try to fill out a form. Do you get a pop-up? Does your chat window overlap your CTAs or form fields? If so, you’re likely driving users away and losing out on cases. We’d encourage you to look at the options your intake chat plug-in gives, and turn off pop-ups.
Conclusion
Don’t let a plug-in hijack your website’s mobile UX. Instead, hire a Web Designer who understands website performance for law firms and is familiar with the needs of your users, and the needs of your business.
At Hennessey Digital, we are intimately familiar with the legal industry because we specialize in law firm websites and create every design with SEO, AI-search, conversion, and user experience in mind. We don’t chase a single conversion metric that makes us look important, we analyze how our design decisions affect your entire business from search query to case.
If you need a real teammate who helps you achieve your law firm’s goals, contact us to schedule a design audit of your website.