On January 13th, Custom Legal Marketing turned 19 years old. Ok, actually our parent company, Adviatech Corp., turned 19 years old. Shortly after Adviatech was founded, we created the SEO | Law Firm brand which would become Custom Legal Marketing. While we weren’t initially focused exclusively on law firms, some of our first clients were attorneys and we quickly grew into the market. Today, all of Adviatech’s brands (Custom Legal Marketing being the biggest) are exclusively committed to the legal industry.
All that being said, we’ve seen a lot of changes over our nearly two decades of helping law firms grow. The law firm SEO process has changed dramatically but there is also a lot of technology that is part of our agency’s daily processes that did not exist when we occupied our tiny shared office in Tampa, Florida back in January of 2005.
I thought it would be fun to explore a few companies that are part of the law firm marketing universe which did not exist when we opened our doors in 2005.
YouTube - Founded February 14, 2005
While today, Custom Legal Marketing generates millions of video views, clicks, and leads for law firms on YouTube, and we built a studio in our San Francisco office to power CLM's YouTube Channel, the platform didn’t exist when we opened our doors. It was founded one month later and would be acquired a year after that by Google and then integrated into the Google Ads (formerly Adwords) platform.
Google Analytics - Formed in April 2005 After the Acquisition of Urchin
Urchin Analytics was the goto for most web marketers wanting to analyze their web traffic. In April of 2005, just 3 months after we were founded, Google bought Urchin and formed Google Analytics. This was the starting point of the Google Marketing Platform. All of the old Urchin bones of Google Analytics were finally put to rest last year when Google launched the completely new Google Analytics 4 platform.
WordPress.com / Automattic, Inc. - Founded August of 2005
It’s hard to imagine an internet without WordPress. The content management system powers nearly half the internet and the WordPress powered economy generates nearly $600 billion a year. While the open source content management system was released in 2003, it wasn’t until 2005 that the for-profit Automattic, Inc., was founded and the hosting platform, WordPress.com was launched. Today, Automattic powers many premium plugins that our clients rely on and the open source WordPress is managed by the WordPress Foundation, which was formed in 2010. Custom Legal Marketing began using WordPress for our clients in 2007 and has developed countless custom plugins for lawyers which helps us make award-winning law firm websites.
Spotify - Founded on April 23, 2006
Spotify was founded one year and 4 months after we were. Today, Spotify is a powerful yet underutilized marketing platform for lawyers. We use it for class action marketing as well as regional brand awareness. Not to mention podcasting which was in its infancy in 2005.
Dropbox - Founded June 1, 2007
Located in our tiny office was a giant file server and as we added remote workers we would utilize a VPN. At one point, we even setup a series of small factor Dell PCs that employees and contractors would access using remote desktop services like Logmein. Today, Dropbox along with other companies like Box, Sync, and Google Drive replaces the need for clunky hardware and allows us to share videos, media assets, and content with clients and remote workers.
Facebook Ads - Launched November 6, 2007
While Facebook, (the exclusively used by college students version) was founded in 2004, they didn’t launch a business-friendly ad platform until the latter part of 2007. Facebook Ads are used by our clients for everything from lead generation, to remarketing, and brand awareness while also used to reach younger demographics on our next featured company… Instagram.
Instagram - October 6, 2010
Long before it was gobbled up by Facebook (now Meta), Instagram was a photo-filter-rich app that gave everyone the ability to make their smartphone photos resemble grainy Polaroids. Today, of course, the social media platform is much more than that and law firms looking to reach younger clientele can use Instagram which is now part of the Facebook Ads platform.
There are of course, many other companies that were founded after us but these are the major companies that are now part of our daily law firm marketing efforts. A big part of our success comes from our ability to harness new technologies and make them work for law firms. Whether that’s a new social media platform or tapping into the incredible powers of AI, Custom Legal Marketing will always be innovative and find new ways to drive new cases to your law firm.
To all of our clients and team members, thank you for 19 years of legal marketing success!
