Dueling Websites

Rival Immigration Lawyers Compete to Create the Most Effective Site

Call them the Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa of legal marketers on the Internet.

Greg Siskind of Memphis and Carl Shusterman of Los Angeles have the most comprehensive immigration law websites in the country, and among the best legal websites, period. And they're head-to-head in competition.

When Siskind puts something innovative on his site, Shusterman isn't far behind, and vice versa. It's a friendly but intense rivalry that benefits consumers as well as their own marketing efforts.

"It's a healthy competition," says Siskind. "When he sees us doing things, he does improvements and upgrades. And our site wouldn't be as good as it is unless he was doing new things on his site."

Shusterman agrees. "I think by working so hard on each of our pages, we push each other to make the pages better. And that's good for the public," he says.

It's also good for their practices. In the past six years, Siskind, who in 1994 became the fourth lawyer in the U.S. with a website and the first with an immigration law site, has built his firm from a solo practice to 18 lawyers with offices in four cities. He gets 80 percent of his business from his website, he says.

Shusterman, who doesn't want his four-lawyer firm to get any bigger, gets 90 percent of his business from the Internet. He says this is "remarkable, because I was doing immigration law for 20 years before the Internet was even around, and had substantial business. This has changed everything."

He's such a key player in the niche that his recent online critique of the Immigration and Naturalization Service website led the agency to make numerous improvements on it.

Both lawyers unabashedly state that their sites are the best around for immigration law. While there are several other good sites, none is close to theirs in the amount of information, says Siskind.

"Other sites lack depth," he says. "Someone may have a newsletter but it comes out once a month, with six or seven articles that may be pretty good. But there's not a lot to make you keep coming all month long."

By contrast, Siskind say he and Shusterman "have stuff on our sites everyday, sometimes more than once a day." As a result, they both have booming practices in immigration law.

Both lawyers spend tremendous amounts of time keeping their sites up-to-date and useful. Shusterman estimates he focuses 40 hours a week on his website and another 40 hours practicing law, while Siskind works on marketing full-time and lets his partners and associates handle the legal work. Both travel the country lecturing on immigration issues and advising lawyers on how to market through the Internet.

That's great if you want to devote your professional life to your website – but what can a typical small-firm lawyer learn from these two Internet virtuosos?

Although Siskind spends an extraordinary amount of time on his website, he says other lawyers can have a limited website that's still of value to their marketing efforts, he says.

Adding content isn't as hard as they might think, he adds. Firms have memos and other written materials on points of law that they can place on their websites that are useful for clients.

"Self-publishing was never something lawyers could do before, and now through their websites they can do it," he says.

Nor is building a website difficult, insists Siskind, who does all his Web programming himself.

"If you can teach lawyers to use a word-processing program, you can teach them to use Microsoft's FrontPage [a website template]," he says. "It's not rocket science."

And lawyers in almost any practice niche can benefit from a website with some good content, he adds. "By the year 2004, 90 million Americans will have Internet access. That's as many as use the telephone or have a TV."

Useful content may mean something as simple as putting up relevant statutes and regulations of interest to your clients, he says, which is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site. Or try a question-and-answer section with answers to common questions in your practice area, he suggests.

Shusterman, in contrast, doesn't believe simple websites are worth the trouble from a marketing perspective.

"It's nice to have something up on the Internet that gives the basics about your firm, so that if someone is considering hiring you as an attorney, they can look at your resume, etc. But that, in itself, isn't going to bring traffic into your business. If you want to do that, you have to spend an incredible amount of time on [your website], and have lots of information on it. So for the average lawyer, it's of limited utility."

Shusterman also believes that immigration law – because of its national focus and the fact that much of the legal work can be done over the phone – is the practice area best suited for marketing through the Internet.

"I can't think of any area of law quite as good for the Net as immigration law," he says.

With all this attention tuned to making their sites better, it's natural that Siskind and Shusterman sometimes land on new concepts at the same time.

"When you have an idea that's really great, we both tend to jump on that idea," says Shusterman.

Take the day three years ago when both of them added immigration forms to their sites for the public to download. "It was kind of embarrassing, because it was within hours of each other on the same day," Shusterman recalls.

"There was a little bit of acrimonious exchange that day about whether there was copying. Greg had announced that he was putting forms up, and he thought I'd copied him. But I'd been working on it for a couple of months.

"We had a little exchange of e-mail, and I said, 'I didn't copy you, I wouldn't copy you, let's have a beer at the next [immigration lawyers] conference and I'll pay.' At that time, we didn't know each other. So we went out, I paid for the beer, and Greg told me all the stuff he was doing on his page. And actually, I learned a lot," Shusterman says.

They read each other's sites at least once a day, to keep tabs on what's new. And the competition, they emphasize, is strictly in the cyberspace realm rather than in nabbing each other's clients.

"Frankly, I don't think any client has gone from me to him or him to me," says Shusterman. "It's just competition on the Web."

Nor do they always choose to follow each other. Shusterman recently added an audio portion to his site describing basic aspects of immigration law. Siskind says he won't do the same.

"I don't see it adding that much value for us," says Siskind. "He's got a lot of speeches he wants to put in, while we're focusing our energy on writing."

Likewise, Siskind site recently became the first lawyer to enable his newsletter to be downloaded from his website onto PalmPilots. Shusterman doesn't plan to adopt that idea.

"Greg is 10 times the technophile I am," says Shusterman. "I barely know how to use my PalmPilot. My focus is really on content rather than on the technological stuff."

One thing they agree on wholeheartedly: The Internet can be a boon for business.

Immigration law is particularly suited to the Internet because it's strictly federal and administrative in nature, which means lawyers aren't restricted to practice in any single jurisdiction and can do much of the legal work by phone. Thus, a lawyer with a good website can attract clients all over the U.S. and the world. Another point: many potential immigration law clients are very tech-savvy, including companies that use foreign workers, doctors and other professionals, and computer workers.

Both attorneys believe the Internet is the best way to reach an international audience of clients. And they drive clients to their websites by providing an enormous variety of timely information about immigration.

No matter what your practice area, however, the key to a good site is lots of information updated frequently, they emphasize.

"Carl and I have always subscribed to the theory that if we have overwhelming content on the site, people will come to it over and over," says Siskind. "So we have a tremendous commitment to having a lot of information on the site."

For Siskind's site, http://www.visalaw.com/, that means more than 3,000 articles online; a 30-page weekly newsletter distributed by e-mail; a discussion board; hundreds of immigration forms; links to related sites; and a special area for foreign doctors looking to immigrate to the U.S. Everything is free except for information about the Green Card lottery.

Shusterman's site, http://www.shusterman.com/, has many similar features but is more streamlined, he says, with fewer articles but more analysis. He also has a streaming "news ticker," where immigration news is placed as soon as it happens, much like a newspaper wire service. Everything on the site is free.

Shusterman adds, "Information is what draws people to the site. Other lawyers don't see their sites as being dynamic. They put up a site, giving some information about visas and how to contact them, and then forget about it. Once people look at their page, there's no reason to come back. It's like reading yesterday's papers."

Constant updating draws people again and again – until the time when they want to hire a lawyer, when, these two hope, they'll be chosen.

"Carl's site changes a lot, and he already had a high-profile practice before his website. And it's a good news source. I've got to give him a lot of credit," Siskind says.

Shusterman is equally generous in his assessment of his rival. "Greg was a bit before me" in getting his website going, he says. "And he's always looking at the technological side. Having someone like Greg who's really good at the technology kind of pulls me along. I think, 'That's an interesting thing to do.'"

Take, for example, the e-mail newsletter. Siskind took the lead here, preparing a monthly, 30-page newsletter that he sends online to lawyers, clients, companies and government officials. It's packed with a wide variety of articles related to immigration.

Shusterman then decided to create a newsletter, too, but with a different slant: He limits his to 10 articles in each issue.

Siskind says he puts up so many articles because he's trying to attract as much traffic as possible because he wants his firm to continue to grow.

"Our growth strategies are very different," Siskind says. "Carl is interested in staying the size he is, where we're interested in growing the firm. So traffic is more of an issue for us, and the way to build traffic is through constantly changing information. He has a more commentary-type approach, where ours is just delivering their news. It's worked for us."

In January, both newsletters passed the 20,000 mark in subscribers "at exactly the same time," says Shusterman. But since then, Shusterman has pulled ahead, with 32,000 subscribers to Siskind's 25,500.

Although he doesn't keep a running total at his site of his subscription numbers as Siskind does, "I must confess that when I became No. 1 in circulation, I made a big announcement and put it up [on my site]," Shusterman says.

So he stole his rival's idea and did it better?

"I don't think [the higher subscription numbers are] because it's better," Shusterman is quick to state. "I want to say that right away. His is far more comprehensive. He's gotten to the point where he'll have over 50 articles in his newsletter. I do longer treatments with analysis. He's like the New York Times and I felt I should keep mine like Time or Newsweek, to keep it short, that 50 articles was more than my readers want to read."

In other ways, however, Shusterman's site is similar to a breaking-news agency. His news "ticker" provides the latest news in immigration law. And his "Visa Bulletin," which comes out monthly, publishes the waiting periods for Green Cards before the U.S. State Department or anyone else gets the information out, Shusterman says proudly. He relies on a group of friends around the country to fax him this information as soon as it comes out. The information comes from the State Department. But unlike Shusterman, the agency's computer programmers want to head home at 4:30. Unlike him, "They have no vested interest in being the first to get it online," he says.

Both Shusterman and Siskind enjoy playing around with new concepts. In December, Shusterman added a search engine to his site so visitors could search for articles or other information using a key word. "I just type in some words I'm looking for, and it comes up right away," he says.

"I try different things I think would be popular and helpful," Shusterman says. "Sometimes I'm right, sometimes not." He has been surprised by the popularity of his new audio portion, which is only in English although he's considering adding versions in other languages. The purpose is to soothe and guide visitors who are overwhelmed by all the visual content on his page, he adds.

Shusterman worked at the INS back in 1976, and at the time was unhappy to find little helpful information for the public about the immigration process. He started community outreach programs to help people apply for citizenship.

"The main thing was to demystify this whole process. And that's what I'm trying to do 25 years later with my Web pages," he says.

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