Apps, computer programs aimed at technological development and internet marketing. For many industries, this is the most normal thing in the world. But what about the legal profession in the Netherlands? In particular, many small law firms are active there, which traditionally have little interest in technological developments. What are the consequences of this, for example for a personal injury lawyer (Dutch: letselschade advocaat) and what are lawyers in the Netherlands doing with the available technology?
Personal injury technology
The lawyer is a broad term, which is why we limit ourselves in the following to the field of personal injury. Because technological developments made it difficult for many personal injury lawyers in the Netherlands. If you search Google for personal injury lawyer Utrecht (Dutch: letselschade advocaat Utrecht), you will not find a personal injury lawyer, but only personal injury agencies, what is going on?
Originally, personal injury lawyers are not entrepreneurs. That was not necessary in the past. Advertising in a local newspaper or door-to-door paper was sufficient. The Internet did not exist yet or was in its infancy. But when this came up, nothing was done with these technological developments. Personal injury lawyers kept quietly waiting for clients, no action was taken.
Those who did act were smart entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs, often also tech entrepreneurs, knew nothing about personal injury stories. What they do understand is reaching litigants through the internet, apps and social media. To help these clients recover personal injury claims, they set up a personal injury agency and hired personal injury lawyers who performed the substantive work.
Technological developments have sidelined personal injury lawyers in this way. The number of lawyers specializing in personal injury has therefore decreased in the past year and the existing lawyers are having an increasingly difficult time.
What does the lawyer do to turn the tide?
In the Netherlands, personal injury lawyers have run into problems due to the arrival of smarter entrepreneurs. For example, if we look at the results on Google, it is immediately noticeable that both with regard to the advertisements on Google and with the organic results, there are mainly many personal injury agencies and only a few law firms. To date, only a few law firms have succeeded in catching up with the personal injury agencies of the entrepreneurs.
These law firms have also been involved in all kinds of technological developments for several years. For example, these personal injury lawyers developed better websites with many technological gadgets such as a personal injury scan and being able to log into a file yourself so that the victim of a traffic accident or industrial accident can manage his file himself.
In addition to the website, you now also see that several personal injury lawyers are also tackling other matters, such as starting an SEA campaign and drawing up landing pages to ensure that they are easier to find in the field of SEO.
The legal profession in the Netherlands therefore has a hard time keeping up with technological developments. Fortunately, several law firms are now well on their way to all these developments. However, this remains very difficult, especially for small law firms. There is a chance that these law firms will disappear in the future.
