Why Do Some Lawyers Have Hundreds of Five-Star Reviews?

There are a lot of law firms with hundreds of five-star reviews.

Is there such a thing as “too many good lawyer reviews”?

If you’ve spent any time looking for lawyers recently, you might have noticed something interesting: several small law firms with hundreds of five-star reviews.

You’d probably expect this from one of the larger firms who advertise on TV and billboards. After all, these firms handle thousands of cases every month. For most law firms, however, seeing 700 five-star reviews on Google may (rightfully) make you skeptical.

Is it even possible for an average law firm to handle hundreds of cases a year (and make every single client ecstatic about the outcome)?

How Can Lawyers Have So Many Five-Star Reviews?

We have seen firms with only a couple years’ experience that have a hundred five-star reviews.

It is extremely unlikely that these firms have resolved that many cases in such a limited amount of time and just as unlikely that every one of their clients wrote a review (much less a five-star one).

Nevertheless, the reviews are there on the internet for everyone to see. How do they do it?

One method they may be employing is buying good reviews. While we sincerely hope no one is using this method, the truth is that companies do exist that get results this way.

Even if they aren’t using a company, firms and businesses may also have friends, family, or staff write fake reviews to artificially boost their overall rating.

Another method is to catch bad reviews before they get uploaded to Google, Facebook, or another platform.

We have been approached by more than one company who advised that they would get reviews for us and ensure that nothing but five-star reviews would be published. As you can guess, we politely declined these offers.

We prefer authentic, organic reviews from those who have worked directly with our firm. Our perspective on marketing is the same as our position on handling cases: honesty and integrity is everything.

Having a company “scrub” the reviews for us will only put a false image of our firm out to the general public.

How To Read Lawyer Reviews

If you can’t judge by reviews, how can you possibly choose a quality attorney for your case? Here are some tips to help you weed through those search results.

We encourage you to look beyond the amount of stars given and read what the client had to say about the law firm. You will probably get a better insight from the comments that people leave compared to the number of stars on a review.

A well-written review will give you information about how the case was handled and the communication with the attorney and staff. This is the type of information that can assist in making a good decision on which attorney to choose.

Don’t forget to read the one- and two-star reviews as well. Oftentimes, bad reviews have no corresponding comments about what the firm or business did wrong.

We have been fortunate to avoid many of these issues. However, in our infancy, Beers & Gordon received a two-star review on Facebook from someone we never met and never represented. To this date, we have no idea why this person gave us the review.

Another such review was from an IT person who we had stopped working with to go with a local company when we moved to Oviedo. Apparently, this was “payback” for changing companies.

Of course, neither of these individuals had any specifics to back up their bad rating because they had no experience working with us as attorneys.

Conclusion

We are proud of the work that we do, and we know that many of our colleagues do good work and deserve the reviews that they receive. However, we encourage everyone to be careful when using reviews only to make a decision on a law firm.

Unfortunately, it is too easy to manipulate ratings to place your trust solely in those five-star lawyer reviews.

Instead, ask around about the law firm. Get recommendations from friends and family members and thoroughly read the good (and bad) reviews posted online.

Second, meet with the attorney themselves (not an investigator) to make sure that you feel comfortable with the manner in which s/he will handle your case.

At Beers & Gordon, we have built a reputation of compassion, integrity, and professionalism—qualities that we bring to each and every case. If you’re looking for an attorney to guide, educate, and assist you with your injury case, give us a call at (407) 862-1825 to schedule a consultation with a licensed attorney.