Traffic Lawyer Directory Statistics

Noticed an interesting set of statistics about our directory of traffic lawyers just now.

The image below shows the number of visits to the various pages within the directory. Click on the image to enlarge it. The stats are for the last October 21 to November 20.

Most interesting numbers:
a. 11,424 total pageviews and 7737 unique pageviews. As a rough guess, it looks like maybe 5000 people a month use the lawyer directory.
b. Nassau County District Court must be very busy. There were 175 unique pageviews for the lawyers page for that court.
c. Same for the Rancho Cucamonga Court - a Superior Court in San Bernardino County, California -- 131 unique pageviews.
d. The dropoff from those two courts is big. The Jersey City Court at 81 unique and Nassau County Traffic Court at 71 unique views. You can see that in the second image.
e. After the top, there's a strong middle class. Lots of courts getting lots of views. Among the top 25 are three courts in the Albany area with over 30 unique views each.



And the next image is specific to courts only. Again, click to enlarge:



Some observations:

1. County pages, in general, get more traffic than court pages.

The lawyer directory does not contain many court pages. The site is set up so that a court page is created only when a lawyer indicates in their profile that they handle that particular court. And yes, there is a reason I set it up that way.

You can see that "241 page titles were viewed" in the stats for courts. That probably means lawyers have indicated those 241 courts in their profiles, and maybe a few more that just didn't get any views.

Similarly, counties only appear in the directory when a lawyer has indicated she handles cases in that county.


2. There's a lot of people looking for lawyers on our site. I'm surprised more lawyers haven't signed up for the directory. With all the web sites out there drilling lawyers for big money to be on their sites, you'd think a free opportunity would be attractive.

You lawyers know which courts are busy in your area. Sign up for the site and list yourself for the busy courts around you. We have one lawyer in all of Pennsylvania, and the state is one of the top states on our site. No one has listed themselves in the Philadelphia area even though two of those court pages get a lot of visits.

Lawyers can register on the traffic lawyers registration page.

Why shouldn't I hire a lawyer to beat my ticket?

Saw something on the web that got me laughing. Back in '05 I did a post about lawyer marketing on the web. I critiqued some websites that claimed to help people with their tickets.

Well, someone from speedticketbeaters -dot- com tried to post a comment on that old blog post. I don't allow these sites to promote themselves through my blog. But it was funny. The comment asserted, among other things, that "traffic lawyers don't know anything about traffic law." This is quite similar to something on the site, which I quote below with more critique:

Why shouldn't I hire a lawyer to beat my ticket?
Here's several of many reasons:

"Several of many"??

Lawyers do not study traffic law in law school ....

I don't remember much traffic law in law school. But traffic cases in most of New York are handled in local criminal courts. Law school did cover Constitutional Law, Procedure, Evidence, Criminal Law. Along with a few other topics, those classes are quite relevant to traffic law. In addition, some of us actually learn more after law school. I've had over 40 jury trials. Maybe I learned something along the way.

... all [lawyers] ever ... do is plea bargain your ticket down to a lower fine. That is not winning, and still costs you big money in insurance ... and ... fines!

We do usually plea bargain. Our focus is not just the fine though. Most of our clients are concerned about the points and insurance impact. Many of them ask if we can get them a deal where they pay a higher fine so they can get less points - but it generally doesn't work that way.

And plea bargaining is not all we ever do. Our office has done several speeding ticket trials, and we win about half of them. We occasionally get tickets dismissed before trial too. But the strategy of fighting tickets is risky, and in most cases our clients prefer the safer option of a deal that protects their license and insurance.

Lawyers charge a fortune [and] ... do ... mediocre work ... on speeding tickets. ... Lawyers call us ... asking us to teach THEM ....

You'd think if they say we charge so much, they'd have the decency to publish their fees. They don't. They do at one point criticize other websites who charge only $50 as too cheap. There are places (like Florida and Texas) where lawyers don't charge much more than that.

There most certainly are some lawyers who do mediocre work. But most of the lawyers I see handling traffic cases do a good job for their clients. And if there are lawyers calling these guys for instruction, they strangely are not identified on the site.

One thing about hiring a lawyer - at least with most NY lawyers, we put our names and addresses on our websites. You know who we are. On this particular website there is no information identifying who really runs the site.

Another detail: It is true that in cases where the cop doesn't show up for trial, the case will sometimes be dismissed. But they usually do show up (I'd say about 95% of the time) and even when they don't, some judges won't dismiss the case.

There's also the nightmare scenario. Under NY law you can get up to 15 days in jail for speeding. You go without a lawyer to the wrong court with the wrong judge with the wrong set of facts, and then you don't handle things well, ... you might not be going home that night. It's pretty rare, but I remember one young woman who walked out of Court after the deal didn't go through, and was brought back in wearing handcuffs. I know of a couple judges who put people in jail for high speeds too.

These incidents are very rare, and not something I'd want my clients worried about. But if something does go wrong, do you really want to rely on a questionable website? You might feel more comfortable with a lawyer.

Traffic Court News

So here's the latest with our directory of traffic courts. For starters, the directory now covers all or part of 19 states, the District of Columbia, and even a few in Toronto. We've completed Illinois and North Carolina, and are almost done with Maryland and Georgia. We're making progress on Texas again (it's a really big state). We're now over 140,000 visits and 125K unique users a month.

The biggest news is our successful mailing to the courts themselves. We sent postcards to approximately 5000 courts, asking them to notify us if they see any problems with how we listed them. We received over 300 responses. The mailing wasn't cheap, and making the corrections took quite a few hours, but it was worth it to make the directory more accurate.

The traffic lawyer article directory is in its early stages. There are only 45 articles but they are getting read. Below is an image of the top 10 most read articles:

Most of the articles have been read more than 100 times. That's a good sign.

The traffic lawyers club now has over 100 registered attorney members. We are working on some efforts to spread the word about it.