So Amazon.com introduced a new phone yesterday. And what does it do? It allows you to point it at some knick-knack you might want to buy and Amazon tells you how much you can buy it for from them.

What is really does, of course, is give yet more information to Amazon and its partners as to your every thought, whim and desire. What does it do for the consumer? Not so much. You can already go to their website, after all, and see what they have.

Here is the problem, which should have been obvious, if it wasn’t already with the big scandal over Edward Snowden and the NSA spying on us: People hate to be spied on.

Google, which started out with a mantra of “Don’t be evil” loves to collect information on you. So too does LinkedIn, which seems to like snooping through your contacts, then using those names to send out spam.

Lawyers should learn from this: Because this is everything you should not do.

Lawyers provide a service; our clients are our mission. When retained, we are supposed to do the job we were hired to do as diligently as possible, not use it as an excuse to find yet more clients. The client comes first.

We’ve seen a few examples in the past, of course. One example was a Chicago criminal defense lawyer using his potential retention by Lindsay Lohan as an excuse to give a press interview. We’ve seen it also with lawyers that place stupid ad damnum clauses in Complaints hoping that they can get their names in the paper.

Except it isn’t about the lawyer. It’s about the client.

So watch Amazon and Google and LinkedIn and learn from them about the stuff you should not be doing.