August 1st, 2011

Lawyer Brands and Reputations

I shudder sometimes when I hear about lawyers having a “brand,” as if we were some form of potato chip or car. But we are not products, we are people.

So I really like this quote that comes from An Associate’s Mind:

Your brand is what you say about yourself, but your reputation is what others say about you.

There is no way to self-create a reputation – or at least no way to buy a reputation that lasts. Reputation is developed through hard work, consistency, reliability, and integrity.

Being a successful lawyer isn’t about marketing, but competence in representing the people that retained you. If you don’t have the competence, all the marketing in the world won’t save you.

More here: Facebook You v. Real You or Why Personal Branding is Stupid

June 28th, 2011

Personal Injury Attorneys – Our Own Worst Enemy

A confluence of a couple different thing brings about today’s guest blog by H. Q. Nguyen. First, there was the terrific presentation by Brian Tannebaum down in Florida about online marketing and ethics. His talk runs 50 minutes and is time well spent, not only because you get to see a blogging lawyer in action doing what he does best — trying to pursuade a group of people by marshaling the evidence — but because his talk just might save one or two sad souls from selling themselves off to a demon marketer.

And second was the premier on HBO of Hot Coffee, which addresses many of the perceptions of the citizenry regarding our profession, and how it is that those perceptions were formed.

Nguyen brings home a point that should be evident to all of us concerning the damage some lawyers do with crappy marketing…

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I’m a personal injury attorney and proud to serve those who’s lives have been damaged due to negligence. Due to those in the profession, people are able to seek just compensation for their losses from those that caused it.

Yet the public perception of the typical PI attorney is that of a greedy, cheesy ambulance chaser who does nothing more than bring frivolous lawsuits causing their insurance premiums to rise as well as hindering societal progress. How can this be?

We can put part of the blame on the insurance companies who spend an enormous amount of money on tort “reform” and marketing in order to influence the public (and the jury pools).

But let’s start with a look in the mirror first. If we want the public to see who we really are, we need to first change the way we present ourselves.

For example, everyday, millions of New Yorkers ride the New York City subways on their way to and from work or wherever they are going. When the typical Joe looks up in the subway car, he sees advertisement from PI firms. Instead of the content conveying that the firm helps those recover for harms caused by the negligence of others, all Joe sees is dollars, millions of dollars. What does that ad convey to a typical viewer who earns $35,000 -$50,000 a year? What does that ad convey to Joe, who may be on his way to serve as a juror?

While these ads may be effective in bringing in clients for the firm who pay for these ads, it harms the profession as a whole. Until we police ourselves and reign in these dollar-centric ads, we cannot hope to change the public’s perception of our profession. We are in essence our worst enemy.

May 5th, 2011

Charlie Crist, Personal Injury Lawyer

You may remember Charlie Crist. He was the governor of Florida. He’s moved on from politics now and gone to work for Morgan & Morgan, the largest personal injury firm in Florida.

Ain’t nothing wrong with that. Based on what I do for a living, you would expect me to support those that fight on behalf of consumers against behemoth insurance companies that treat people like files.

But I do have a bone to pick. It’s about his 10-second commercial:

I’m Charlie Crist. If you need help sorting out your legal issues as a result of an accident or insurance dispute, visit me at [email protected].

Now I understand it’s tough to create a quality personal injury commercial (and also tough to create a decent PI website, as I’ve discussed). But it can be done. And with that, I return you to the best PI commercials I have ever seen, from the New York firm of Trolman, Glaser & Lichtman: Power Company, Machete, and Song Stuck in Head.

And so, a note to Morgan & Morgan. You spend enormous sums of money advertising in Florida. You can do better than having a former governor do a 10-second spot that says “visit me.” If your ad agency lacks the creative juices to break out of the tired mold of “If you’ve been injured, blah, blah, blah,” then find a new agency where people have some imagination.

(Hat tip: Mitchell Senft)

April 5th, 2011

Lawyers and Advertising (The New Frontier)

I broach the subject of lawyer advertising every so often, because there seems to be so many different things to write on the subject. It covers constitutional law, ethics and plain old good (bad) taste.

Ethics and constitutional issues butted heads in recent years over New York’s new attorney advertising rules, which went up to the Second Circuit in Alexander v. Cahill, about which I’ve written often as it tracked its way through the judicial system.

Ethics also comes into play with deception, as evidenced by one Joseph Rakofsky, a New York lawyer with scant experience, but whose website sung his praises in oh so many ways. Then he got a real client. Defending a murder case. Which of course, he was utterly incompetent to do and after being exposed in the Washington Post, the story is now buzzing around the blogosphere (Gamso; Bennett; Elefant; Greenfield; Tannebaum; Mayer; Koehler, Above the Law).

And in the plain old bad taste department, I’ve written of lawyer advertising on a funeral home website and, in what I previously thought was the ultimate captive audience spot, over a urinal. All of this is part of a never-ending race to the bottom, as Scott Greenfield describes it.

Which brings me today to The Buffalo News, and an op-ed by Jeffrey Freedman, and the next round of bad-taste advertising, and the fact that there was an even more captive audience that I hadn’t even thought of, but others, apparently have:

…Captive ads, in case you missed it, is the new Metrodata Services advertising program that allows defense attorneys, bail bondsmen and anyone else who would like to advertise to the captive audience of the recently arrested on big screen TVs in the Holding Center….

So if you thought standing at a urinal and seeing an ad in front of your nose made you a captive audience, then this brings us to the next level: An audience that is captive in the most literal sense of the word, in the local lock-up.

Freedman wonders where this will ultimately lead:

Erie County Medical Center is a potential gold mine of space. Picture the possibilities for hospital gowns. Give patients a choice: Viagra or Cialis today, Mr. Smith?

And just imagine elevators and waiting rooms papered with the faces of compassionate, personal injury attorneys. “We don’t charge a fee unless we win your case.”

I thought that when lawyers dug down deep to advertise at a funeral home website, that this was as low as they could go. But perhaps there are new avenues to be explored in bad taste.

March 15th, 2011

North Carolina to Allow Non-Lawyers to Buy Interest in Firms? (Lousy Idea)

There is a bill pending in North Carolina that would allow non-lawyers to buy interests in law firms, up to 49% of the total. This violates the age old prohibition on sharing legal fees with non-lawyers, and is one hell of a lousy idea. First, read the short piece by Dan Fisher @ Forbes on the bill, then come back.

Welcome back. Now here is the problem from my perch in the personal injury field. If non-lawyers profit from the legal business then there is an incentive for them to “help” their investment by finding cases to refer to the firm. In other words, it is an invitation for private “investigators” to troll for clients. We have legalized ambulance chasing, bringing more disrespect to the profession and our justice system since the non-lawyers aren’t bound by the ethics rules. And the lawyers who get the cases may simply choose to turn a blind eye as to how the cases are coming to the firm, or worse, give equity in the firm to the investigators without asking the critical questions of how the clients were obtained.

When the disciplinary committee comes a callin’, they will profess to be shocked, just shocked, at how their firms’ names were given to potential clients.

Let me show you how this works in the real world. This past weekend there was a horrific bus crash in the Bronx that killed 15 people. And attorneys are prohibited under New York’s 30-day anti-solicitation rules from approaching any of the injured victims or next of kin.

So how can lawyers work around this? By using marketing firms to launder their ethics.

Other firms, such as this one and this one, run “blog” posts about the accident that merely regurgitate the facts from a news article and then follow up with a call to action (If you or someone you know…). I discussed this problem back in 2007 after the new anti-solicitiaton rules went into effect (see: Attorney Solicitation 2.0: Is it ethical?)

So what will happen if non-lawyers have a financial interest in the firm? You can bet your last dollar the situation will worsen.

Larry Ribstein asks why non-lawyers shouldn’t be allowed to own shares of firms, under the theory that the restrictions limit the market for legal skills in the business world. But I don’t think he has given enough thought on how that plays out among other fields of the law.

Elsewhere:

Legal Services Act comes to US (Legal Transformation: The Changing Legal Profession)

Are ABSs coming to America? They may be in North Carolina (Legal Futures)

Lay Ownership Share In Law Firms Proposed in North Carolina (Law Forward)