Category Archives: Marketing

 

February 11th, 2011

Dominic Barbara, High Profile NY Attorney, Suspended for 18 months

Part of this short story is about a lawyer named Dominic Barbara, who previously represented Howard Stern (and is a regular side-kick, call-in guest on his show). He also represented Joey Buttafuco, Jessica Hahn, and Michael Lohan, each of whom had more than their allotted 15 minutes of fame. New York Magazine once called him the “biggest, brassiest lawyer on Long Island.” And last year he was retained for a headline making crash on the Taconic Parkway that killed eight people (video).

But the more important part, to me, is the fact that what you see on a lawyer’s website, or in the newspapers, isn’t always what you get.

First, as to Barbara. He was suspended this week after “an avalanche of Grievance Committee sanctions” (nine Letters of Caution, nine Admonitions, and two Advisements). That’s a lot of baggage, and as a consequence of the latest round he was handed an 18-month suspension.  Among the charges, and these seem to be the straws that broke the camel’s back, are that he failed to issue itemized bills as required, failed to supervise the lawyers in his office, failed to timely refund a portion of a fee that had not been earned after the client fired him, and engaged in conduct that adversely reflects on his fitness as a lawyer by failing to adequately communicate with that client (or her new counsel).

But here’s the thing, despite this “avalanche” of sanctions, he has this to say about his firm on  his website:

For more than 35 years, The Barbara Law Firm has performed at the highest level of quality legal representation in the fields of Family, Matrimonial, Criminal, and Civil Law.

The highest levels? I think not. Not with all those sanctions. There is more puffery, of course, as he tries to parlay  the celebrity clients into more business:

Dominic A. Barbara has been leading this firm for more than 30 years, providing personal, assertive, successful legal representation to clients from all walks of life. The housewife, teacher and business owner receive the same care and consideration as the high-profile celebrities who turn to The Barbara Law Firm. Each one is looking for the same thing – a team of brilliant legal minds focusing on his or her individual case.

So what you see on a website isn’t always what you get when it comes to the law. Anybody can write puffery. And just because someone has high profile clients doesn’t mean that they are actually good lawyers. (I never did like that whole “celebrity lawyer” thing.) ” I once tried a case with a guy that had many high profile clients. In the well of the courtroom he was awful. And when I say awful I mean law students could do a better job. I would see him on the news after our trial and the first in my mind was this: His client is gonna hang.

The best way to find a lawyer isn’t by checking out the puffery on a website. It’s by asking around and making sure they handle the problem that you have, perhaps by starting with friends and neighbors and other lawyers who will hopefully be able to direct you to someone who knows what they are doing. In fact, this was the subject of the fourth post I ever did on this blog, more than 1,000 posts ago, when I only had six readers. They were all Bulgarian spammers.

So if you’re hunting for a lawyer, ignore that guy on the news. And certainly don’t be impressed with his website. For as the old New Yorker cartoon goes, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Avvo screenshot at about noon on 2/11/11

Addendum: I think it’s worth noting that this “avalanche” of Grievance Committee sanctions didn’t show up on Avvo‘s lawyer rating service, a service of which I’ve previously been critical. (This suspension hasn’t either, but I cut them slack for that because the opinion was just released yesterday.) But the point is that many disciplinary actions are hidden from public view. In other words, Avvo probably couldn’t have found the problems even if they looked. And that type of incomplete information can be rather misleading to the consumer, notwithstanding all the caveats that Avvo might provide. A copy of Barbara’s listing, showing “No professional misconduct found” is at right.

Elsewhere:

Learning Tricks from an Old Dog (Simple Justice):

Is this your hero?  Is this your savior?  Is this the lawyer who you want standing next to you when your life is on the line?  Or is this the guy who will charge you a whole lotta money because he’s a big time “high profile” lawyer, and when you decide that he’s not the guy you want next to you despite all the puffery on his website, he won’t give you your money back? (more)

Loud Lawyer Dominic Barbara suspended for 18 months (Courtroom Strategy):

I have had clients who have come to me after a foray into his firm’s office that when they complained about the non-stop pouring of money into legal fees, that he would offer to stay on the case if he allowed them to hold a press conference about the case. (more)

Update: Dominic Barbara Retires In Wake of Suspension

(Note: Subsequent to this post, news organizations ran stories on the suspension)

 

December 14th, 2010

Supreme Court Kills New York’s “New” Attorney Advertising Rules

Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court put the final nail in the coffin of New York’s “new” attorney disciplinary rules regarding advertising when it refused to review a Second Circuit decision that struck most of the rules. I put “new” in quotes because they actually date to February 1, 2007, just months after I opened this little blog.

And I’ve been following the issue ever since. See January, 5, 2007;  New Attorney Advertising Rules (Is This Blog an Advertisement?)

Most of the rules were first  struck down by the U.S. District Court in July 2007 when challenged by Public Citizen on behalf of the upstate firm of Alexander & Catalano. And the Second Circuit upheld those determinations in April of this year. (Sonia Sotomayor was on the panel that heard the case, but had gone to the Supreme Court by the time the decision came down.)

Those broad-based rules tried to stop a variety of advertising techniques, but did so in a fashion that ran headlong into the First Amendment. The rules had barred, among other things, testimonials from clients relating to pending matters, portrayals of judges or fictitious law firms, attention-getting techniques unrelated to attorney competence, and trade names or nicknames that imply an ability to get results.

As I pointed out in one of my first posts, simply putting a picture of yourself on a lawfirm website could be construed as violating the prohibition against “characteristics clearly unrelated to legal competence.” The picture will tell the potential client your age, your race and your sex, but what will it tell them about legal competence? Nada. Ergo, under the new rules the photo could be a violation.

Obviously, this wasn’t why the rules were crafted. They came in response to the embarrassing aftermath of the October 2003 Staten Island Ferry disaster that killed 11, and the onslaught of ads in the Staten Island Advance the next day. Those ads were placed while rescue efforts were still ongoing at the ferry that day. It was not one of the better moments of the personal injury bar. And that incident brought about New York’s 30 day anti-solicitation rule, part of the new set of rules but one which was not affected by this ruling.

But the new rules went after problems that didn’t just have to do with 30 day time limits.

Senior Judge Frederick J. Scullin, who wrote the District Court opinion striking down almost all the other rules, summed up the problem this way in a buried footnote on page 29 of his decision:

Without question there has been a proliferation of tasteless, and at times obnoxious, methods of attorney advertising in recent years. New technology and an increase in the types of media available for advertising have exacerbated this problem and made it more ubiquitous. As a result, among other things, the public perception of he legal profession has been greatly diminished.

But in re-crafting rules in an attempt to solve this problem, the crafters went way too far. So far, in fact, that the only way to defend them was to assert that attorneys couldn’t use humor.

For it was humor that formed part of the basis of the state’s response to the Alexander & Catalano lawsuit. AS described the by state in one of its filings, the firm advertised that it:

retained by aliens, have the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, or have stomped around downtown Syracuse, Godzilla-style.

And the argument by the state against this? That it wasn’t truthful. See: New York Responds to Lawsuit Challenging New Attorney Advertising Rules — By Banning Humor

When I read the state’s brief, that I discussed at some length in that post, I knew the rules were toast.

While the ads may have been tasteless and embarrassing to the profession, no person with a functioning brain could have believed that the firm had actually been retained by aliens or done any of the other eye-catching things in those commercials.

And so the First Amendment ruled the day, as the rules over reached to ban more than just dishonesty.

Now I sure as hell wouldn’t want to pick a jury in any courtroom if my firm was busy running such moronic ads, but taste is not something that can be regulated.

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See also on the Supreme Court’s action:

SCOTUS Gives Nod to 2nd Circuit OK of ‘Heavy Hitters’ Law Firm Slogan & Descriptive Trade Names (ABA Journal)

US Supreme Court to New York Lawyers: You Are Awesome (Tannebaum @ My Law License)

Supreme Court Denies Certiorari in Lawyer Advertising Case (Robson @ Constitutional Law Prof Blog)

Good News for ‘Heavy Hitters’: High Court Sidesteps Lawyer Advertising Dispute (Koppel @ WSJ Law Blog)

 

November 10th, 2010

FuneralHomes.Com Digs Down Deep For Personal Injury Lawyers

When the email arrived, my first thought was: Can this be for real?

The pitch that came from FuneralHomes.com (coded “NoFollow“) was this: They are a directory of funeral homes. And they want to inquire about my “interest in a new marketing channel” that they have “for firms specializing in Medical Malpractice, Wrongful Death & Nursing Home Abuse or Neglect.”

It made me shudder. And made me think of the washed up lawyer played by Paul Newman in The Verdict, going to funeral homes to pass around his card, pretending to have known the deceased as he chased cases. But instead of standing in their parlors handing out cards, this company wants lawyers to hang advertising on their site where the bereaved might go in time of need.

So, not really believing this email was real, as I thought it too sickening to be true, I shot back a reply to its sender, Tom Keesee: Is this for real?

And Keesee called back quickly, perhaps excited about having a having a potential fish on the line. Yes, he said, it was for real.

But before he could launch too deeply into his sales spiel, I asked him about the ethics of it all. Lawyers don’t pay him for leads, he said, so there was no problem. Also, since they aren’t attorneys, they don’t have to comply with attorney ethics rules regarding solicitation.

I pointed out, of course, that the lawyers they wanted to do business with still had to comply with ethics rules. And wasn’t this solicitation? He told me, a couple of times, that his “legal department” had looked into it and it was fine.

But rather than dwell on whether lawyers advertising on a funeral home website is a permissible form of solicitation or not, I’m going to move right to the “smell test” as in, does this smell right to you?

This marketing madness happens to come at the same time that a debate rages elsewhere in the legal blogosphere on this subject, because the American Bar Association recently announced it was going to look further into regulating online activity for lawyers. Larry Bodine, fired the first salvo, from the perspective of lawyer-marketing, trying to stop the ABA from working on the project. Scott Greenfield worries that his opportunity to blog could be impaired because of the liars and scoundrels out there, claiming to be something that they are not. Brian Tannebaum points out that it was the marketers that brought this on themselves. There is more on this from Antonin Pribetic, and and a summary of the issues presented to the ABA by Carolyn Elefant. There seem to be many ways in which ethics can be laundered.

So here’s what I think: The ABA position doesn’t really matter. And you know why? Because when lawyers see conduct that they deem to be offensive and detrimental to the legal field  — and I think that lawyers advertising on funeral home websites fits that definition — then some lawyer-bloggers will write about the subject. And if those bloggers are sufficiently offended by the conduct, then they might publicize the names of those that are chasing cases in such a manner. You can see examples of such e-shaming here by Mark Bennett, or another by Kevin O’Keefe here.

The web moves very fast when it comes to correcting the behavior of those that act offensively, a hell of a lot faster than the ABA. Witness this week, for example, the conduct of Judith Griggs who edits a small magazine called Cooks Source. She stole the work of others, did it without attribution, and tried to justify the plagiarism by claiming that the web is considered “public domain” that she can use. Colin Samuels at Infamy or Praise did a long piece on the subject as part of his Round Tuit round-ups, but here’s the thing: If you Google “Cooks Source” now you can see how she and the company has been savagely beaten up by the web, with page after page of venom. Their Google reputation is shot.

There are some who used to believe that any publicity is good publicity, so long as the name is spelled right. In an earlier era, a person might remember seeing a lawyer’s name in a newspaper, though not necessarily the details. But now the details are easy to find. Judith Griggs will likely see those comments about her for decades to come. The old mantra about any publicity has been destroyed by the web.

So what kind of publicity is likely to come to a law firm that advertises on FuneralHomes.com?  Those attorneys that think this might be a good way to find cases ought to consider the potential backlash from those that are offended by the concept and wish to write about the subject.

The bar for attorney advertising has been lowered to new depths. It now appears to rest six feet under.

Updated: I was reminded of an old post of my by a friend, where a law firm decided it would be savvy to advertise over a urinal.

 

November 5th, 2010

Yodle and Attorney Advertising

Want to see something funny about attorney advertising?

Try Googling this phrase:

Our commitment to you is to go the extra mile to win your case, and we take that pledge very seriously.

The result, pages and pages of lawyer websites using the exact same quote, can be seen here.

A big old hat tip to Mark Bennett of Houston who was taking a look at the advertising skills of a company called Yodle that sells websites to lawyers.

Are you using Yodle? And do you think you are getting what you paid for by having the same content as so many others?

Yodle’s slogan is “Get Found.” OK, I found you. Do you think I’m impressed?

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See also:  Yodle Lawyer Marketing Sucks (Bennett @ Defending People)

Related:

 

October 17th, 2010

Attorney Advertising (So how are YOU going about it?)

I must get a call at least once a week from people peddling fame and fortune if I would just follow their Internet strategy. For a fee.

With all the pixels that get spilled by hustlers pimping the “leads” that they develop and “exclusive” deals to be had for lawyers, if you would just fork over your cold, hard cash to them, you would think that Internet attorney search businesses are the only way for the general public to learn your name.

But, of course, it isn’t. First and foremost is just doing a good job and having former clients be happy.

When it comes to advertising, being active in the community remains today one of the soundest ways of letting others know that you have a law firm. For the people you meet learn you are not a pixel, but a person. And if they have questions in subject areas you aren’t fluent in, you turn them toward those that are.

It may seem counterintuitive, but you do demonstrate expertise in a field when you tell people your field of knowledge is x, and not y. And both the person in need of assistance, and the other lawyer, learn a bit more about who you are, and what you do.

There isn’t anything wrong with being old school if you want to get your name out there. And it’s a lot more rewarding, especially if these are the types of activities you would engage in anyway.

Previously: Turkewitz in the News (7/13/10) — A discussion of how another community event, creating a half-marathon trail race, can also play a role in attorney marketing. These types of community activities are limited only by your imagination.