Events bring out the young lawyers with no jobs, wandering around like zombies clutching stacks of business cards with “Esq.” after their names but no firm name or physical address anywhere to be found. Some only list a cell phone with an Illinois area code and a Gmail or Yahoo email address consisting of a cutesy name followed by a few odd digits. As smart as some of them seem, I can’t bring myself to refer a potential client to Jim from Joliet who goes by “puppylover69″ and practices out of a post office box. I try to buy them drinks instead; they deserve a cold one.

The events also bring out the newly-minted small firm associates. Some of them are models for success, but more of them are there because they aren’t yet earning their keep. Their bosses send them out hoping they’ll make connections and snare a few small referrals here and there. They usually aren’t quite sure about what type of law they practice. They try to feel out what the solos are making and figure out how much vacation time other young associates get. It isn’t encouraging.

Perhaps the most fascinating lawyer of all at these functions is the big firm associate. Like any type of lawyer, there are amazingly talented ones as well as those who make me concerned about the future of the profession. The latter are far more interesting. Some of them are still fixated on law school. Despite all their money (I assume) and support staff (I assume) and mahogany-scented homes filled with leather-bound books (I assume), they seem to have peaked before they ever met a client. They talk about their law school grades like Al Bundy talks about the touchdowns he scored during the glory days of high school football.

In high school, I remember the people who were at their peak. I remember the pretty girls who never got any prettier, and the athletic guys whose dreams of a professional sports career turned out to be nothing more than dreams. I’m confident that the ones who made it big don’t think about high school anymore, and so it goes with the top of any law school class. There are ones who have gone on to great things. There are ones who still tell you about their grades.

Law school isn’t trade school. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t. It also isn’t a vacuum. I’m happy about that. The important parts of the professional life of a lawyer, a life centered around representing people or people’s ideas or institutions comprised of people, are the parts that occur after the lawyer starts lawyering. That much may seem obvious, but like many obvious things, it’s only that way when you have a certain perspective. Epic tales about all-night cram sessions to ascend into the elite top 7.6% of a school ranked in the top 37.5% just aren’t that interesting to me. They are to some. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

What I take from many networking events, and from grade-obsessed people in general, are a reinvigorated outlook and a little bit of resolve. It’s the idea that what I’m doing now should be the most important thing I’ve done. It’s resolving that I won’t define myself based on something I did or didn’t do in training school or at any other point in my past, but that I’m defining myself by the work I’m doing right now.

I’m not hanging around with ex-presidents. I’m mostly meeting people my age or younger. If they’re already coming down from the peak, it tells me they haven’t climbed much of a mountain. People who are eating free hors d’oeuvres and hobnobbing with the likes of me should be people whose best is yet to come. Constantly reminding myself that’s what should ring true for me as well is the best thing I can do to ensure my clients now are as well-served as the ones I’ve done right in the past.

I am no salesman. It isn’t in my genes, I haven’t gone to great lengths to develop any sales skills, and quite honestly, the idea of selling things to people, even if it’s something I believe in, makes me feel a tad bit icky. I acknowledge I must sell my services to stay afloat in this profession, but I generally do that by sticking with one basic principle. It’s the one that makes me feel the least icky.

I am the product I’m selling. Constrained only by my own natural abilities and the number of hours in each day I am capable of devoting to improving on those, I have absolute control over the quality of my product. Improving what I’m selling so it hopefully sells itself is the best way to increase sales. It’s better than making some false claims on a website, though perhaps slower to show a financial return on investment.

Unfortunately, clients don’t hire based on legal skills alone. For the most part, they don’t have the requisite knowledge to meaningfully assess legal skills at all. Even lawyers who don’t practice in my specific area usually don’t have enough understanding to tell a good criminal defense lawyer from a bad one.

Clients sometimes look to things like the lawyer’s car, the lawyer’s clothing, or the lawyer’s office. They don’t want a lawyer who’s spilled chocolate milkshake on his oversized hand-me-down suit and smells like the elephant cage at the zoo. Riding a BMX bike to your office on the corner stool of a dive bar is no way to impress a potential client, even if you’re a great lawyer. Habits can be important too.

Occasionally, I see something that reminds me that lawyers are products. As products, we should not only refine the skills that enable us to achieve our intended purpose, but we should also consider how we present ourselves. I thought about that after I got an email containing this fabulous photo of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his expensive lawyer:

I don’t practice in New York. I’ve never met that lawyer. I imagine he does a fine job considering his list of clientele, but the glance from his client is so wonderfully skeptical that my first inclination is to doubt him.

I expect he’s just the victim of an unfortunate photo. I feel bad for the guy, but nail-biting is such a fantastically expressive thing that it completely colors my impression of him. You could pull up to your billion-dollar office in a Bugatti Veyron wearing a suit made of solid gold thread, and I’d be suspicious if you started biting your nails. I’d probably look a lot like Mr. Strauss-Kahn looks. It just isn’t a good habit, especially not in the middle of a hearing.

That picture reminded me that any product improvement on the part of a lawyer needs to be comprehensive. You can still focus primarily on increasing the quality of services you provide, but you should also remember not to bite your nails or engage in any other bad habits that might reflect poorly on you. It doesn’t look good. It might cost you business.

It doesn’t seem like it’s hurt Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s attorney, but then again, he and I aren’t exactly in the same situation. I suspect his product isn’t too hard to sell at this point in his career. As for me, I think I’m going to go shine my shoes and drop my suits off at the dry cleaner’s.

I had a great time and met some very nice people, but I was surprised by just how many people were there promoting their social media and search engine optimization services. I would bet that more than half of all the people at the event had businesses involving computers or the internet. At least half of those people did SEO and social media work. Even people with businesses that seem very traditionally business-like to me (insurance salesmen, accountants, repairmen) seemed to dabble in SEO for extra profit. There really must be an awful lot of money in it.

After a day or so, calls started coming in from people I’d met. Suddenly, I remembered why I’m not so crazy about networking events, but that’s a different post altogether.

Some of those calls were from companies that do SEO and social media. They all wanted to get together and talk about my “online presence” and “social media strategy.” I could tell that what I was hearing from each was a carefully crafted sales pitch. Being the nice guy I am, I humored them.

I explained my situation as honestly and accurately as I could. I get way too many calls from people who found me online and either don’t need or can’t afford my services. Those rare people who do need and can afford my services tend to want free advice over the phone followed by a free initial consultation, and they don’t understand why I can’t guarantee I’ll match the lowest price they find. I am no different from every other lawyer, after all, so why can’t I do what every other lawyer does?

After explaining my predicament, I made each SEO guy a proposal. I’d seriously consider hiring them if they could figure out a social media and SEO strategy that reduces my overall call volume while increasing calls from people with disposable income and an immediate need for a lawyer in a pending Arizona criminal matter. Those people need to have a clear understanding that I am providing them with professional services and not a guaranteed result, a good deal, or just a warm body to keep them company at court. I give the SEO guys an example of what I want.

One of my former law professors, a practicing lawyer who maintains a thriving practice and a person whom I respect immensely, has given me a great deal of guidance since Adrian and I began the firm. He hesitantly sent me one criminal referral during my first year of practice. Things ended up working out, and the lady became a client. She was extremely pleased with my representation, and the professor has continued to refer me cases.

It always starts the same way. The professor calls, tells me the type of case, and finds out first if it’s possible I might have some kind of conflict. He gives me a general overview of what he knows about the client and the situation. If I say I’m interested, he gives the client my name and number and recommends the client call me. He tells the client I am busy and charge for an in-person consultation. For each client, I’m the only lawyer he recommends. I always get a call from the client within an hour or so of his call, the client always schedules a meeting, and the client always shows up for the meeting. I’ve never had one not hire me.

I want the web equivalent of that. I tell this to the SEO guys knowing such a referral will likely never come from a web marketing company. Maybe, just maybe, it might come from years of building relationships online, but I still doubt it. It certainly won’t come from 140-character high-fives and blog posts repeating keywords ad nauseam.

The SEO guys are never deterred. They tell me the secret is keywords. They act like they believe it, so I almost feel a little guilty for harboring no realistic belief they are telling me anything even remotely resembling the truth. I tell them I might believe them if they had proof, and I tell them what I’m going to need from these magical keywords.

To reduce my call volume, I will need terms few people will enter. My site must be chock full o’ terms only people with the means to hire a private lawyer would know. It must have terms only people with a pending Arizona criminal matter would know too. Furthermore, the terms must be carefully selected and combined to display an understanding of the nature of the professional services I intend to provide. The terms should probably be ones known only to those who know and appreciate me already. My site should be invisible to most people.

You may grasp the absurdity of any keywords fitting that bill, but the SEO guys don’t. They tell me it’s possible, but they always revert to the same old stuff everyone’s been trying to sell me since I first set up shop. They can tell me whatever they want, but I’m going to see through it when their ideas don’t go much past spamming other blogs with nonsense and tagging my site with meaningless catchphrases. I’m open-minded, but only to a point. As the title says, I’m open to embracing a new social media strategy…maybe. If I keep hearing the same stale lines about keywords, however, that maybe is going to become a no.

Traditionally, summer months are the hardest for me and Adrian, but this summer has been an exception. We’ve seen unexpected growth during a time when we usually hunker down and prepare for the worst. We’re lucky, but even if every month is a relatively good month compared to when you started out, you still never know what the next month holds. A lot of money can pour out of a business very quickly when times are slow.

Running a small firm isn’t for the faint of heart. Running it the way Adrian and I run our criminal defense practice seems make it even tougher. You won’t see Brown & Little billboards. Clients don’t go on TV telling the world what we did for them. We have no phone book ads, no radio spots, and I can’t remember the last time we put money on the books for our Google AdWords account. If anything, this blog seems to scare away prospective clients.

Marketing for us is almost entirely socializing with other lawyers, remaining active in things we’d be doing whether we were lawyers or not, and most importantly, doing the best we can in every case. There’s a big downside to that kind of marketing.

The things we don’t do create the illusion of stability. The ignorant count Twitter followers like they’re money in the bank and calls from the back page of the phone book like they’re paying clients, not people in need of free advice without any intention of hiring a private lawyer. Oh what I’d give for the bliss of not knowing better!

The other part of the downside is taxes. An ad in the classified section of a paper is a 100% deduction. Web hosting and SEO are the same way. Take a highly respected lawyer in your field out for lunch to pick his or her brain and develop a relationship, and the IRS will hold you to a 50% limit. The IRS wants you on the side of the bus peddling your services, not in a social setting learning from a master (or even teaching a younger lawyer, depending on where you are in your career). It’s a sad state of affairs.

A man of faith I am not, yet each month the phone seems to ring and provide me peace of mind. Some months are good, others not so good. You don’t which which one it’s going to be until it’s too late. Luckily, they’ve never been so bad that Brown & Little couldn’t cope. I feel blessed, but I never feel secure, no matter how much money’s in the bank. It’s a strange sensation knowing that the source of your income in the future is people you’ve probably never met coming from sources you probably don’t expect, and there’s no guarantee anyone will come in the door at all.

Learning to represent people is a process, and you can always get better, no matter how good or old you are. Learning to roll with the ups and downs of ethically and professionally running a small firm is no different. It’s especially tough when false stability and government incentives line the quick and easy route.

I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia [penis enlargement] and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. [penis enlargement] They’re coming back now. [penis enlargement] Please send help! [penis enlargement]

I think I just saved a life by posting this. You can thank me when they free you, vimax.

Yesterday, I noticed she put up the following with a link: “Adam Gee teaches you How To Market To Bikers in his newest class.” Intrigued, I clicked the link. I couldn’t find anything about the content of the course though, so I went to Adam Gee’s page at SPU. There, I saw the following under his syllabus:

Marketing to Bikers: Developing a Motorcycle Practice
* Indirect Marketing Techniques
* Direct Marketing Techniques
* Blogs, social media and books

I think SPU is a great idea, and Adam Gee may be a hell of a lawyer. For all I know, he may even have some serious biker cred. However, what Susan Carter Liebel wrote, along with that little portion of the syllabus on Adam Gee’s page, worried me a little bit.

I’m a biker. I ride ten to twenty thousand miles each year, and I’m very active in a variety of bikers’ groups. I volunteered for MROs and went to swap meets before I started law school. Brown & Little, P.L.C., wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye. My friends are bikers, so I often get to see lawyer advertising not from the perspective of another lawyer, but from the perspective of the target demographic. It isn’t pretty.

Lawyers saturate the biker market. Most lawyer advertising aimed at bikers is not well done. I cringe every time I see a pamphlet showing a couple of guys with neatly-trimmed goatees wearing neatly-pressed leathers as they lean on their spotless, stock Softails. Do they really think they can just add some flames and an angry eagle to their ad and they’ll be ready to take the motorcycle community by storm? Never mind, I know the answer.

Lawyers also start special wings of their firms claiming to offer bikers free breakdown assistance or legal advice regarding discrimination. They give out special cards for bikers to carry in their wallets in case something happens. When there’s discrimination or a stranded biker, you can usually hear the crickets chirping on the phone line. When a biker gets seriously injured by another motorist, however, the lawyers pounce. Good thing the biker joined their card-club; those pesky ethics rules about solicitation are normally a drag. Do lawyers actually think bikers can’t tell the difference between a gimmick and someone who genuinely wants to help? Never mind, I know the answer.

Attorneys finagle their way into every event bikers attend and every product bikers buy. They’re like vultures. They see the promise of riches and throw money at bikers, but most bikers see through their crappy advertising. Bikers know who the outsiders are, and they generally aren’t swayed by a back page ad. Weekend warriors and people who aren’t in a club or an MRO may not notice the lack of authenticity, so the poser biker’s lawyer will probably find himself sitting across a desk from a poser biker in an initial consultation, each pretending they’re the genuine article. I guess that’s okay, but it’s too bad lawyers have to insult the intelligence of a group of good people with ridiculous advertising in order to find a playmate for a session of biker make-believe.

Whether you believe me or not, I’m not complaining about this because bikers are my market. Sure, my firm does market to bikers, but it’s mostly just to the extent necessary to help good causes that need sponsors. We also do get clients from our involvement, but there’s one big difference between that and the way most lawyers market to groups like bikers.

I get biker clients the way I get clients from my family and friends. It isn’t based on some slick ad or some sham club I’ve convinced people to join. When a friend who happens to be a biker knows someone in need of a criminal defense lawyer, they refer that person to me because they know and trust me. Lawyer advertising in the biker market doesn’t take away my slice of the biker pie any more than another lawyer advertising in my mom’s Christmas letter would convince my brother to send a DUI referral elsewhere.

Lawyers study their markets as if the people who compose them are animals. They infiltrate organizations to take their targets’ hard-earned money. Their goal, because of the very nature what they’re doing, is to take more than they give. They aren’t in it to make friends or help a cause at all. And we wonder why we’re hated?

I understand that’s how marketing in general may work for a lot of lawyers, but I wish we had a little more self-respect. This is supposed to be a profession, isn’t it? Lawyers can get some of the low-hanging fruit by exploiting a group of people, but that doesn’t mean they should. It’s embarrassing. Are attorneys so greedy, stupid, and helpless that they need to pay someone else to study insular groups of people and teach them how to make friends with and influence those people? Never mind, I know the answer.

I hope SPU isn’t wasting its time sending freshly-minted solos into meetings to peddle their new biker helpline or hand out pamphlets with lots of flames and skulls, but I honestly have no idea what SPU intends to teach about bikers. If it’s something to make lawyers more effective at handling motorcycle-related cases, more power to SPU. If it’s a superficial study of what most bikers like (hint: a good time, and boobs) and don’t like (hint: authority) intended to show money-grubbing lawyers how to make friends and persuade bikers to hire them, I’ll be disappointed. Please, SPU. Do it right. The biker world doesn’t need any more law firms with mascots.

The only consolation for me in all of this is the fact that attorneys, probably far more so than bikers, are studied as a group and targeted by marketers. What I view as exploitation by us may be more likely to end up being exploitation of us. Most biker marketing isn’t going to send a single biker to a shady lawyer hoping to score a quick buck from a new group of suckers, but the same doesn’t seem to be true of marketing to lawyers. Lawyers looking to exploit bikers are probably going to find themselves getting a dose of their own medicine, medicine that actually seems to work on them. Attorneys will buy anything. That must be why many lawyers think they can get clients with half-baked ideas.

It looks like some new lawyers have jumped into the fray. Taking a cue from viagra vendors, some scumbag attorneys have decided to spam my poor little blog. They put up stupid comments talking about how great they are and linking to their website. The spam comments were completely unrelated to the posts. I won’t provide a link, as it will just encourage them. If they’re attacking little-old-me with spam, they are probably big enough to have more visitors than I do. A small number of people will notice me complaining about their marketing practices, but my link will probably just make them look more important. I’m pretty sure it’s a losing fight, but please correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ve purposefully avoided discussing marketing here, as I don’t really have much to say on the subject. When I started this blog, this was my thought process: I like writing. I need an outlet to complain about the things that frustrate me and make me eager to get to work each day. I want to learn HTML and PHP in my spare time. Blogging seems like a good way to combine all of that, right? I vaguely thought it might somehow serve as a marketing tool and possibly bring in a client or two if the content was good enough.

Well, I turns out I’m bad at marketing. I doubt the firm has gotten a single client because of this blog. I haven’t learned HTML or PHP very well either (try using the search function on this blog). On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed blawging, and I think I’ve written some decent posts. Blawgers seem to be a fairly close-knit community, and I’ve had a good time meeting and communicating with other blawgers. I learned there are some things I didn’t think mattered that do matter (like giving your blog a promotional name), and things I did think mattered that don’t matter (for some reason, I thought it was common courtesy to ask someone before putting them on your blogroll). I think I’m pretty aware of blawging customs at this point.

What those spamming lawyers did is more than just against custom. I view it as tantamount to spray-painting the outside of my office building with their name and number. It wastes my time cleaning it up and tells me they are either unethical or too incompetent to properly supervise their staff. If it’s an ethics issue, I think it will self-correct. An attorney who trolls blogs and self-promotes with comments-spam is probably nearing the end of his or her legal career (or so I hope). If I were an inadvertnently-spamming lawyer, I’d still be worried about my state bar ethics committee if I didn’t address it ASAP. If my marketing guy went too far, I’d rein him in or fire him. It’s the only honorable thing to do.

I won’t pretend to be all high and mighty. I also won’t try to shame spammers in general, as plenty of far better blawgers have already done that. On principle, I’m not putting any links in this post. Check my blogroll for people with good things to say on the subject. All I have to say is the following for the sleazy attorneys who spammed me: if you messed up and hired a shady SEO guy, you should be prepared to apologize and fix the problem. If you’re so desperate for clients that you resorted to spamming other lawyers’ sites, you should probably focus more on the quality of your legal services. I didn’t appreciate taking the time to delete your irritating comments, and I bet you didn’t earn yourself a single client doing it. I think I’m not alone in saying that under no circumstances would I ever consider recommending you or your network to anyone.