» Entries tagged with "lawyers"

Save The Lawyers!

It seems that news about LegalZoom’s various legal battles has popped up every few months for the last few years. One state will decide that the online service, which is intended to help people create their own legal documents, is engaging in the unauthorized practice of law. Before you know it, another will disagree. It is hard to keep track. Unfortunately, I also find it hard to stay interested. That is mostly because, on a purely business level, LegalZoom is more or less irrelevant to me. My tiny little niche is never going to suffer one bit because of it. You simply cannot download a trial lawyer. There are no standard forms to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a criminal case, to negotiate the … Read entire article »

Filed under: Marketing, Practice in General

More Sleazy Lawyer Marketing

This time, I checked Simple Justice thoroughly before posting something about an email I got from Total Attorneys yesterday. The company seemed familiar, and sure enough, it turned out that Scott Greenfield wrote about its sketchy lawyer marketing practices in 2009 and then again in 2010, when the Connecticut State Bar officially decided its founder wasn’t quite driving the legal profession into the shitter in a specific manner that would have offended their sensibilities too terribly. Either way, they’re still at it, and I’m posting because what I received serves as a great lesson about how these marketing people work. Here’s the email I got from an “Alicia Stevenson” in its entirety, which I’ll break down part by part: Matthew, I figured an email may be the best bet if … Read entire article »

Filed under: Marketing

Attorney At Law Magazine

There’s this thing called Attorney At Law Magazine here in Arizona. It’s a fairly slick-looking magazine I get regularly despite never having subscribed. I just got one last week, in fact. Looking around a bit, I actually realized there are things called Attorney At Law Magazine in a whole bunch of places (like California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, and Virginia). What’s going on? Attorney At Law Magazine isn’t really a magazine in what I’d consider the traditional sense at all. The lawyers’ “articles” there are hardly Pulitzer Prize material; they basically make it look like the magazine just keeps realizing how awesome various rotating superstar lawyers with sexy pictures are and decides to report … Read entire article »

Filed under: Marketing

Reinventing The Wheel Into Something Else

After reading a post at My Shingle, I clicked through to a post by Jordan Furlong discussing his thoughts on the future of the practice of law. He divides what he calls “the evolution of the legal services market” into stages, the first being what he calls a “closed market,” the second being a “breached market,” the third being a “fully open market,” the fourth being an “expanding market,” and the fifth being a “multi-dimensional market.” He sees competition growing and lawyers having to drastically change what we do. We’re all going to have to think outside the box, reinvent ourselves. My initial reaction was that he was just making up stuff, providing intricate details about a fictional future where his services will be in far greater demand … Read entire article »

Filed under: Marketing, Practice in General

An Unemployed Lawyer Is Still a Lawyer

The legal market is not good. You probably knew that already. There are unemployed lawyers everywhere and probably even more soon-to-be-unemployed-lawyers sitting in law school classrooms around the country. You probably knew that too. It seems like everyone knows it’s a rough economy for legal services, but people are entering the profession in droves. Is it that they all assume they’re the best? That they’re the ones who are going to be first in their class and skyrocket to lawyerly fame and fortune? I don’t have an awful lot of sympathy for law grads struggling to find work. It wasn’t too long ago that I had nothing but a bar number, an awareness that I had no clue what the hell I was doing, … Read entire article »

Filed under: Practice in General, Solo Practice

Availability

In the process of calling out a lawyer named Christopher J. McCann who apparently felt the need to employ some scumbag marketing tactics by having someone else send out a request for a guest post, Brian Tannebaum wrote as follows: I just wonder why Chris has hired someone to go find lawyers and try to sell himself on their blogs. Can’t he send his own email, or “call directly?” Where’s the “personal service” Chris. Chris? That highlights a fascinating phenomenon that would probably be easiest to explain with some examples. I know a lawyer who sucks. Okay, I know a bunch of lawyers who suck. They never answer their phones. They never respond to emails. They can’t even be bothered to respond to a desperate text for a … Read entire article »

Filed under: Clients, lawyers, Marketing

Rejection

If you haven’t experienced rejection, you are either delusional, or you haven’t been doing anything worthwhile. Rejection is an integral part of life well-lived. You can’t be everything to everyone, and someone is bound to be looking for something else. It’s just as true in your professional life as it is in your personal life. If you’re smart, you deal with it and learn from it. I got a little bit of rejection recently. It’s nothing special, really. I fought hard for a client, and despite the results I achieved, they ended up switching lawyers before the real battle started. Although it’s nothing new, it still stung. I thought I had built a relationship. I cared about the client and his family, … Read entire article »

Filed under: Clients, lawyers

I Guess This Isn't the Only Profession

Read this passage: [I]t is surpassingly strange that there is no connection between [school] programs, the trainers, and the [businesses] that will employ [graduates]. There is no dialogue about what type of [graduates] schools are preparing, how the paradigm needs to shift, and what new skills [employers] should be considering for the future. I cannot think of another industry where there is no relationship between the employers and the trainers. For the future, this really needs to change and I believe the key words are “partnerships” and “collaborations.” Sounds like a great idea, right? It sure does to me. In fact, it’s the kind of thing I’ve been saying here for a while. Every hiring lawyer I know has been saying it. Smarter law students often … Read entire article »

Filed under: Law School

Marketing to Bikers

I follow Susan Carter Liebel on Twitter. She’s the creator of Solo Practice University, a website that’s supposed to be “the #1 web-based educational and professional networking community for solo lawyers and law students.” 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 … Read entire article »

Filed under: Bikers' Rights, Clients, lawyers, Marketing

Missing the Point

You can imagine my surprise yesterday when this ten-day-old post suddenly lit up with new comments. They read like typical troll comments, but they were from lawyers. Local lawyers, in fact, and ones who seem to have quite a bit of experience. I believe I have multiple mutual friends with at least one of them, though I doubt he realizes that. I have no clue what possessed all of them to comment at once. Like typical troll comments, they made ad hominem attacks. One writer accused me of presuming my clients guilty, another accused me of going off “half-cocked” without knowing my facts, and yet another seems to think I merely hold myself out as someone who practices criminal defense and accused me of throwing gossip … Read entire article »

Filed under: lawyers, Professionalism

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