We interrupt this blog to bring you a special announcement on the latest and greatest in law firm marketing.

As you can guess from the picture to the right, my answer is not about  phony press releases like this that are little more than advertisements with links to obtain Google juice (this link is coded “No follow” to avoid that problem).

And it isn’t about creating fake law blogs, or flawgs (a great portmanteau), in order to create empty content that Google indexes in hopes to game search engines so that potential clients will find you.

And it isn’t about amassing gazillions of Twitter followers with less-than-candid personal profiles.

It isn’t about outsourcing marketing so that others can leave comment spam on blogs in the name of the law firm.

No, I am here to announce that the best attorney marketing — other than the obvious one of doing a good job for  your clients, who in turn refer you to others, a tactic that seems to get overlooked by the marketeers — is the tactic that is close to home. Do something in your community. There are approximately one gazillion ways to do this.

Being involved in the community isn’t a bad way to have people learn who you are and what you do while also providing muscle, brains or perhaps some financial support so that kids can, for example, take part in the national pastime. It’s the same approach used by generations of professionals and businesses of all stripes.

That’s right, this year’s winner of the best marketing technique is the same one I discussed back in 2010 when I got disgusted by all the marketeers pimping the “leads” they could get me for new cases from their attorney search services.

As I’ve told more than one cold-caller: I don’t have leads, I have clients. Humans are not commodities to be bought and traded.

I like to think of my version of marketing as an all-around win-win. It sure beats placing your firm name over a urinal.

And, by the way, since I know you were wondering, the kid on the mound to the left is the same one previously featured with his skateboard.

He done good this weekend. Thanks for asking.

Yesterday Brian Tannebaum wrote about many of the law firm web site marketeers that write dreck for their clients (Blogging And Other Social Media, Like A Search Engine Whore)

The marketeers put this stuff online for the lawyers and call it content. Those with even minimal composition skills use far less charitable words to describe it.

As an example, he writes about the self-linking that takes place in pseudo-blogs and the embarrassing effect it actually has on the lawyer being promoted. He uses the example below — a monstrous keyword smorgasbord you may have stumbled across in the past, and were dumber for having done so:

Recently, this Craptown family lawyer read about a father being held in contempt for failing to pay child support. This case was not in Craptown and did not involve aCraptown family lawyer. As a Craptown family lawyer, it is important that anyone in Craptown who has a problem with Craptown family law call a Craptown family lawyer. It is unclear whether the father sought the services of aCraptown family lawyer, but contempt is a bad thing and is a reason to seek out aCraptown family lawyer. So for those of you fathers that are broke, it may be time to call a Craptown family lawyer.

This is a theme you have likely seen before, though it’s still worth reiterating as lawyers continue to come online with blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, etc., ad nauseum. Not knowing how to actually use these media, the attorneys outsource the content to the marketeers, outsourcing their ethics and public face in the process.

But I’d like to add a bit to what Tannebaum wrote, which he summarized like this:

Stop the multiple links in your blogs, and stop automating your social media accounts.

Fire anyone who you hired to do this for you.

Stop being an internet marketing whore, and start being a lawyer.

Now my two rupees to add on: The only reason to create such horribly dreadful prose is because the marketeers (or lawyers listening to them) think there will be Google link juice that will flow to those links; they think page rank will increase. In other words, the prattle isn’t written for the human, but for the search engine.

But do they really think Google is that stupid? Do they think Google doesn’t know that folks are trying to game them by passing along valuable page rank in the form of links?

If I were building a search engine, I would value the first inbound link from a site. The second link would be less valuable, and the third even less. It’s the only logical thing to do. Thus, my first link from Above the Law was likely good for my blog. But they’ve linked to me often over the years and additional ones probably have little impact as far as Google is concerned.

The same is true with multiple links within a post. The more links, the less value each will have. While I’m obviously not privy to Google’s algorithms, I do know these folks didn’t get to the top of the search game by being stupid.

So if you should happen to stumble across one of those Craptown blog posts that Tannebaum wrote about,  you have learned several things about the lawyer, none of them good

But adding to the humiliation factor that Tannebaum noted, you can add that:

1. The lawyer has hired a marketeer that is incompetent;
2. The lawyer has wasted his money because he gets nothing from it (other than humiliation).

And if you already made the mistake of hiring one of the marketing charlatans hustling business from lawyers left and right, and you can’t figure out whether the content being produced is good for you, ask your mother to read it. Ask your spouse. Ask friends who you trust for candor, the kind of friends that would take the car keys out of your hand because you’ve had one too many.

What would they think? Would they be proud to say they know you? If your kid’s friends read it, what are they likely to think of you?

1/4/13 – Update - this post has been modified where indicated to remove the name of a law firm and add the name of marketing firm. Explanation below.

1/9/13 – Update - The comment might have been left by a “Negative SEO” company trying to use this blog to damage someone else. Explanation below.
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I’ve written before about the dangers of lawyers outsourcing their marketing to others, because marketing and legal ethics are intertwined. Thus was born the simple formula:

outsourcing marketing = outsourcing ethics

But it isn’t just ethics that get outsourced. Those who outsource their marketing are also outsourcing their brains. Why? Because now you have an agent writing on the web on your behalf. The fact that something might not violate the code of professional responsibility doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid and humiliating.

Now comes today’s example. In late December I wrote about a fundraising event for Sandy Hook (12 Miles to Newtown). I don’t need to explain the many levels of horribleness of the massacre of children.

But because the New Jersey law firm of [redacted] apparently outsourced its marketing, this piece of tripe was posted in the comments:

Its a good way to show that, people are still care for each others.
Thanks for this!!!
It was a phase which is gone so now we have to move on.

The  writer is listed as haddonfield new jersey law firm, which is obviously the first clue to spam. The second clue is the link to the website embedded with the name. The third clue is the Gmail address of bobbywilson315@gmail.com.

But the final clue is, of course, the meaningless gibberish, which is definable as crap unrelated to the posting. Really now, “It was a phase which is gone so now we have to move on”?

Congrats to [redacted] for having someone write this in their name. Well played gentlemen, well played.

And now an offer to the firm — an idea I poached from Popehat and have used before– if you are willing to cough up the name of your godawful marketing company, I will modify this post.
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1/4/13 Update: Last night Drew Rigler of Impact Internet Marketing in New Jersey contacted me via email, aghast at what had happened. His small company does the Internet marketing for the law firm.

He says that everything they currently do is in house, and that their one attempt to outsource the creation of an app did not work out well. There isn’t anybody overseas that is paid to make comments on blogs. (The IP address for the comment spam says India.)

As I type, he said he is scrambling to find out how this happened. Now you would think that anyone looking to save their skin would claim to be aghast, right? But Rigler had this to say also, in his very first email to me:

I stand by our client and if you wish to drag anyone through the mud, feel free to use my name, my company, but not the great lawyers and team at [the law firm that hired us]. This is in no way reflective of them as a company or a firm.

That is an upstanding comment to make that I simply can’t take issue with.

I expect to update this again after Rigler completes his investigation. Since he (and the law firm) have a vested interest in finding out who did this and why, I expect that I will hear back from them.
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1/4/13 Update - Rigler got back to me again to let me know that their current belief is that a “Negative SEO” company was trying to damage the law firm, by dropping comment spam here and hoping that I would write about it.  While I know there are bad people in this world — and that such black hat tactics might go on in politics —  I never knew that a company could be founded on that principle and then target lawyers for its “marketing.”

And yet, Rigler tells me that such a company had actually pitched its services to one of the lawyers previously, which they obviously rejected, and then two bits of subtle attack popped up. One was here and one was elsewhere (which he showed me). He also gave me a link to the company that does it, which I won’t share so as not to give it any link juice.

Why did this happen? Was it anger by a company whose entreaties were spurned? A competitor hiring it? Someone testing the waters to see what happens? I don’t know.

Caveat Jurista.

Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy, it just doesn’t get much better than this. An SEO salesman, trying to sell a lawyer a domain name, sounding drunk as a skunk, leaves a wonderfully rambling message. Not wonderful for him, of course, but for us.

And all of it deliciously placed on YouTube. Go ahead. Listen. It runs just over a minute. Trust me on this one.

So, was that, like, totally awesome, or what? Who the hell has to even write a post about it?

Can you imagine, someplace in America some lawyers might actually be outsourcing their marketing (and therefore their ethics) to this guy and his company?

A name, a name, my kingdom for a name! The recipient firm, McCollum & Griggs of Kansas City earns brownie points for putting this on the web, but publishing the name of the company, would have earned even more.

Hat tip to Bret Emison, also of Kansas City, who posted about it here.

(This is cross-published at Above the Law)

For the new ATL readers, let me introduce myself here in my first column. OK, screw that, I know you don’t really give a damn about me, so let’s jump to the meat and potatoes…

You all know that Dewey & LeBoeuf, filing for bankruptcy liquidation today, is the largest law firm to ever go bust. And that means a ton of people are now out of work, either scrambling to hitch their wagons to new firms or looking to start their own practices.

Because having your own firm is, to many, the Holy Grail of a law practice. Sure, some like the consistent fat paycheck, but the ranks of lawyers are filled with Type-A personalities who fantasize about practicing law the way they want to do it, not the way some other Type-A knucklehead has been telling them to do it.

There are only about a gazillion things to think about in starting your own shop: office space, support staff, technology and money to keep you going, to name a few. But today’s topic will be self-promotion and social media. And I don’t mean this in a good way, as in here’s how to go out and be famous on Twitter. No, no, a thousand times no. Instead I’d like to warn you about them, and help  you save your soul.

You’re welcome. Pull up a chair, and let’s review some of the more dreadful attorney marketing over the years. We’ll start in the toilet.

And when I say start in the toilet, I am perhaps, exaggerating a bit, because what I really mean is over a urinal. Now I know that no one from BigLaw would ever stoop low enough to advertise over a urinal, but you should know that marketing opportunities come in all shapes and sizes and that someone, somewhere might try to sell you something that doesn’t quite pass the smell test.

Selling is what marketers do, and dreams of a steady flow of clients is what many lawyers want to hear. That is always the salesman’s pitch, figuring out what the mark wants to hear. (“Would you like to have more cases?”) But I don’t suggest you take the ghoulish pitch from the funeral home website. Or that you advertise in a jail.

I won’t belabor the point of lousy marketing strategies, because I think you get the picture. If you’re going out on your own — and letting everyone know you are out on your own — you may start fielding inquiries not only from the commercial end of the pool where you once swam, but also questions from friends, family and neighbors that may focus on the consumer end of the law. That means criminal, personal injury, matrimonial, residential real estate, etc.

Some of you will dabble, not wanting to turn away business and curious as to how you might expand your practice. And some of you might actually like it, as your clients are likely to be real people instead of corporations. In addition to getting paid, you might get the warm, fuzzy feeling of actually helping a fellow human. But because these are people that don’t usually use legal services, it is also the domain of the mass advertiser.

So, for my new ATL readers, this is the thing to remember above all else: Marketing is part of our ethics codes. So if you outsource your marketing you outsource your ethics. It isn’t complicated; the marketer is your agent that is speaking for you. When the marketer calls and emails, you ask yourself: Is this the type of person I want to hand my law license to?

You may think that the company is reputable. But that is only because you really haven’t been watching the way some of us outside the BigLaw cocoon have been watching. Instead of giving examples of how the piddling marketing companies screw up (urinals, funeral homes, jails) — perhaps you figure you’ll just be safe and hire the biggest and best? —  let’s look at the Goliaths of the industry to see how well they have done.

First in the dock is Martindale Hubbell. One day it seems, some comment spam turned up on my blog. From them. That’s right, the great revered king of all kings in the legal directory business, was using black hat techniques to drum up business. By basically coming over to my place to stick a billboard for itself on my lawn. How did that happen? Because they weren’t actually doing the work, but had simply outsourced it to others (who may in turn have outsourced it yet again). So you should assume that no matter who you hire to market for you, it will end up being done by some kid in Bangalore, India who knows less than nothing about the practice of law and our codes of professional responsibility.

Next in the dock is FindLaw. What was their faux-pas? Creating crap. This company decided to create fax-blogs that did little more than repeat local news stories of accidents and then end with a links to the people that pay them. They were hoping that the people in the accidents would Google themselves and find the story and then click on the links to the lawyers that had paid FindLaw. At one point, I actually found them using the name of a dead child in the subject heading in order to lure in the family. Ask  yourself: Are these the types of people that you want to hand your ethics over to?

So this is the essence of what happens: The lawyer outsources marketing (and reputation) to a non-lawyer marketing company, which in turn hires or outsources your marketing (and reputation) to yet other people.

Don’t say you weren’t warned. Welcome to the world of attorney marketing. Please drive carefully.

This post was substantially edited on May 25, 2012.

A lawyer “blog” stole a post of mine wholesale, regarding medical malpractice tort reform in Texas being a bust. I ran the story on May 23rd. This is a copy of my post that they used: LawGroup 5.23.12

The marketing company responsible has now come forward and owned up to the deed.

This is the explanation of John Uniac of The U Agency, which has a Massachusettes telephone number:

I wanted to reach out to you regarding a post that seems to have come from your blog. I apologize as the team is instructed to reach out to the original content producer to see if they would like it posted and then linked back to them as well as full credit given.

Two lessons learned: One is for lawyers that when they outsource their marketing their reputations go along with it. The other is for the marketeers that are busy writing/stealing “content” to post on law firm websites. Here’s a thought, let the lawyers write their own pieces. There is simply no way that some marketing agency is going to create quality legal content.

The U Agency, ironically, doesn’t seem to have its own website. While the graphic you now see in the upper right hand corner says www.theuagency.com, there is no actual website at that address. Go figure. But he does have a Linked-In profile that says, in part, about the company:

We help you get social but we make sure you get it right!

Well, he didn’t get it right. I don’t know if the “team” he refers to is an actual group of people in a real office, or if this is some team in Bangalore for whom this is just another “create content” project.

Finally, while you can still see the lawyer’s name in pdfs, it is gone from this post for the purpose of Google searching. I even took it out of the URL (hope no one linked to it, otherwise it will be a dead page).

I took the name out to uphold my part of the bargain that I wrote about: If the law firm coughed up the name of their black hat marketers, for me to publish here, I would edit this post to remove their name. Done.

The idea for letting the lawyer off the hook if they cough up the name of the marketeer engaging in slimy conduct, by the way, comes from Popehat. See: Too Seldom Is The Question Asked: Who Are Be Defensing Our Criminals? and also:   It’s Time To Ask: Have We Adequately Investigated The Link Between Attorney Comment Spam And Masturbation-Aid Devices?

2nd Update, 5/27/12: See the comments regarding concerns the marketer has also fouled up by using the kosher mark (a hechsher) of the Orthodox Union.  That O(U) is the most widely recognized mark of kosher foods in the country.

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

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.

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 Charlie@ForThePeople.com.

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)

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.