Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Social Media, Twitter

The message of Mark Britton, CEO of Avvo, kicking off Avvo's Internet marketing conference, is that, with the advent of Web 2.0, lawyers ought to be looking at free very and low cost client development solutions to market their services.

Is that what lawyers really want? Is free or marketing for dollar a day in the best interest of you as a lawyer? Is it in the best interest of your law firm? Is it what you really want?

Sure, the Web has brought us some incredible tools that lawyers may harness at little or no cost.

• Consumer and small business lawyers would be foolish not to avail themselves of completing profiles, and using the question and answer features, in the Avvo and Justia lawyer directories.
• A LinkedIn profile is a necessity for any lawyer, consumer or large business based, and the groups and answers features of LInkedIn can be very fruitful for networking.
• Twitter, when used strategically, can be be a very effective relationship building and brand building tool.
• Google local search may be worthwhile depending on the density of lawyers in your locale and the type of law you do.
• A link from the DMOZ directory and/or the Yahoo Directory ($299) to your blog or website is worthwhile for SEO purposes.
• JD Supra allows you to upload articles and pleadings.
• Facebook can be a an effective way to enhance relationships and build communities.

But if you're a lawyer trying to get the top of your field and trying to reach financial independence for you and your family, is your goal to keep your client development spending down to a dollar a day?

If you're focused on honing your skill and expertise as a a lawyer, while at the same time addressing your client's affairs, do you have the time to tinker with the free and low cost Internet marketing solutions?

Britton says all these "Web 2.0" tools are easy to use. Look at the above list of Web 2.O and social media tools. Do you know what they all are? Do you know how to use them for client development purposes? Do you know how to use them in a way where you don't embarrass yourself? Do you know how to use them well enough to burn political capital in your firm by advising the firm's leadership that the firm ought to embrace these tools?

I talk with thousands of lawyers and hundreds of law firm leaders a year. I observe what lawyers are doing online as much as anyone. Not only don't lawyers and law firms now how to use these 'free tools,' but a lot of them, including law firms with huge marketing budgets, embarrass themselves through the foolish use of these free and low cost tools. In response to lots of lawyers who have told me they are getting seen online, I ask them "Is that a good thing?" It's often not.

I practiced law for 20 years. I found that lawyers and law firms who invested in themselves to improve themselves as a lawyer and invested in their marketing and business development did markedly better than other lawyers.

I laud Avvo for what they are doing in offering lawyers a free directory. While serving as a VP of Business Development for Martindale, I could never get Martindale to send their people out to educate lawyers on Internet Marketing. Avvo and Britton are doing a good job of such lawyer education. There's probably 200 lawyers sitting in front of me in Seattle at Avvo's Internet Marketing Conference.

But free marketing services or doing your law firm's client development for a dollar a day, less than a can of coke costs, seems terribly misguided. Especially for a lawyer who has invested seven years in getting an education. And especially for a professional who is holding themselves out to the American public as someone they can trust to address their most important and personal affairs.

Hiring someone to help you do what you're not good at is a concept Americans are very comfortable with. You as a lawyer expect people to hire you, when perhaps they could incorporate their own business or do their own divorce.

Buying services and solutions that cast you in a better light, make your life easier, and allow you to accomplish your goals is something lawyers do every day. Lawyers buy software, lease offices (as opposed to practicing at home), hire associates and legal assistants so they can do more work for more - and better clients.

Free and low cost can be good be good for lawyers. Especially when compared to the expensive services offered by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell and Thomson FindLaw whose services often under deliver.

But I'm not sure free and low cost is what American lawyers are looking for. What do you think?

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Avvo, an up and coming online lawyer directory, will be holding an Internet marketing conference in Seattle on January 21 and 22.

Mark Britton, Conrad Saam, and the Avvo crew have pulled together a good group of presenters, including folks from Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Google, and the University of Washington. Included among the presenters are my good friends, Bob Ambrogi, who'll be keynoting, and Tim Stanley, CEO of Justia.

Though I won't be presenting at the conference, I'll be attending and hanging out at the Bell Harbor Conference Center, a beautiful place for a conference. I look forward to seeing lawyers from around the country, including some of LexBlog's clients. Maybe we can even pull together a 'Beer for Bloggers' one evening.

If you're looking to learn a few things on Internet marketing and escape from the cold of the Midwest and East, you ought to join us in Seattle. The conference only costs $249 and you may register here.

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West Publishing, founded in 1872 in St. Paul, Minnesota by John West, has been one of, if not the, most prominent legal publishers in the United States for over a century.

West established itself as the nationwide de facto standard used by all federal courts and most state courts for the reporting of legal decisions. The company published countless legal treatises authored by the leading legal scholars of our time. Black's Law Dictionary published by West and the first law book I bought in law school, had a place in every courtroom and law office the entire time I practiced law.

But boy has West Publishing, now part of Thomson Reuters, fallen. West, under the FindLaw brand, is now publishing spam law blogs full of little more than mindless crap, all in the name of selling Internet marketing services to unknowing lawyers. Shameless.

West's slide has come with the roll up of West into what's now known as the global legal division of Toronto based Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters (then known as Thomson) purchased West in 1996 and consolidated West and a number of other law book companies into what became know as Thomson West. In 2001, Thomson West acquired FindLaw.com, a free legal information web portal, founded by Stacy Stern and Tim Stanley. Thomson Reuters - West - FindLaw, however they may be now branded, make up this global legal division of Thomson Reuters.

As way of background, spam blogs are blog sites with inauthentic text or or text merely stolen or paraphrased (blog scraping) from other websites. The purpose of such a blog is to get high google search results in order to sell ads on the spam blog or to link to other websites in an attempt to improve the search engine performance of the site being linked to so you may sell ads or services on this second site.

Spam blogs are the rage among two bit scheme artists out hustling a buck. Unfortunately West, under the FindLaw brand, has become one these two bit scheme artists.

Let's look at one of FindLaw's new law blogs, The New York Personal Injury Law Blog, and in particular a blog post about a fatal auto crash reported by WCBS News in New York. The blog post is authored by a Emily Grube, a writing specialist, not a lawyer. Grube also authors other spam blogs for FindLaw.

In this blog post FindLaw regurgitates the facts of a local accident, including listing the names of four people killed in the accident. The post goes on to strategically link keywords related to the law, injury, lawyer, and New York to web pages in the FindLaw Internet directory in which lawyers buy listings and ads.

Grube then has the gall to write if you've suffered a personal injury you can contact a New York personal injury lawyer, of course linking the text 'personal injury lawyer' to FindLaw's directory. The post does not allow for comments, nor is there any attempt at creativity or analysis.

Imagine scraping the names of four of someone's loved ones killed in an accident from a news website story for a blog post so you can use the term 'wrongful death.' Your goal being to link the term 'wrongful death' to a FindLaw website page where people may search for injury lawyers who pay to pay to be in the FindLaw directory. Ambulance chasing at its worst. But FindLaw did it.

Imagine scraping the names of four of someone's loved ones killed in an accident from a news website story for a blog post so you can say 'can still sue that man's estate.' Your goal being to link the phrase 'can still sue that man's estate' (also done in the subject post) to a FindLaw website page where people may search for probate lawyers who pay to be in the FindLaw directory. Disgusting. But FindLaw did it.

There's even more garbage in this FindLaw spam blog. Look in the about section in the right hand column where out of 97 words 37 words are keywords related to New York and injury law. It takes a real 'writing specialist' to write crap like this:

The New York Personal Injury Law Blog covers news and developments in the area of personal injury and tort law in New York state, and New York City specifically, and helps to connect people with New York injury lawyers. The New York Personal Injury Law Blog is intended to serve as a resource for people working through a personal injury issue in New York, or those who are interested in New York personal injury and tort law generally, including New York personal injury attorneys who wish to keep up with the latest news developments.

I'm not alone in my criticism of FindLaw. Leading New York Attorney Eric Turkewitz labels the blog publishers on spam blogs, and in this case FindLaw's blogs, as dreck-bloggers. (dreck defined as "excrement; dung")

[They] aren't interested in creating good content, they simply regurgitate local accident or arrest stories and place a call-to-action link at the bottom. Posts are filled with buzzwords to game Google that, if coupled with the call-to-action for a recent event, places them firmly in the camp of Solicitation 2.0, a subject I dealt with two years ago. Put bluntly, many of these dung-blogs are electronically soliciting clients. E-chasing, for lack of a better word.

Widely respected blogger and New York Attorney, Scott Greenfield, commenting on FindLaw's blogs:

These aren't blogs, of course, in the sense that we understand them. There are mere names designed to trade in on search engine keywords, and capitalize on FindLaw's SEO ability to get their scam blogs higher than yours on the search engine's first page.

San Diego Attorney Marc Randazza asked 'FindLaw, are you really that douchetastic?'

They hired a milquetoast writer to author a milquetoast blawg for the sole purpose of selling ad space to sh*tty lawyers who can't develop a reputation on their own.

FindLaw's conduct is beneath everything we have the right to expect from companies serving the legal profession. Rather than conduct itself in a way that improves the image of lawyers and upholds the dignity of our profession, FindLaw gets down in the gutter so it can sell marketing services to lawyers who have not a clue what FindLaw is doing to trash our profession. A profession in which West Publishing once played a proud role.

Boy has a first class legal publishing company once held in esteem by lawyers, judges, and law schools fallen. All in the name of greed.

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How about more cowbell and less courthouse and Lady Justice on lawyer's blogs and websites? I can't take any more of the tune being sung by law firms across the Internet.

Do you know who it was who thought pictures of buildings and scales of justice were a good idea for lawyer ads? Yellow page sales representatives holed up in cheap hotel rooms.

Yellow page sales reps were taught a two call concept. The first meeting you listen and learn. You then go back to your hotel at night to cut, paste, draw and write the ads. Unless you found phrases or artwork in the directories you cart around in your trunk, you just cut and paste an ad together. You then head back to the business for the second meeting to try to sell the ad.

I'm not sure who's most to blame for all the legal 'artwork' being carried over from the yellow pages to lawyer websites and blogs. High school kids with cheap software, Martindale-Hubbell selling 25,000 'Lawyer HomePages,' or lawyers, with the design taste of someone who shops for their suits at K-Mart.

Back in 1996 when I did a website for my law firm, I wanted the website to look the people I represented, not lawyers. No one had to tell me people didn't like lawyers. No one had to tell me claimants were not looking to find themselves in a courtroom.

Rather than pictures of the law (whatever that even means), I wanted to create an atmosphere of professionalism, trust, and comfort. It remains true today.

LexBlog graphic design professionals and our creative director will do their darndest to avoid scales and courthouses. We'll have occasion where a local historic building is desired by a client. But it's music to our hears when we hear 'no legal stuff' in the design.

C'mon guys. There are no ethic's rules that require cheesy ads. You can leave the yellow pages behind. You can let your prospective clients know you're more like them and less like other lawyers. Imagine.

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Lawyers can spend a ton of time using social media and not bring in new legal work. Lots of activity doesn't necessarily equate to progress.

John Jantsch goes so far to ask 'Is Social Media Killing Your Business?'

Some small business folks equate busy with business. The problem with social media usage is it can keep you really, really busy, without producing a dime of business.......It's all too easy to get sucked into building a big blog readership or twitter following and then wonder why your phone isn't ringing.

Social media for the small business is a catalyst, a tool, a way to create awareness and deeper engagement - it's not a way to take orders.

At some point you've got to take orders. If you can't convince someone face to face of the value of your proposition, don't expect to do it in 140 characters or less.

This post is not for the social media legal luddittes who think social media has no place in the law. They're in more trouble than the lawyers spending too much time on Twitter.

For those of you using social media just keep some things in mind.

• You need to be focused in your use of social media. Large blog readership and Twitter followers are not the goal.
• You need to focus on building relationships with your clients, prospective clients, referral sources, and their influencers.
• You need to keep track of the people you meet through social media via LinkedIn and/or your law firm's client relationship management (CRM) system.
• You need to get out and meet the people you've met through social media for coffee, lunch, or a beer.
• You need to ask industry groups whose members you'd like to represent to speak at their luncheon meetings or conferences.
• You need to follow up with the people you meet, relationships aren't built in one meeting.

You can be a social media rockstar, but you still need to deploy real world client development skills. And God forbid, you may even need to ask someone for their legal work.

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It's the end of the year so blogs from lawyers, law firm management professionals, and legal marketing consultants are full of the obligatory predictions for 2010.

Adrian Lurssen of JD Supra has a nice summary of the predictions coming from legal professionals. Some of the predictions are inspiring, some less so.

But what I'm struck by in reading predictions for 2010 is that they are often predicting things that are out of predicting professional's control. Why not make the future instead of predicting the future?

No one is going to care if your predictions were right or wrong at at the end of the year. Except maybe you. And you'll like a self serving clown if you come back a year from now and say look at this blog post from December, 2009 in which I predicted something that's now true.

There's never been a better time for the 'Average Joes' of the world, like you and me, to make the future. It used to be that some people predicted what would happen, and that only Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Steve Jobs could make the future.

No longer. If you're a small company in the legal space, there's never been a better time to develop new products and solutions to compete with the dualopoly of Thomson West FindLaw and LexisNexis (including LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell).

The cost of developing products with software that's low cost or open source allows you to bring products to product to maket at a fraction of the cost of what it would have been only 10 years ago.

Rather than raising a large sum of money to get started, find some hard working friends with a passion. You can run laps around the big boys who employ the risk adverse and the less innovative and who try to squeeze the last dollar out the American lawyer by selling products that under deliver.

For you lawyers, there's never been a better time to compete with the good old boy lawyers. Whether the good old boys are large law firms or older lawyers who've established a long standing name in your town.

The best lawyers get their work by word of mouth, always have and always have. I practiced for 20 years and spent a ton on advertising. Yellow pages, TV, radio, newspapers, you name it. But my best clients came by word of mouth based on my skill, passion, and reputation.

Today, at a fraction of the cost of advertising, you can make a name for yourself online. By networking through the Internet via social media (blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn) you can develop a local or national reputation as an authority in a couple years. Now that requires that you be a good lawyer offering a lot to start with. But many of you sitting on your cans trying to figure out how to get work are good lawyers.

So make a little future in 2010. Don't predict it. If you're a company with a solution or product offering value to lawyers that competes with the dualopoly, go kick their ass. They are there for the taking.

If you're lawyer wishing you could be like one of the lawyers with a big name who doesn't have to worry about where the next client is coming from, go become one of them. Except better.

Your competition is lawyers who have it made. Those lawyers aren't driven to learn how to network through the Internet like you are. I'll take a PHD any day. Someone who's poor, hungry, and driven.

Good luck in 2010. But remember luck is the residue of design and hard work.

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The Seattle startup legal directory, Avvo, appears to have caught Martindale-Hubbell's lawyers.com in the number of unique visitors per month. This per the below comparison I ran with Compete.com, a web traffic analysis service.

Avvo only trailed lawyers.com by 85,000 unique visitors in November (838,000 versus 753,000). In October the gap was even closer, a difference of 42,000 unique visitors (911,000 versus 869,000). It's possible Martindale's multi-million dollar national television ad campaign increased the gap slightly In November.

Perhaps more telling is the rate of growth for each website. Lawyers.com's traffic is up 43% the last year while Avvo's traffic is up 127%. You'd have to think Avvo is going to pass lawyers.com in unique visitors in the coming year.

This increased Avvo traffic is resulting in exposure for lawyers listed in the Avvo directory and participating in Avvo website features such as Avvo Answers and Advice. Lawyer contacts such as emails, phone calls or website visits from prospective clients totaled 160,000 last month, per Mark Britton, Avvo's CEO.

Increased traffic is also resulting in increase sales at Avvo. I'm told their account managers have been fulfilling orders for their Avvo Pro product at a volume that was unexpected for the pre-holiday season.

Avvo may not be right for all lawyers (more focused on consumer & small business lawyers), and I have been critical of Avvo on some items, but there's little question Avvo, with it's rising traffic, is going to be included in lawyers' Internet marketing buys and be a strong competitor to Martindale's lawyers.com.

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I can't tell you how often I'm asked by lawyers 'What about the state bar rules that prevent us from blogging and using social media?'

Without even giving thought to what they rules are, it's just presumed by lawyers and law firms that ethics rules will stand in the way of their use blogs and social media. Note, there are no rules that I know of that limit blogging and social media by lawyers.

Who's fault is this? The state bar associations. The vast majority of state bar associations have done little to promote blogging and the use of other social media by lawyers.

Strange in that social media, including blogs, may be one the most effective means ever for lawyers to engage real people and build meaningful relationships with the public. The byproduct being an improved public image for the legal profession. God knows something we sorely need.

There's a couple reasons I see for the state bar's inactivity. One is a total lack of understanding of social media and blogging.

The knee jerk reaction of the state bar's is to view blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the like as just another form of cheesy lawyer advertising. You know, 'It's just for a lower class of lawyers who need to hustle for the next client, the type of thing certainly not be to be endorsed.'

The fact is blogs (the good ones) and social media (good use of it) are as far from advertising as they could be.

• Blogs and social media are all about engaging your target audience in a real and meaningful way.
• They're about listening to people, finding out their needs, and offering value where you can.
• They're about offering the intellectual capital of a lawyer in way that can make a difference in others' lives.
• They better allow the public to connect with lawyers in a intimate way before they select a lawyer.
• They allow the public to make an informed chose of lawyer by listening to what their peers are sharing.

The second reason is that state bar associations tend to be run, or influenced heavily, by old guard lawyers whose reputations are well entrenched. Though most of these lawyers don't advertise, those that do have war chests which allow for heavy law firm advertising.

Old guard lawyers and law firms aren't looking to give younger lawyers and firms without war chests a competitive advantage. And God forbid, a competitive advantage earned through the use of something the old guard doesn't understand.

I went to law school to make a difference in other's lives. I used to think, naively so, that bar associations stood for the same thing. 'How could we, as an association help lawyers make a difference in other's lives? How could we as an association improve the image of lawyers, something that benefits both lawyers and the public, who would more likely turn to a lawyer in a time of need?

But in the 30 years since I started law school, the law has become less accessible to people, the reputation of our profession has diminished greatly, and far few lawyers feel the pride of being part of a noble profession.

Social media and blogging could stem of the decline. It's a shame state bar associations can't see that and do something about it.

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A marketing company doing work on behalf of the legal directory Martindale-Hubbell has acknowledged spamming the comment field on New York Attorney Eric Turkewitz' blog.

Turkewitz blogged about the Martindale spamming. Martindale's marketing company in a 'heart felt' apology left in a comment to Turkewitz' post acknowledged they had done the spamming. Martindale remains silent.

Spamming blogs is done by shady marketing and SEO companies by leaving gibberish comments on blogs along with the name and url address of a company in the accompanying fields. It's done to garner links to a target site (martindale-hubbell.co.uk in this case) in order to improve the target sites search engine performance.

How low does this type of marketing go? Per Turkewitz:

Is it possible to go lower than a spammer on the web? Probably, but I haven't seen them use pornography to market the law firms that have hired them.

So what does this mean? It means that the most 'venerable brand in the legal community' is now using one of the lowest forms of Internet 'marketing' that exists: This is the cyber-equivalent of trespassing on someone's land (their blog) for the sole purpose of plastering its advertisements. Nice.

It's bad enough that Martindale, once viewed by me as a top shelf company, is pulling this crap. But I agree with Turkewitz that lawyers buying Martindale's service are partly to blame for outsourcing their marketing to companies who use such tactics.

I've written befefore about attorneys that outsource their marketing also outsourcing their ethics. This happens when one of the bazillion attorney search search sites that have popped up are hired to do promotion for lawyers. The lack of care when it comes to ethical violations or other abhorrent conduct can happen regardless of whether the search site is large or small.

When it comes to protecting your reputation, this is one simple rule for lawyers to follow: No one cares as much about your reputation as you do. So when you entrust others to do your work, you are virtually guaranteed a lower standard of care.

Turkewitz is spot on in asking lawyers and law firms who use Martindale-Hubbell:

1. How would you rate M-H?
2. How do your clients feel about spammers?
3. Since you've hired M-H as an agent to market for your law firm, how do you feel about your agent being a spammer?

I'm afraid many lawyers don't give a darn. They'll pay whatever to get the next client, no matter how shady the means and no matter that it pulls our profession down into the gutter.

But I'd hope that some you as upstanding members of our profession who care about the legal profession and its reputation would examine what you're buying when it comes to Internet marketing and who you are buying it from.

What do they do to earn your money? Do they also believe in our legal profession and for the good things it stands for. If not, I'd hope you'd spend your money elsewhere.

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