Paul Jacobson

There is a thread going around the legal blogosphere about the marketing tactics some law firms are employing.  Some of these ads are regarded as somewhat problematic.  One example of a particularly edgy ad is this video which was posted on YouTube by Steve Miller, a trial lawyer in Florida and Massachusetts.

I was about to write about the problem with this approach and approaches like it and then I stopped myself and asked myself why this is problematic?  Should lawyers be permitted to advertise using this sort of content?  I’m not talking about using multimedia to advertise but rather what is said in that ad.  As Carolyn Elefant of MyShingle puts it:

Personally, I’m not sure why Miller chose to market to angry or disgruntled clients, because he doesn’t have to.  As Miller’s website makes clear, Miller competes aggressively on price which I’ve always believed is both a credible and necessary approach not just for lawyers, but for clients priced out of the legal services market.  But by attempting to appeal to people who call their spouse "vermin" or refer to their marriage as a "hell hole," Miller virtually guarantees that he’s going to attract clients who are unreasonable and uncompromising.  These clients may think of their spouses as vermin when they call to retain Miller, but I’m guessing that by the end of the case, they’ll be referring to Miller as vermin as well.  Sometimes you get the clients you deserve.

I suspect the Law Societies in South Africa wouldn’t tolerate these sorts of ads for very long and they would take the view that these ads don’t do the perception of the legal profession any favours (although I suspect the average person in the street may not agree). We may be getting close though. Here is a photo of an ad that a tourist found in Cape Town:

Image sourced from Klaas Oost’s Flickr account.

What do you think?

(Sources: MyShingle and the [non]billable hour)

Technorati Tags: advertising, family law, law society, lawyers, youtube

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I came across a post on Lexblog which asks how many top US law firms are using blogs and feeds?  I have spoken about using these technologies in modern law firms from time to time.  A good example of where blogs and feeds can be meaningfully incorporated into any law firm’s site is as a replacement for their existing mechanism for publishing newsletters.  All the major law firms publish a newsletter of some kind.  These newsletters are either sent out by email or published as pdf documents on the firm’s website. 

This method has certainly worked in the past and I am sure clients are accustomed to receiving their emails.  There are, however, more flexible, effective and richer options available now in the form of blogs and feeds.  These are very simply technologies that enable contributors to upload newsletter content easily and make that content available for subscription or publication by email.  It is no longer a question of the availability of the technology to do this.  The question is more why firms are not adopting these technologies and, in the process, helping to drive adoption of these technologies which, ultimately, help everyone communicate better?

One thought which comes to me now as I type this is that law firms are accustomed to being repositories of legal knowledge (this knowledge is our commodity) and this knowledge is often stored in silos (there are sometimes even silos within silos so only certain people have access to certain knowledge) which are not accessible to anyone who doesn’t have the right keys.  The mentality that most bloggers share is contrary to this restricted access to knowledge and I wonder if this is why firms don’t adopt these technologies?  Are they afraid of opening up and sharing more knowledge?  I’m not sure.  It is just a thought bouncing around in my head.

Technorati Tags: blogging, feeds, lawyers, legal services, newsletters, large law firms, rss, xml

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I participated in a presentation the other day to an executive of a bank.  The presentation gave this executive a high level overview of a project we (my colleagues and I) would like to develop and launch as a fairly exciting business.  That basically lit a fire in me to develop more projects with a view to launching new ventures.  It is quite an exciting process and way outside my usual frame of reference.

Anyway, the reason for this post is more that I came across a post on Micro Persuasion that talks about how an iPod can be used as a backup to give a presentation if your laptop and other safeguards die.  As Steve Rubel puts it:

Many readers of this blog work in PR or marketing or for Web 2.0 related start-ups. This means you spend a lot of time preparing presentations in either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote. What’s more, you probably also invest hours rehearsing and traveling to and from various meetings. Oh and if I were a betting man I’d say you carry an iPod. Well, whether you are on Windows or Mac with a few simple steps you can turn your iPod (even an older one) into the ultimate PowerPoint accessory. I am going to focus on PowerPoint here since it’s what most people use. The process is similar for Keynote.

One funky piece of software that you can use for this purpose is iPresent It which I have downloaded and am going to try out.

I also flipped over to Presentation Zen and watched a short video showing how this is actually done.  I am pretty excited about this and want to start putting presentations together so I can try this out.  The one catch is that I don’t own a projector.  I don’t suppose anyone has suggestions for a projector that works with a Mac and perhaps has the necessary ports for AV input?

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I received this from my wife this morning.  No idea where it originated though:

An elderly woman walked into the Bank of Canada one morning with a purse full of money. She wanted to open a savings account and insisted on talking to the president of the Bank because, she said, she had a lot of money.

After many lengthy discussions (after all, the client is always right) an employee took the elderly woman to the president’s office.

The president of the Bank asked her how much she wanted to deposit. She placed her purse on his desk and replied, "$165,000". The president was curious and asked her how she had been able to save so much money. The elderly woman replied that she made bets.

The president was surprised and asked, "What kind of bets?"

The elderly woman replied, "Well, I bet you $25,000 that your testicles are square."

The president started to laugh and told the woman that it was impossible to win a bet like that.

The woman never batted an eye. She just looked at the president and said, "Would you like to take my bet?"

"Certainly", replied the president. "I bet you $25,000 that my testicles are not square."

"Done", the elderly woman answered. "But given the amount of money involved, if you don’t mind I would like to come back at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning with my lawyer as a witness."

"No problem", said the president of the Bank confidently.

That night, the president became very nervous about the bet and spent a long time in front of the mirror examining his testicles, turning them this way and that, checking them over again and again until he was positive that no one could consider his testicles as square and reassuring himself that there was no way he could lose the bet.

The next morning at exactly 10 o’clock the elderly woman arrived at the president’s office with her lawyer and acknowledged the $25,000 bet made the day before that the president’s testicles were square.

The president confirmed that the bet was the same as the one made the day before. Then the elderly woman asked him to drop his pants etc. so that she and her lawyer could see clearly.

The president was happy to oblige.

The elderly woman came closer so she could see better and asked the president if she could touch them. "Of course", said the president. "Given the amount of money involved, you should be 100% sure."

The elderly woman did so with a little smile. Suddenly the president noticed that the lawyer was banging his head against the wall. He asked the elderly woman why he was doing that and she replied, "Oh, it’s probably because I bet him $100,000 that around 10 o’clock in the morning I would be holding the balls of the President of the Bank of Canada!"

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Here is a cool prospect: Skype and Google Talk become interoperable.  That seems to be a possibility, according to Om Malik:

Google and eBay deal announced earlier today is going to have even bigger ramifications for the VoIP world. Google Talk team is talking about interoperating with Skype.

Just as exciting are our plans to explore interoperability between Google Talk and Skype, making it easier for our users to chat with one another. This is just another step in our commitment to interoperability via open, industry standards.

The Google Talk team posted an announcement about the Google/eBay deal on their blog and talked about their plans to "to explore interoperability" between the two clients.  If this exploration comes to fruition it will be pretty exciting indeed and will probably mean I can cut my number of open clients down by half!

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