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Attorney Marketing Can Be Helpful, Though Not in the Way the Marketers Expect

Dec 24, 2008
By .
Irksome, Law Practice

Today the attorneys in my firm were spammed with a dozen or so emails from a legal marketing outfit called LegalForce, a fairly generic legal marketing site that purports to list "best lawyers in the United States," with search options for consumers and lawyers, and opportunities to get anonymous and questionable advice in response to ambiguously phrased questions.

The spam emails go like this:

Hello,

You have been invited by someone you know to vote for Paul Poorjudgment of Jackhole Twitt, LLP, as a Best Lawyer in the Employment / Labor Law category in Los Angeles, CA. The bio of Paul Poorjudgment can be seen by clicking here and is also pasted below.

The objective of the LegalForce Best Lawyers selection process is to create a credible, comprehensive and diverse listing of best lawyers that can be used as a resource to assist attorneys and consumers in the search for legal counsel. All nominations and votes are confidential and anonymous.

Click here to submit to vote "YES" for Paul Poorjudgment as a Best Lawyer in Los Angeles, CA.

Click here to leave an Endorsement for Paul Poorjudgment in Los Angeles, CA.

Click here to submit to vote "NO" for Paul Poorjudgment as a Best Lawyer in Los Angeles, CA.

Click here to Nominate yourself as a Best Lawyer in Los Angeles, CA.

Click here to Nominate someone else as a Best Lawyer in Los Angeles, CA.

Click here to browse profiles of other nominated Best Lawyers in Los Angeles, CA across a variety of categories.

Paul Poorjudgment
Jackhole Twitt LLP
Mr. Poorjudgment is a blah blah blah qualifications schooling blah blah

First of all, I suspect that LegalForce is straight-up lying when it says we have been invited by someone we know to vote. I talked to my lawyers, and we don't know any of these people.  We're not sure from whence our names and email addresses have been culled.

Second, what they hell are these lawyers thinking? The more charitable interpretation is that they encountered LegalForce through spam or otherwise, signed up for the Best Lawyer contest, and simply didn't realize that their names would subsequently be used in widespread spam. That's a little foolhardy, but forgivable in the fast-moving world of internet marketing.

But the alternative — that they thought it would be helpful to business development to spam untold numbers of strangers with an invented contest for a manufactured "honor" — suggests they have a very grave deficit of judgment.

Let me make this perfectly clear to LegalForce and to anyone who thinks it would be a good idea to get their name out there through methods like this. My firm refers a substantial amount of business out. But:

  1. I would never in a million years refer business to an attorney who spammed me through LegalForce.
  2. If I needed a lawyer with a particularly specialty, I would pick out out of the phone book, or based on a Google search, before I picked one who spammed me through LegalForce.
  3. If I were forced to work with an attorney who spammed me through LegalForce — as opposing counsel or co-counsel, perhaps — I would view their work with extreme skepticism and remain vigilant for other lapses in good judgment.

Online contests are illusory and mastubatory enough.  But spam marketing campaigns to law firms?  If a lawyer is participating in one, I know that lawyer either has atrocious judgment or is so desperate for work that he is willing to debase himself an annoy thousands for the chance of getting one case.  In other words, these attorneys are apparently content to employ the same business model as the spammers who annoy a million people in order to get $30 from one guy who thinks that someone on the internet can make his dick bigger.  That level of probity does not recommend a lawyer.

By the way, Scott Greenfield at the indispensable Simple Justice has been writing a lot of very insightful posts about legal marketing — including the issue of marketeers hosting internet forums in which people can get anonymous and frequently shitty legal advice.

Postscript: Based on my casual reading of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, I think that LegalForce was required to put opt-out options on these emails. They didn't. Perhaps they think they fall under the relationship/transaction exception — if they do, that exception is so broad as to render the whole Act useless. The thing to do, I think, is to find a class action attorney desperate enough to sue LegalForce for violations. Hmmm. Where could I find an attorney like that?

Last 5 posts by Ken

6 Comments
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6 Comments

  1. dbt1949  •  Dec 24, 2008 @1:37 pm

    867-5309

  2. Vikram Rajan  •  Dec 26, 2008 @7:07 am

    Yes, they should put an opt-out option – in fact, it's good courtesy even when we're putting out our e-newsletters/blasts to our own "known" (i.e., legal) lists. And we have to put our physical address too… which they may or may not have.

    Most of our attorney clients already have great relationships with other lawyers/firms through the Bar, mutual clients, etc. To be fair to the world of LegalForce and on-line networking for lawyers, it will inevitably be a force… take … for example. It's the ABA's own social/on-line network for attorneys (et al). I think it's great that the Bar is taking such a pro-active stand to help attorneys be more "Web 2.0" savvy.

    Attorney marketing like all the marketing we experience as consumers (if not buyers) is great from the learning we can gain from it: What to do — and what NOT to do.

    ~ Vikram Rajan

  3. Patrick  •  Dec 26, 2008 @9:09 am

    Vikram I approved your comment against my better judgment, but removed all links from it. Thank you for inserting the "nofollow" tag, but we don't allow any marketing of anything at this site, unless it's something we approve in advance. To date, that's limited to Curio City, because the owner is a friend and it's a service we like. This is not a legal marketing site, by the way.

    You are welcome to stay as a reader, but if you post another link, I will remove your privilege to comment without regret. Ken may choose to do that in any event.

  4. Simeron Steelhammer  •  Dec 29, 2008 @8:03 am

    According to the Spam Act 2003, there are four things that must be in any UNsolicited email (means you can't have "opted in" or "signed up" for the list)…

    1) Valid Return Email Address
    2) Valid Physical Address (snailmail)
    3) Unsubscribe option
    4) Valid Subject Line (no misleading or false subjects)

    This is not the upper limit but the LOWER limit…the minimum that is required by the law. There are many, MANY cases that cause other stipulations to come into play including, but not limited to, state and even local city/county regulations.

    Sadly though, the bottom line is that most of the teeth in this simply miss the mark because the main "spammers" use proxy servers and other means (such as 'zombie' computers, ones infected with Trojans and other virus programs) to send the spam and therefore, are very hard to locate.

    The BIGGEST deterent to spam would be to get people to STOP EVEN REPLYING TO IT! Much less USING or falling for the stuff.

    This is why LegalForce and other people keep spamming. If they get 1 bite for 1000 emails, and they can send a BILLION emails in a day or two, think of the money they make!

    Let's say I have a standard "email list" that is harvested…it will have 100,000 to 1,000,000 addresses. Figure 1% will actually respond and 1 in 10 of those will bite. That is 0.1% of 100,000 (minimum figure)….

    That is 100 people.

    If I get only $5 per person…that is $500 for LESS THEN AN HOURS "work" that a COMPUTER does for me.

    I can run 24 of these "tiny" campaigns in a day…PER COMPUTER….

    The reality is that they will get about 1000 hits per day, per computer and probably make $20-$50 per hit….

    So if I can make $2000-$5000 per campaign and run 10 campaigns a day…why should I stop if the odds are I am not going to get caught in the first place and even if I am…the fine is only $2000-$10000 dollars?

    It's getting better but until people start to do computer security CORRECTLY….set up all computers so that there is VERIFICATION of incoming mail (which is easily done) and start taking things seriously when it comes to spam, instead of seeing it as an annoyance (Identity theft anyone? Phishing?) things are not really going to change much.

    And yes, I am an IT professional (MSCE, MCP, MCT and more) and this is a "hot button" issue for me because it could be stopped COLD with very little effort but it seems NOBODY wants to do what it takes….sigh.

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