DAVID BETRAS: The issue with Internet advertising for lawyers
I am the managing partner of a law firm, which means I am a businessman and an advertiser.
I understand that some people are appalled and offended by attorneys who market their services and are fond of referring to personal injury attorneys as ambulance chasers.”
That is ironic for two reasons: first, the term was coined in the days when attorneys were forced to contact potential clients and their families directly because the bar was barred from advertising, and second, the pejorative is used regularly by the folks who run or work for mammoth insurance companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on marketing.
Talk about hypocrites. I guess it is ok for Allstate to spend $500 million annually to convince accident victims that they are in good hands. Still, I am a ghoul for expenditures less than one-two thousandth of that to tell them the company is using those hands to pick their pockets.
Go figure.
How marketing in my profession had evolved since 1977
But I digress. I want to discuss in this column how marketing in my profession had evolved since 1977 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that lawyer advertising was commercial speech entitled to protection under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Immediately after the decision in Bates v. Arizona was announced, law firms began using every available advertising medium to contact clients, including television, radio, billboards, direct mail, and the Yellow Pages. For readers too young to remember, the Yellow Pages were the business directory section of a phone book—a thick printed directory that listed every phone number and address in a community.
Think of it as a printed version of Google, only much more difficult to use.
Because the phone book was how most people obtained phone numbers for businesses, competition for the easily accessible parts of the directory, including the covers, was fierce.
Attorneys often paid tens of thousands for the coveted spots, which explains why every Yellow Pages sales rep drove a Porsche, Cadillac, or Corvette back in the day.
How Google, Yahoo, Bing, and YouTube have overtaken the Yellow Pages
Google, Yahoo, Bing, and YouTube have replaced the Yellow Pages.
The bidding wars for frequently searched keywords like “accident attorney” are as fierce as the battles for prime placement in the phone book, with one significant difference: the competitors cheat by purchasing the names of other law firms.
Here is how it works: a person who has been injured wants to contact my firm. They search for Betras/Kopp.
The result comes back in a millisecond, but the phone number and website that pops up belong to the law firm paying the most for our name that day. So, instead of calling us, the potential client calls one of our competitors.
I believe the practice is dishonest. The Ohio Supreme Court recently agreed that using another firm’s name to drive traffic to a law firm’s site “may constitute conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” and is “…designed to deceive an Internet user.”
I applaud the Court’s ruling now, if we could get the justices to force Nationwide to admit they are not on our side.
David J. Betras can be reached at 330-746-8484 or dbetras@bkmlaws.com.