A New Blogger The Marketers And Starbucks Lawyers Missed

According to those worshipped on the internet these days, lawyers only blog for profit, and working in an office is a sure fire road to nowhere. We are in a marketing sewer and all lawyers are to follow the lawyer in front of them down to the pile of shit called the internet, typiing away for the sole purpose of business, and working from their dining room table when Starbucks kicks them out.

Lawyer Joe Scura must have been out the day the unemployed former nothing lawyers were busy scamming other lawyers young and old in to thinking that working alone from home and blogging for clients was the only way to riches and fame.

His website and blog violate about every marketing rule that exists.

Fasten your seatbelt marketing scum - here's Joe out of the box on his website:

Joe Scura opened his first law office in 2009

2009! You idiot! Rule number 1 - never, NEVER say how long you've been out unless it's more than 5 years.

What the marketers would have told Joe was to start with:

Joe Scura is an experienced criminal defense lawyer that will fight for your rights for a reasonable fee.

The Virtual Office crew (who of late have insisted this is the future of law) drops out of Joe's world at the second sentence, where he says:

This office is devoted to providing exceptional representation to real people faced with real legal problems

Then there's his first blog post:

Two Years In Solo Practice

There you go again Joe, being all honest and transparent and just violating every rule of sleezy marketers.

A better title would have been: My Advice To Young Lawyers After Years In Private Practice (2 is plural after all.)

Joe continunes with the first reason he writes this post:

I would like potential clients to know who I am and where I’m coming from.

Oh man Joe, you want them to know the truth about you? Really?

Here's more bad news: Joe went to law school not to make money, but: with the goal of becoming a criminal defense attorney

And while I want you to go to Joe's blog and give him the many hits he obviously doesn't care about, here's a clip of what to expect (so the "how to make money fast like today as a lawyer" crowd doesn't waste their time.)

If I could stress one point here, it would be “just work”. You could spend hours in your office tweaking your website, tweeting, answering questions on AVVO, (all of which I’ve done btw) but if you want to be a young solo the most productive thing you can do to build your practice is develop skills as an attorney and do good work

Welcome aboard Joe, and congratulations on your first "Like," from me.

h/t: Mark Bennett

Non-anonymous comments welcome. Located in Miami, Florida, Brian Tannebaum practices Bar Admission and Discipline and Criminal Defense. He is the author of I Got A Bar Complaint.

Finally, Good Advice To Young Lawyers: Shut Up

It's not even fun anymore to predict what will happen on the internet when a discussion ensues about how young solo practitioners can make money, immediately.

So the queen of advocacy for solos, Carolyn Elefant, decided to open the floor to anyone with a perceived lucid thought in their head.

As Scott Greenfield noted, "naturally, a marketer showed up like a guppy drawn to chum..."

It's the mantra: Practice in trouble? Cash flow not what you expected with that shiny new iPad and virtual law practice? Start plunging your brains out on marketing.

A quick word about marketing.

Every so often the lawyers get into a dust up with the marketers, social media consultants, and tech hacks on the internet. We live different lives. Lawyers practice law. Many marketers, social media consultants, and tech hacks used to practice law and now don't, but have all the answers on how to make zillions as a lawyer. They'd rather just work at their dining room table and take their daily trip to Starbucks to tweet about the price increase on Netflix, which affects their nightly obligation to stay home because they have no money to go out.

The marketers will try to argue that lawyers are "marketers" as well. This is true. Everyone in business is marketing. The definition of marketing is to take your product or service to market. The difference is that practicing lawyers don't take money from desperate lawyers in return for marketing advice. We may engage in marketing, but our job is to practice law. I know, it's hard to comprehend that the only argument you marketers have is really no argument at all.

Back to the advice.

Here's some (anonymous of course) advice that came in the comments to Carolyn's post:

Waiting for people to refer you things is not a marketing plan. The three big marketing methods are direct mail solicitations, yellow pages and internet.

Learn these words: Search Engine Organization (SEO). SEO is the science of getting page 1 on Google. Become a master of SEO. Besides hiring an internet consultant, you should learn everything that you can yourself from books.

A good service will ghostwrite blogs for you that have good keyword content.

Don't get involved in commenting on other lawyer blogs (especially a crew of criminal defense lawyer blogs who are friendly with this site) They are well followed and readers will follow your comments from their sites to yours, but these guys get into the habit of picking fights with other lawyers on the internet.

(i.e., stay away from me)

From this point forward, 50% of your gross will go to internet and mail advertising. In a good economy, it drops to 25%. Cut non-advertising expenses. You can use a virtual phone network, get rid of the secretary, etc; but you can't skimp on advertising.

Criminal: Lots of people get arrested and need a lawyer. Do misdemeanor and DUI. Stay away from felonies in the beginning. Criminal cases are all flat fee paid up front (or at least half up front). Unlike civil litigation the opposing counsel (the prosecutor) isn't out to crucify you for your inexperience. They'll offer you 20-30% more jail that to an experience criminal defense lawyer who is part of the club; but they won't crucify you.

Marketing driven specialization in routine practice areas criminal/bankruptcy/divorce etc) will let you make a good living.

Too bad this loser was too scared to put his name to his awful advice.

But then there was Joe. Joe put his name to his advice, which caused Greenfield to call him out on his lack of experience.

Joe said maybe he should just "shut up," to which Greenfield said:

That's right. New lawyers don't want to hear this, and don't like it one little bit, but this is exactly the right advice. If you have nothing helpful to say, say nothing. If you have yet to achieve a thriving practice, then you have no advice for anyone else who is having difficulty achieving the same thriving practice.

I realize that the idea of shutting up offends you, and being told to shut up stings. I realize that it flies in the face of what your parents and professors told you, that you should express yourself constantly. But this is the real world, and just because you have a keyboard and time on your hands does not mean you have advice to offer.

After a few months, even a year in practice, I knew nothing. At least I told myself that. I spent a lot of time doing three things, practicing, listening, and learning. Giving advice was something I did to clients and those few lawyers in the PD's office that asked, but not to other lawyers who had been doing this longer than me. I took advice from them.

But that's not acceptable today. There is a notion out there that lawyers like me, like Greenfield, are "scared" of what's happening, that we're scared that our clients will go to younger lawyers armed with shiny toys and a recorded voice at the virtual (basement) office in mommy and daddy's house. That we're scared our clients will prefer someone who lives 2,000 miles away who was "recently quoted" on some website for 3 minutes.

You want to listen to (or pay) a lawyer who's been practicing for less time than it takes to have a child? You think these people have the answers? You think the way things "used to be done" are over?

Lawyers are like anyone else, even worse: tell them you can put money in their pocket, and they will listen. They will type, they will swipe the maxed out credit card for the marketing plan, and they willbe attracted to those that claim to have the secrets to the pot of gold.

Scott was right: "...this is the real world, and just because you have a keyboard and time on your hands does not mean you have advice to offer."

Wait... Oh, nevermind, I've been doing this longer than 9 months.

Non-anonymous comments welcome. Located in Miami, Florida, Brian Tannebaum practices Bar Admission and Discipline and Criminal Defense. He is the author of I Got A Bar Complaint.

Around The Ethicsphere: Reproductive Law Classes at SPU Cancelled, Arizona Ethics Law May Spell "Oops"

It's been a busy day here in the ethicsphere. So let's get right to it.

Students registered at Solo Practice University (SPU) for the "Creating a Niche in Reproductive Law," will have some extra time on their hands as, well, the professor is no longer teaching there. Here is her SPU bio, uh oh, page not found. It was only in December of 2008 that "it was announced that theresa m. erickson would be joining the prestigious faculty at Solo Practice University."

So students may want to consider the class on blogging that was announced in November 2008. Oh wait, that professor was disbarred 3 months before the announcement, so that's not an option.

Anyway, on to the next issue of the day.

You may remember my post from yesterday where I mentioned one Rachel Rodgers practicing with her New York and New Jersey License from her home in Arizona. Lisa Solomon swooped in to accuse me of libel, and now Matt Brown, in Arizona, may have cleared up this whole thing for us:

You see, Ms. Rodgers lists a Phoenix, Arizona address on her website. She offers services that look like legal services. Ms. Rodgers is not a licensed Arizona attorney. I checked. She never explicitly claims to be licensed in Arizona, but she also never offers any kind of disclaimer clearly explaining that she isn’t licensed here. That wouldn’t matter anyway, as I’ll explain in a second. The of-counsel lawyer listed on her website, Donna Seyle, is not a licensed Arizona attorney either

An out-of-state lawyer, not admitted to practice in Arizona but living in Arizona, may not practice law limited to the law of jurisdictions in which he is licensed. The out-of-state lawyer may not perform the practice of law in an Arizona office of record, either the office of the out-of-state lawyer or an admitted Arizona attorney.

Oh.

Well, it's been a fun day in the ethicsphere folks. Of course as soon as the parties involved here, or the vast amount of Starbucks lawyers who think I'm mean and support any lawyer who tries to make a go of it on the internet (either as a practitioner or host of an online university) make some statement, I'll be sure to pass it along.

As soon as it happens.

The minute they say something.

Any minute now...

Wait for it...

Non-anonymous comments welcome. Located in Miami, Florida, Brian Tannebaum practices Bar Admission and Discipline and Criminal Defense. He is the author of I Got A Bar Complaint.

A Young Lawyer Rages Against All This "Ethics" Crap

Back in June (which is a lifetime ago in the blawgosphere), Scott Greenfield wrote about young Rachel Rodgers.

His motivation for the post was my tweet of what Greenfield referred to as a "cheerleading post" on solo practice.

A brief history on solo practice:

Used to be that lawyers would work for someone and then go solo. Now there's no jobs so lawyers are going from law school graduation, right to the computer to create their law firm twitter account and Facebook fan page, and presto - a practice is born with an "experienced, aggressive" attorney. Today we fake it until we make it, as the marketers encourage young lawyers to do.

Back to the post.

It was a post about all the wonderful things about solo practice, and it highlighted Rachel:

The 2009 Cardozo School of Law graduate spent a year clerking for a judge and then decided to start her own firm while working a part-time job at a law firm. She was laid off after they ran out of work for her to do, but her unemployment gave her the push she needed to dedicate more time and effort to building her practice.

OK. Sounds good.

By working from her home in Phoenix, Ariz., and using her website as her storefront, she manages to keep overhead costs less than $500 a month. Her virtual office allows clients to log into her website and, like a bank’s secure online system, send information back and forth between her clients.

Nice, for those clients who don't want to meet their lawyer face to face, don't want an office to visit, don't want to see where and how their files are being managed, and completely trust the confidentiality and total complete rock solid privacy of the internet.

“There have been times when I’ve woken up in the morning and I have new clients,” she said. “They’ve found me online somehow and I’ve never had any interaction with them, but now they’re my clients. It’s pretty sweet.”

New clients, no interaction with them. OK.

Rodgers is catering to other people like herself— burgeoning first-time entrepreneurs, some of whom have been laid off due to the poor economy.

Clients who have been laid off. They are signing on to hire a lawyer over the internet for what, exactly?

And of course: She... maintains a blog, writes on other blogs and stays active on her Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Cue the tribute to the almighty social media:

“Twitter has helped me be on the cutting edge. I know what’s going on right when it’s happening,” she said. “Also I work in my office by myself most days, so it’s like these are my coworkers. That’s who I interact with throughout the day. It helps me not to be so lonely.”

The cutting edge of what? Weather? Plane crashes? What exactly, please tell us unknowing, old, stick in the mud lawyers, what is going on "right now" on twitter? Did Justin Bieber fart again?

And of course, when we talk solo these days, we never find Solo Practice University too far away, an online collection of lawyers (practicing and non practicing and even one who is referred to as a "practicing attorney" but isn't, but who cares?) and social media consultants ready to teach solo practice over the internet.

Rodgers credits her success to the confidence she gained from the clerkship and to Solo Practice University, a subscription-based website founded in 2009 that offers video, written and audio tutorials for prospective or current solo practitioners.

Must be why Solo Practice University went into a frenzy tweeting out Rachel's rant yesterday.

So after this post appeared, Greenfield wrote about it and took a minute to discover this solo practice wonder kid.

Now remember, this was June.

He found this about the 2009 graduate:

Rodgers has her law office in Arizona, though she's not admitted to practice law there.

She claims: Rachel has developed expertise in various areas of alternative dispute resolution including negotiation, mediation and arbitration.

Then Greenfield wondered whether she actually practices law, you know represents clients, those things that lawyers do?

He asked this because he found this on her site:

Want to Go Solo?

Are you a law student looking to start developing a strategy to go solo upon graduation?

Are you a new law graduate having trouble finding employment?

Are you a lawyer ready to go solo and wondering what area of law to practice?
Would you love to have your own practice but not sure how to obtain clients?

I am contacted every week by law students and lawyers who are struggling due to a tough job market and are wondering how they’ll pay off their loans, practice the type of law they always hoped to and have the type of lifestyle they always wanted. I have spent the last two years researching, planning and then building my own unique law practice and have been able to bring it to a place of profitability while also meeting my lifestyle needs. I believe that you can do the same.

I Can Help!

You can build the law practice of your dreams and I can help! I provide consulting sessions for lawyer-entrepreneurs wanting to set up their own innovative, tech-savvy law practices. For many lawyers (especially recent law grads), entrepreneurship is the only way that they will be able to practice law and do so in a way that fits their lifestyle and philosophy. I understand this dilemma as I am also a recent law grad. I will help you develop a strategy and actionable plan to get your solo practice off the ground.

Now that was June. It's August. Since June, I haven't heard Rachel's name. Apparently though, she's been getting very very mad about things she's read.

So she basically went on a hysterical rant that the happysphere of online lawyers blew kisses to, while others questioned what she was talking about, and told everyone who is not a young lawyer looking for the magic bullet to shut up about ethics and go to hell, meanies:

Let me start off with a warning that as I write this column I am angry. I’ve decided enough is enough and am now willing to address this issue, and the attorneys who do what I am about to describe, head on.

Then she asks a bunch of questions:

Why would young lawyers be against being ethical? Because we have an online presence? Because we, dare I say it, actually market our practices to potential clients? Because we have the nerve to start law practices after completing law school and passing our state bar? Or because we practice law in a non-traditional way?

I can answer that.

No Rachel, because lawyers like me have caught many "fake it til you make it" young lawyers lying about their experience in order to get both clients to hire them and lawyers to use them as consultants. That's unethical.

It's not unethical to claim that 2 years after graduating law school a lawyer can help other lawyers build the practice of their dreams. It's merely ridiculous bullshit that only the naive and desperate would believe. But it's not unethical.

Rachel is also mad (but is afraid to say at who) because:

I have been accused by ‘more experienced’ colleagues’ of being an unethical attorney simply because I practice law online or because I practice law in a state where I do not live...

No dear, you were accused of PRACTICING LAW IN A STATE WHERE YOU ARE NOT ADMITTED. HAVING AN OFFICE SOMEWHERE WHERE YOU ARE NOT A MEMBER OF THE BAR OR NOT HAVING AN OFFICE IN A STATE WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE AN OFFICE.

That's unethical, if it's true. I'm sure it's not. I'm sure she'll be here in a few minutes to explain, as will her happy following of fans.

Rachel's rant includes some prolific statements, like:

Well, too bad! Too bad that you do not understand.

Then there's:

What further toasts my muffins about the so-called unimpeachable ethics of some highly critical, experienced attorneys is that they themselves could certainly take notes from younger attorneys about professional ethics.

Rachel's rant against old rigid lawyers who fear the iPad and too much coffee at Starbucks while researching the newest social media site, then reveals the point:



In conclusion, my point is this: Experienced attorneys stop trying to scare young lawyers half to death with your scary ethics anecdotes about lawyers who were disbarred or suspended due to unethical behavior.

Scary ethics anecdotes.

Like stories of young lawyers who took on cases for which they had no business taking and got disbarred? Like stories of young lawyers who didn't know how to maintain a trust account and got disbarred? Like stories of young lawyers who were suspended for lying about their credentials?

Boo.

Rachel, listen, like you (say), I get calls "every week" from young lawyers with ethics questions. I answer them. I never "scare" them in to not opening their own practice. Never.

Social media has created a new level of "truth," in general, and in the practice of law. Old lawyers are not to blame, young lawyers are not to blame. Generalities never work.

But the truth, Rachel, is that the current state of the legal economy has caused young lawyers who can't get jobs to blow their brains out on the internet, practice in non-traditional ways, and lie, yes, lie to get clients. People do weird things when money is on the table.

And when a young lawyer calls me after committing an ethics violation because they "didn't know" they couldn't do what their marketer or online work at home lawyer consultant told them, I always wish they would of called me before they screwed up.

So I could scare them.



Non-anonymous comments welcome. Located in Miami, Florida, Brian Tannebaum practices Bar Admission and Discipline and Criminal Defense. He is the author of I Got A Bar Complaint.