Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘chasing clients’

Great moments in client-chasing

Injury law firms in St. Louis and Seattle run promotional blogs for which they’ve been generating content as follows: a post summarizes (presumably from police or news reports) a recent local road fatality or injury naming the victim and other persons involved, towns, roads and other identifying information. Then it adds a bit of discussion of the accident, and advises that the law firm can assist the victims in filing claims. Often the killed, maimed or comatose person’s name appears prominently in the post title, which aids in search engine visibility to reach families searching for their own names or the names of witnesses or other parties involved in the accident. The law firms have had no previous involvement whatsoever in most of the incidents, nor have they been invited onto the scene by any of the persons they name or their survivors.

Isn’t legal marketing wonderful? In years to come when you go online in quest of remembrances of your loved ones, paging through their school reunion pages, club involvements and professional achievements, you can look forward to confronting the equivalents of giant if outdated lawyer billboards along the way. Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs blasts the practice as “a cheap stunt” and “the stuff that gives plaintiff’s lawyers a bad name” (Dec. 11), “unseemly” and “wrong” (Dec. 14), “shameless” and “sleazy” (Dec. 15). Eric Turkewitz adds his voice in condemnation (Dec. 13). Peter Lattman’s link at the WSJ law blog (Dec. 14) draws out numerous posters who appear to approve of the idea, though.

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“The tackiest lawyer advertisements of all time”

Norm Pattis makes a couple of nominations from the local crop he sees in Connecticut (Nov. 14). To me, at least, “Lady DUI” doesn’t sound as bad as Pattis’s choice for a “close second”, which

goes to a firm boasting that it can get every dime possible for you if you are injured. The lawyer intoning this commitment stands slapping baseball bat into an open hand. What does he do, beat the adjuster to death for an extra dollar or two?

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November 13 roundup

  • Ethical questions for Vioxx lawyers [WSJ law blog] And who’s going to make what? [same; more from Ted at PoL]
  • American lawyers shouldn’t get all self-congratulatory about the courage shown by their Pakistani counterparts [Giacalone; more]
  • Just another of those harmless questionnaires from school, this time about kindergartners’ at-home computer use. Or maybe there’s more to it [Nicole Black]
  • Probe of personal injury “runners” bribing Gotham hospital staff to chase business nets another conviction, this one of a lawyer who stole $148,000 from clients [NYLJ; earlier]
  • Facebook sometimes sends text messages to obsolete cellphone numbers relinquished by its users, so let’s sue it [IndyStar]
  • Series on defensive medicine at docblog White Coat Rants [first, second, third]
  • Arm broken by bully, student wins $4 million verdict against Tampa private school; bully himself not sued [St. Petersburg Times]
  • Washington, D.C. reportedly doing away with right to contest a traffic parking ticket in person [The Newspaper, on “the politics of driving”]
  • “Walking headline factory” Scruggs to be arraigned November 20 [Rossmiller]
  • More on whether government’s refusal to alter paper currency discriminates against the blind [Waldeck, ConcurOp via Bader; earlier]
  • Eric Turkewitz hosts a truly marathon Blawg Review #134 [NY Pers Inj Law Blog]

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Inside one TV-ad law firm

William K. Mattar, 43, of Buffalo “has built a substantial auto-injury practice through the estimated $2 million he spends each year on ads produced by CJ Advertising in Nashville, Tenn.” Now three lawyers who worked for Mattar have quit in acrimonious circumstances, providing a look inside the firm’s workings. Joseph Bergen said Mattar had admitted never having tried a case and had never taken a client deposition in the nine years Bergen had worked with the firm. As business poured in from TV viewers, the lawyers say, Mattar stopped using his staff lawyers to screen the cases for likely merit, instead devolving that task on a call center in Tennessee. Meanwhile, the staff lawyers’ caseloads swelled to more than 200 cases apiece, along with which came “increased pressure from Mattar to settle a minimum of two to three cases a week each,” whether or not the lawyers felt the cases were in an appropriate posture to settle. The three are setting up their own personal-injury firm, and Mattar depicts them as disgruntled employees who are misleading clients in hopes of taking away business from him. (Michael Beebe, “Mattar’s 3 trial lawyers quit”, Buffalo News, Oct. 25; “Mattar says lawyers conspired to steal clients”, Nov. 1; Martha Neil, “Former PI Colleagues Now Battling in Buffalo”, ABA Journal, Nov. 1). For some reason the Buffalo-Rochester area has generated a steady stream of colorful stories about law firms with saturation TV-ad budgets, sometimes coupled with factory-line methods; see our earlier coverage of Cellino & Barnes/The Barnes Firm and the now-retired Jim (“The Hammer”) Shapiro, of “hand you their severed heads” fame, who conceded in a deposition that he had never tried a case.

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November 7 roundup

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“Competing for Clients, and Paying by the Click”

Adam Liptak at the Times looks at the heavy lawyer-ad presence on Google sponsored links (“Oakland personal injury lawyer” costs $58.03), and quotes both Ted and me. “Instead of competing on price,” Ted says of plaintiffs’ lawyers, “they compete on Google.” And I point out that the family in search of information on, say, cerebral palsy, will run into plenty of medically tendentious material posted by lawyers as part of their client-intake efforts. (New York Times, Oct. 15).

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Minneapolis bridge aftermath

A federal judge has rebuked a large Minnesota personal-injury law firm that, even before rescuers had emerged from the treacherous waters, had petitioned for access to the I-35W site for three attorneys and two expert witnesses. And Democrat-Farmer-Labor State Rep. Ryan Winkler has suggested establishing a public compensation fund, along the lines of the 9/11 fund, for victims who agree not to sue:

The legal spectacle about to play out threatens to drag on for years and impose huge costs on some defendants.

In the future, as Winkler has pointed out, even the largest contractors may hesitate to work on Minnesota’s riskiest projects: repairs to crumbling infrastructure. “If engineers and constructors are scared away from bidding,” he warns, “it will be a long time before our infrastructure is adequate and safe.”

(Katherine Kersten, “After I-35W bridge collapse, lawyers promptly pounced”, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Sept. 2). Earlier: Aug. 9, Aug. 2.

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Search engine index II

Seventeen months ago, I noted that the most expensive Google AdSearch term was “mesothelioma lawyers” topping the charts at C$54.33. I further noted that such rich referral costs suggested that lawyers were rent-seeking and unethically obtaining surplus from clients, and bidding it away to search for new clients instead of lowering their rates.

How have things changed since? Well, lawyers have gotten slightly more sophisticated: the most expensive Google AdSearch term as of July 9, 2007, is “mesothelioma treatment options“, and, aside from a couple of medical facilities, the vast majority of advertisers are for law firms or fronts for law firms. And the price for that search term is C$69.10, up about 27% in just over a year, demonstrating the rent-seeking involved. David Giacalone comments on the related issue of fixed contingency fees that take advantage of litigants.

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