MAY 2, 2024 – Back in the day when lawyers wrote with a golden nib and spoke with a silver tongue, no member of the bar thought about marketing or advertising. In fact, until I entered law school in the 1976 of the Current Era (with emphasis on Current) advertising was strictly verboten. Part of the proscription, perhaps, was driven by a desire (by members of the bar) to minimize the supply-demand ratio of lawyers to potential consumers of legal services to the remunerative benefit of the suppliers. But mostly, I think, the prohibition against advertising, crass or classy, was influenced by a tradition of respect for the practice of law in a land of the rule of law. That same veneration of the law was woven into the fabric of the jurist’s robe.
This being America, however, a tradition of free enterprise existed alongside respect for the rule of law and therefore, for the practice of law. The freer the enterprise, the better, and as society’s appetite for ever greater prosperity grew, so did the pressure to monetize everything to the max.
By the time I was contemplating a career in a traditionally noble profession, others saw an opportunity to inflate its financial rewards. This trend spawned a predictable response: more people wanted to become lawyers to get a piece of the growing pie. As occurs with all goods and services, an increase in supply placed downward pressure on pricing, and that outcome was antithetical to the lawyers whose approach to practicing law was less about law and more about lucre.
Eventually, the ban on advertising was softened, then compromised, then lifted altogether. Within a few short years I found myself in regular firm meetings devoted entirely to marketing. The more aggressive and entrepreneurial lawyers went straight to the bottom line: “The practice of law is first and foremost a business.” The firm’s more traditional members, who clung to the idea that “The practice of law is first and foremost a profession,” argued that the best was to market the firm was by providing consistently high-quality legal services. A reputation for quality, the traditionalists insisted, would in the end be better for business than advertising on the back cover of the Yellow Pages—a somewhat facetitious example to underscore the point.
Yet speaking of the Yellow Pages, I remember a firm colleague who during this time attended a marketing seminar sponsored by Minnesota Continuing Legal Education. He reported to me how at the outset of the course, every attendee was given a copy of the most recent issue of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Yellow Pages. For the past couple of years, a full color ad for a DWI (as “DUI” was then called) lawyer was plastered shamelessly over the back cover of the directory. To demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the expensive ad, the seminar leader told the class that upon his signal, the attendees were to use the Yellow Pages to find a lawyer and the lawyer’s phone number. Whoever reached the goal first would win a trinket (a multitude of which the instructor had on hand in anticipation that a number of people would tie for first).
The trinket-winners who did tie simply had the most nimble fingers: they went for the “A” pages, found “Attorneys,” and stopped at “Alfred Anderson.” The slower sorts fumbled through the “D,” “C,” and “B” sections before landing in the “A” pages. A few went to the “L” pages, discovering that all was lost when they read, “See Attorneys.” The whole point of the exercise, however, was to show that out of a group of several dozen attendees, no one had thought simply to flip the directory over and find the DWI guy on the back cover. High-cost marketing could bring low-cost results.
In any event, throughout the 1990s and into the new century/millennium, lawyers and law firms stumbled all over themselves trying to market and advertise their services. The bigger firms even catapulted their efforts to the big leagues by hiring full-time marketing directors and staff. Many weren’t even lawyers, because the perception was that marketing required marketing experts, not legal mavens.
When I was running my own firm with never more than four lawyers, garnering and retaining a steady flow of clients and legal work became a constant imperative. I still adhered to the notion that the single most important marketing tool was the quality and response time of our services, but I also consciously “marketed” in other ways—mainly by old-fashioned networking.
Today, I have little need to market. I have ample, enjoyable and remunerative work at a desirable pace. If I consciously marketed, I’m afraid I’d soon have too much work and stress.
As it is, my workload ebbs and flows. Lately the tide has been rushing in. Today it was close to high tide filled with phone calls, emails, and document revisions. After the day’s frenzy had ebbed, I took a minute to scrub my “inbox” of extraneous email. Among the missives to be deleted was one from “Elite Lawyer.” It was a marketing email marketing the services of a marketing firm targeting lawyers in need of marketing resources. Bemused, I recalled the most famous words of President Calvin Coolidge, “The business of America is business.”
The email’s intended allure was that the recipient was recognized as an “elite lawyer,” the lawyer could become an “Elite Lawyer,” with all sorts of special privileges, such as having the recipient’s firm’s name listed in “a nationwide directory” (without mention of who, exactly would have access or knowledge of such a directory), and “having the opportunity to receive prestigious annual awards, including trophies and plaques.” For $$$ paid to the marketing outfit, a lawyer could order an impressive glass, rosewood, or shiny fool’s gold trophy or over-sized paperweight (for the paperless—or in my case, remote—office).
As I deleted the email, I wondered in jest, “WWLD?”—“What would Lincoln do?” Who knows, but he might’ve borrowed from what he said after the Battle of Gettysburg: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
