Bad Attorney Advertisements, Part 3

For the third installment in my occasional series of bad attorney advertisements, I have found a television commercial.

Embedding of the video here is disabled, so you'll have to follow this link to see a truly tacky TV ad for a lawyer. Now, you might think that a divorce lawyer would be uniquely able to produce something that could readily cast the entire legal profession into serious disrepute (and indeed, they are well-equipped to do so), the fact of the matter is that at least one other candidate for that the title of "most shameless TV ad ever" comes from that same "Hammer" guy. Frankly, this bit of trivialization of bankruptcy, while lowbrow, doesn't really go over the top the way a lawyer using the decidedly unoriginal nickname "the Hammer" can. (This other "Hammer" guy even uses the same stock clip-art graphic of a steel hammer.)

The lack of dignity in the commercial is apparent. But this begs the question of whether good taste is actually necessary for the ad to accomplish its purpose. Maybe not -- the point of the commercial is to attract business to the lawyer and he doesn't owe any duties to the profession to make the rest of us look good. It's hard to say whether Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro is able to discern what good taste even is, given that the commercial may well not fairly represent what he's like in real life. Who knows, maybe he's really a quite sedate, pleasant, and polite guy when he's not cheesing it up for a TV spot.

But if the commercial is intended to give an idea of what he'd be like as your lawyer, I for one would rather take my business elsewhere.

Why is that? While people might be looking for a zealous advocate who will get angry on their behalf and I would too, I don't think most clients with worthwhile cases are looking for someone whose mental health is subject to reasonable question based on their presentment on TV. Both of these commercials hint that "The Hammer" is a little bit, well, off. Particularly knowing what I know about how litigation works, I know that there is a "sweet spot" that you reach in every case, when the settlement value maximizes with respect to the work done. I don't want a lawyer so blinded by his hatred of the evil insurance company that he does not understand when the case has reached its "sweet spot."

Beyond which, what if I piss him off? Clearly he's contemplated ripping peoples' hearts out and severing their heads from their bodies, and that's just for people who hurt his clients. What might he want to do if you did something he personally didn't like? Maybe it's best if I just avoid the guy altogether.


Now, I can't fault the guy for a lack of focus. A good TV ad should have as a prominent element a clear, direct focus and I'll admit it: Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro has achieved in this respect. One might take issue with the nuance of the focus on display. There is no pretense that what's going on here is about "fairness" or "justice" or "compensation for the innocently hurt" or "healing injuries." Many other personal injury ads speak to equalizing the fight between a claimant with few resources and a big, scary, powerful insurance company. Others tout the competence and aggressiveness of the attorneys whose services are being sold. Still others focus on the money that can be obtained in court, which is after all the point of personal injury law.

But here, it's not even so much about the Benjamins, or even about zealous advocacy, as it is about revenge. For anyone who has thought about how personal injury law works on an economic level, it ought to be obvious that a 40% contingency share of revenge isn't worth a penny, and speaking as someone who has interviewed his fair share of potential clients with worthless cases, I can assure the rest of you that the emotional intensity of a client's desire for revenge has nearly nothing to do with the magnitude of tangible injuries for which I might conceivably recover damages on their behalf in a court. Once again, the fact that the guy went over the top makes me question his judgment and disinclines me to hire him to handle my personal injury situation.

Now, on to practical matters. You only take away one thing from a typical TV commercial and the thing to take away from an injury lawyer's commercial is the number you should call if you've been hurt. Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro is so busy explaining how much hatred he has for the people you want to sue that he only leaves himself enough time to say his telephone number once. It's easy to forget the number after the commercial is gone, because he hasn't hammered it into your head through repetition. What I take away from this commercial is that Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro has got more than his fair share of Teh Crazee. He's practically spitting in the camera at the end when he says "You call, I hammer!" But I've completely forgotten the phone number because I'm so astonished at the lack of good taste and common sense that went in to the commercial itself.

He tries to make up for it with the overall presentation. The whole commercial is a black background frame with parallel video windows in it. The graphics are changing in the right-side window, showing a series of explosions and fires, interspersed with fast-edited black-on-white graphics. But steady on the top part of the background frame is the name of Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro and stead on the bottom of the frame is the phone number.

YMMV, but I personally think this technique fails, because my eye is drawn rapidly back and forth from the image of the frothing lunatic in the left video window with the violence of the explosions in the right video window. I can't concentrate on anything at all while watching the commercial, and my residual reaction when it's all done is a combination of stunned incredulity at the bizarre emotional intensity of the strange man screaming at me, and fatigue in my eye muscles from bouncing my visual focus so many times between the left and right video windows. It's too much, too fast, for me to mentally process.

Bad Attorney Advertisements, Part 2

For our second installment of this intermittent series of posts, I have an ad that passes one test but fails another. The ad in question takes the form of a magnet, attached to one of the three local yellow pages. The firm in question must have paid a tremendous amount of money to get the one magnet ad available.  This is what they chose to put on it:

Now, Messrs. "Beeblebrox" and "Prefect" (names changed) paid probably more than any other single advertiser in the book, in the hopes that people would peel the magnets off the back of the yellow pages and put them on their refrigerators, just in case they ever needed someone to represent them in a personal injury suit.

I give them credit for one thing. The ad has focus. You look at the ad and you know what this firm does -- personal injury work. They represent people who have been hurt.

What I really don't like here, though, is that the print on the ad is so damned small you have no idea what is going on. For some reason, the ad is cluttered will all sorts of verbiage, so that nary a single square millimeter of the expensive ad space lacks information. You can't read very clearly in my scan of the ad, and in fact you can't read very clearly in the original thing, that "Zaphod Beeblebrox" is a former instructor at two Universities You May Have Heard Of, that he is a "Senior Partner" in this law firm, that he is a member of the Consumer Attorneys of California and the American Trial Lawyers Association. What you see is itty bitty tiny thin letters that say something, which may or may not be about the man pictured in the upper-left corner of the ad, and if you squint at them they sound sort of lawyer-like.

The typical layperson probably doesn't appreciate the fact that attorneys who teach do so typically either for extra money or because it is something fun and different than litigation (both of which are true for me). If you want someone who is all-litigation, all the time, someone who teaches classes isn't that. If you know something about how law is taught in a law school, you may not necessarily think that the Socratic method is a particularly good way to prepare for presenting a case to a jury or, more important, working a case up to prepare for settlement. The Socratic method is useful to train new attorneys in figuring out important abstract concepts. But it isn't going to help your discovery disputes very much and is only of marginal utility in a courtroom setting -- because in a good examination, the examiner is providing the bulk of the information, not the examinee.

It is my belief that a layperson will have no idea what the phrase "Senior Partner" means, but the idea that a guy whose name is on the door would be something other than a key decision-maker for the firm is alien. Of course this guy is the one who calls the shots. It doesn't matter what he calls himself.

Then, why is he advertising his membership in ATLA and CAC? These are vaguely lawyer-like things that may sound impressive but don't convey much information to the layperson about what they mean. If you do know what it means to be in ATLA and CAC, you aren't surprised that a guy advertising for personal injury work is in them, because for the most part, ATLA and CAC are organizations of personal injury attorneys. In fact, there are some benefits to membership in these groups, but they are technical, behind-the-scenes sorts of things, which will not be obvious to the layperson and in fact most clients would be uncomfortable learning about ("You mean you let someone else write your pleadings for you?" referring to the pleading banks available to ATLA/CAC members).

So when you peer through the micro-print, what you find isn't of much substantive help to the consumer looking for an attorney. It's just... stuff.

Then there's the rest of it.  "95% success rate since 1984." I sort of like the "since 1984" part of that, because it tells me that there are very experienced attorneys at this firm. The "95% success rate," though, is deceptive -- this rate looks an awful lot to my eye like the number of cases upon which the firm has collected money, mainly through settlements. But it sounds like they take 95% of their cases to trial and win. If they had actually done that, they wouldn't have had time to recover over $100 million for their thousands of satisfied clients.

I've never known why there are long laundry lists of different ways one can be personally injured, but there are always these sorts of things in P.I. advertisements. I guess it's because someone, somewhere, thinks that an attorney who will take an auto accident case won't take a motorcycle accident case. (Motorcycle cases work just like auto cases, except the motorcyclist tends to be much more severely injured.) The six categories of cases listed really only compromise two kinds of work -- personal injury and workers' compensation cases.

The most important parts of the advertisement come below this laundry list -- they will come to you, 24/7, they will not charge you any out-of-pocket fees, they will arrange for free towing for your vehicle and financial help for medical care and other needs of the injured. (This looks like they will help pay you while your case is pending, which I know not to be true; they're talking about doing medical care and other getting other services on liens. But that's a bit deceptive.) If I were an injured person, these would be the things I cared about most. What can these attorneys do for me, and can they do it right now? This is buried towards the bottom of the ad and in smaller print, indicating that it is of lesser importance to the author of the ad than the other, more prominent things.

The most prominent thing on the ad is the photograph of the attorney. Valuable space was taken up describing the attorney's credentials, which look good on the surface but turn out to have little substance. After that, the next most prominent part of the ad is the description of the attorneys as "INJURY ATTORNEYS" followed by a big box describing how much money they've made. Who is the real target of this advertisement here -- the potential clients of the attorney, or his ego?

I'm being too unkind. The ad is focused, it does guide and encourage the right kinds of clients to the attorney, it provides useful information about what the attorney can do. But I think it hasn't been thought through from the audience's point of view. If the target is injured people looking for a lawyer, the lawyer has to offer something to that audience, front and center. I don't care where the attorney teaches, I care whether he is going to get my medical bills paid. I don't care if he's a good-looking man, I care that he's going to make sure I don't have an interruption in my income flow so I can provide for my family. I don't care what fraternal societies he has joined, I care whether I am going to have to pay him before or after I get back to work and have money in my bank account again.

This is there, but it's not prominent enough. I give the ad an "A" for focus, a "C" for content, and a "D" for poor organization and cluttered visual appeal. For the amount of money that went in to circulating a fridge-magnet ad, I'm sure that Beeblebrox & Prefect could have done better than this.

Bad Attorney Advertising, Part 1

Yesterday, I was musing about a lack of blogworthy subjects. After all, what can I say about the Nevada Senate race that hasn't been said elsewhere a million times already? No good options available there, but that ought to be obvious to the casual observer. But I should have simply had a bit more patience, because today, under the windshield wiper of my car out in the parking lot at court, the subject for not only a new post but a whole series of posts was literally given to me, for free.

I speak, of course, of bad attorney advertisements.

I found the flyer to the left on the windshield of my car this morning. Unless I've missed my guess, you should be able to click on the picture and see it at a much higher resolution. The flyer itself was on an 8½" by 11" sheet of glossy paper, printed on only one side.

I've altered the attorney's name and telephone number. I found a font that is sort of like the one used in the ad but I frankly didn't dedicate a lot of effort to that part of this project, so my two alterations are a little darker than the scan, the font isn't exactly right, and is just a little bit smaller. This should be obvious to the casual observer, once you find the alterations I made.

Which is my very first problem with the advertisement.  You've really got to hunt to find the attorney's name and telephone number. There is no doubt that the advertisement is for a divorce lawyer.  What is that lawyer's name?  Assuming that I'm favorably impressed by the advertisement and want to hire this lawyer to handle my divorce, how do I get a hold of that lawyer?  The lawyer's name appears in the smallest size font used in the entire advertisement, at the very bottom of the page.  The lawyer's telephone number is nearly buried underneath stacks of visually oppressive block text.

Which is the second problem.  There are upper- and lower-case letters for a reason.  USING ALL CAPITAL BOLDFACED LETTERS IS LIKE SHOUTING and when you emphasize everything, the result is that nothing is emphasized.  The use of all-capital letters, and the clunky, blocky font gets in the way of the message, which ought to be "Hey, I'm a lawyer who can help you with your divorce." Instead, the ad says "I'M A LAWYER WHO CAN HELP YOU WITH YOUR DIVORCE!" and that suggests some rather disagreeable things about the lawyer's personality. This is only underlined by the central picture (more about that below).

My scan of the flyer is maybe a little blockier than the print, but not much.  The spacing of the fonts is badly-proportioned, and in the central, most important word ("DIVORCE") the spacing is so obviously over-wide that it is distracting.  Since my suspicion is that "Arthur Dent" designed the advertisement himself, I would suggest that he take some time to learn about why typography is important for lawyers and how to use typography advantageously so as to make documents with at least a modicum of care for the visual effect of the end product. A similar typographical disaster is the fact that every word of text on the advertisement is centered.  Some use of centering is good, too much and it looks like you don't understand how to use the "left-align" button on your word processor in addition to being indifferent about how you use your CAPS LOCK key.

The graphic elements of the ad have five parts -- the two pink trapezoids, the two blue trapezoids, and the photograph in the middle.  I like the photograph in the middle.  It is emotionally compelling, accurately describes the need for the service being offered, and it attracts the eye.  It's a shame that this nice photograph is surrounded by such primitive and ineffective graphic elements as the trapezoids.  They are at once so bright on the glossy paper as to hurt the viewer's retinas but also so dark as to create a low contrast with the black text of the advertisement.

On glossy paper, and viewed in the sun (as I first saw the flyer) the low contrast is much more dramatic than it looks in the scan (or the shade). Probably the glossy paper was the only format available that could transmit the clarity of the photograph -- I like the detail of the muscles straining on the man's neck especially -- so maybe "Arthur Dent" was stuck with that kind of medium instead of one that was both more affordable and easier to read.

Now, I've already spilt a lot of words about the flyer but I haven't yet said anything about its content.

My response to the content is not completely negative, however.  I'll say this for "Arthur Dent" -- he has created a properly-focused advertisement. "Arthur Dent" is probably not above taking a personal injury case, an eviction, or a criminal matter.  But this advertisement is going for one kind of business and one kind of business only -- family law.  If you need to get divorced, Arthur Dent does that.  Too many lawyer advertisements -- I'll share another one soon -- contain laundry lists of different sorts of things the attorney either has done, is willing to do, or is at least willing to take your money in exchange for promising to do.  The result is confusion, at best.  "Arthur Dent" does not suffer that problem here -- there is no confusion at all about what "Arthur Dent" does for his clients.

However.  "Arthur" also seems to suffer from low self-esteem.  Despite "13 years experience" our man "Arthur" describes himself as "cheap" twice, "cut-rate" once, and "competent" once.  I would hope that with thirteen years of experience, "Arthur" is not just "competent" at the core segment of his practice.  By now, he should be pretty good.  And he should also be good enough to command a healthy fee.  When I showed this ad to The Wife, her first reaction was, "This guy must not be very good if he has to cut his fees like that."  When I began doing real estate law, I was quickly corrected the first time I referred to a piece of property as "cheap." Real estate isn't "cheap," it's "inexpensive." Similarly, legal services aren't "cheap," they're "affordable" or "reasonable."

So given that his assurances about his "cheap" rates also convey the impression that the quality of the services offered in exchange are not high, what does "Arthur Dent" say about the quality of work he does?  Well, in his left-hand trapezoid, he asks if the reader wants "excellent" representation.  Then in the bottom trapezoid, he promises to deliver "competent" representation.  You might say I'm selling "Arthur Dent" short here, but he's the one who's doing that. I'm just pointing out what he says about himself.

"Arthur" uses the word "representation" four times, and twice in a single sentence.  I suspect most people know what that word means, but it is a long word, and in graphic terms, it eats up acres of space on the flyer.  So do words like "experience," "understanding," "procedures," and "competent."  The"Want-Have-Get" triptych is also a parody of what people cynically think of the legal system in general, and divorces in particular.  The overuse of dollar signs and question marks also does not add luster.

And finally, "Arthur" chose to advertise in the form of a large-format glossy-paper flyer placed on peoples' cars outside a courthouse.  Now, if you want to create a favorable impression for your product or service with me, leaving a flyer for it on my car while I'm not there to monitor you tampering with it is a really counterproductive way to go about doing that. But maybe other people are less bothered by that sort of thing than I.

The medium and venue for the advertisement also suggests that Arthur Dent" is targeting people who are already in the middle of divorce proceedings and find themselves overwhelmed by the legal system without a lawyer.  That's certainly filling a need, but it doesn't seem like a particularly profitable market.  These are people who didn't get a lawyer when they first ventured in to court -- most likely because they didn't have enough money to hire one so they went on their own to do the best they could.  This dovetails with the ad's emphasis on "cheap" fees.  "Arthur Dent" is making a significant mistake here that has been underlined to me by experienced lawyers, marketing consultants, colleagues, and bitter experience -- any attorney can get all the work they want to do, and more, from clients who can't pay.

It's a hard enough time for family lawyers as it is.  Typically, attorney's fees in a middle-class divorce are paid for out of the liquidation of the former family house.  With so many homes upside-down these days, a lot of people who would otherwise get divorced are not doing so, because they can't afford the transaction cost.  One colleague at court tells of a situation where he has a would-be client who can't afford his fee so he and his wife both continue to live together in the house they jointly own within their still-extant marital estate -- he with his girlfriend, she with her boyfriend, all under the same roof.  A ticking time bomb of a situation, if you ask me.

Within that sort of economic environment, "Arthur Dent" is spending money, probably a lot of it, to have these flyers printed up and distributed, so that he can attract clients who will have difficulty compensating him for his services.  My verdict is that the only thing that will save "Arthur Dent" from the ruinous consequences of a successful marketing campaign will be the singular ineffectiveness of the advertisement deployed in pursuit of that strategy.

My Ongoing Gripe About Online Yellow Pages

I know perfectly well that there is an Eye Exam 2000 in the mall in Palmdale, and that's where I want to go to get my eyes checked out this weekend because I have had this sore on my eye for about four weeks now. So I figure I'll call them up, make an appointment, and go.

Now, Eye Exam 2000 couldn't possibly have a frickin' website to tell me what their frickin' phone number is so I can make a frickin' appointment to go see them and give them my frickin' money. Oh, no. A Google search points me to an Eye Exam 2000 franchise in frickin' Sun Valley, Idaho. They must be using the "Maneuver X" method of web presence advertising -- make your customer go on a frickin' internet-wide scavenger hunt armed only with clues left in rhyming riddles written in archaic languages in order to find the remotest shred of information that you even frickin' exist, and that way once your customer does find you, you'll have the most loyal frickin' customer in the whole frickin' world.

You may only get one customer this way as opposed to many customers, but hey, every sales approach has its downside.

So I go to yellowpages.com and look for optometrists in Palmdale, California. Bear in mind that while the Antelope Valley certainly isn't as big a metropole as Los Angeles, I nevertheless do live in a community of more than 400,000 people within a ten-mile radius, with its own minor-league baseball team, and more to the point, not one but two branches of the particular business I'm looking for. This is suburbia, exurbia at worst. It's not the Australian outback.

The results of my search for optometrists in Palmdale, presented in the order given are as follows:

A generic link to the website for Pearle Vision Express. No address.
A generic to the website for Sears Optical. No address. (I happen to know that the Sears in the mall in Palmdale has no branch of Sears Optical.)
Optometrist #1, 28089 Smyth Dr Valencia, CA 91355.
Optometrist #2, 1032 N Hollywood Way Burbank, CA 91505.
Optometrist #3, 622 W DUARTE RD Arcadia, CA 91007.
Optometrist #4, 924 N Citrus Ave Covina, CA 91722.
Optometrist #5, 14147 Pipeline Ave Chino, CA 91710.
Optometrist #6, 1301 7th St Wasco, CA 93280.
(end page 1 of 1).

No hits at all in Palmdale. The nearest hit is more than forty miles away.

This is effin' useless. CostCo has an optometrist whose number I found in under two seconds, and I'll bet they're cheaper than the place in the mall anyway, as are the contact lenses they will sell me.

Eye Exam 2000, the difficulty I encountered in getting your phone number on the web has now cost you my business, which is going elsewhere.

Fish Wrapper Advertisements

How does Google provide advertisements for its subscribers? In theory, it works the way that Brin and Page designed Google -- it's supposed to figure out what everyone looks for with certain queries and guide you to the most popular results based on the query you've made.

Well, apparently if you don't make a specific query, but instead are browsing through another website that references Google, you might see some links that you aren't accustomed to. For instance, if you were (like me) reading the Fish Wrapper online today, and were curious about what had happened to the "Pico East - Olympic West" initative (an idea which started back with Dick Riordan first ran for mayor, way back when I was in law school), you would have gone to this article by way of a headline link on the Fish Wrapper's website's front page. And there you would have seen the the collection of advertisements that I've screen-captured for the upper left of this blog entry.

You'll have to take my word for it, I have not used my computer to search for information about having plastic surgery performed on my labia. Ever.

But apparently, this is a common sort of thing for other readers of this particular website to be looking for, or someone figures that it is a common enough thing to be made the #1 search link for anyone reading the Fish Wrapper. I wonder what the same thing would be at the Gray Lady.