Yellow Pages

Lawyers love the Yellow Pages. 89 pages of the current edition prove it. The reasons aren’t hard to see. It’s easy to place the ad; the phone company delivers it for you into almost every home and office; it stays there a whole year. You take advantage of an established medium that people have come, for better or worse, to rely on. Many people with a need for a lawyer really will look up one in the Yellow Pages, just like they look up plumbers, pizza places, and massage therapists.

The major drawback to the Yellow Pages is that so many other lawyers have discovered them. How will people wandering through the forest of ads find yours? The typical answer is, naturally, the one promoted by the Yellow Pages publishers: a larger ad. Now that there are over thirty pages even of full-page ads, that isn’t much of a solution. In addition, full page ads are not cheap. (It’s actually possible to go beyond full-page but the cost is prohibitive for many. Not long ago a lawyer's ad was on the divider-tab page in front of the Yellow Pages section; rumor has it that the ad cost $35,000.)

The only answer is to craft an ad that will capture people’s attention. But this raises the difficult question of the dissonance — perhaps even more apparent in the Yellow Pages than in other media — between representation and reality.

Figure 1, for example, is what a simple and completely honest ad might look like. This is likely to pull business from a few eccentrics charmed by candor and from the surprisingly large number of people who want to hire the cheapest lawyer they can find and then stiff him on the fee. Either way, it isn’t worth it economically.

Figure 1

_____________________________

John Doe 555-1710

Admitted last week

No Experience No Practice

No Money Please Help

What our friend Joe should have done was to take the time to study the Yellow Pages advertisements of his competitors. By noting and combining techniques common there he could have produced something very like the piece produced below. Study Figure 2 for a moment and then we’ll comment.

Figure 2

_______________________________________________________________________________________

ARE YOU

Injured? Cheated? Indicted? Insulted? Broke?

Annoyed? Vengeful? Just Plain Greedy?

Has anything really bad ever happened to you that's not your fault?

YOU NEED A LAWYER!

Law Offices of JOHN DOE, B.A., J.D.

I'm John Doe

I'm a trained lawyer!

I am AzBA and ATLA qualified.

I care.

I will handle your case myself.

I can sue for cash$!

I will get a result in your case.

FREE initial consultation (15 minutes). FREE parking. FREE coffee.

Specializing in: Accident, Admiralty, Bankruptcy, Business, Contracts, Criminal Defense, Divorce, DWI,

Employment Law, Family Law, General Practice, Health Law, Immigration, Insurance, Juvenile, Labor

Law, Malpractice, Negligence, Occupational Accident, Personal Injury, Products Liability, Real Estate,

Serious Injury, Trusts, Unfair Practices, Vehicular Accidents, Wills, Workers Compensation

Call me first at 555-1710

________________________________________________________________________________________

This ad, and many like it if properly done, can look to the fingers of your typical Yellow Pages browser reasonably impressive and substantial. If it does not quite meet the standards set by the best, it at least does not look altogether out of place compared with a lot of what’s in those 89 pages now. In the phone book John is almost on a level playing field with lawyers and firms who have experience, brains, money, and who know what they’re doing.

But the real beauty of the thing is that this wordy, substantial-looking advertisement is -- again, typical Yellow pages -- almost totally meaningless.

What does it say? Well, it says that John is a lawyer; those of us who know him might question that but he has a degree so he is legally correct.

It says that he belongs to legal organizations. They happen to be the ones you can join by sending in money but most people reading the ad don’t know that.

The ad says that he cares. This is important. When you make up your own ad don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can omit politically-correct mantras; the public, remember, is being conditioned to think them Good Things. About what he cares he doesn’t say; in John’s case it happens to be money.

The ad says that he will handle the case himself. Of course he will handle the case himself, since he can’t even afford a secretary much less an associate, clerk, or paralegal. That he will handle the case himself is not necessarily a Good Thing. On the other hand, one can argue that this makes John’s ad more honest than those featuring large photographs of lawyers and no photograph of the nameless Pima-College-graduate-just-barely who, under the aptly broad title “Legal Assistant” will actually do the work and who for that matter you’d probably be better off having do it than the guy who got his picture in the ad.

John says that he can sue. This is of course absolutely true. It is also of course absolutely true that anybody reading the ad could sue since absolutely anybody can file a Complaint.

He says he will get a result. He is on safe ground. Filing suit -- or anything else he does, or you do --will have some result, whether bad, good, or indifferent.

The ad offers “free” stuff. “Free” stuff is a favorite marketing touch and one of the few that doesn’t seem to have caught on among lawyers. Everybody knows that nothing is free. What they don’t know is how much they’re paying for it. Free” is what merchants call something they don’t want you to know

the price of. John Doe’s ‘free” things of course cost him almost nothing and what they do cost his clients pay for; their percentage of overhead is essentially zero, but that’s not the figure he builds into his fees.

And what about specializing? It used to mean something but in looking at the ads it now appears to means basically that you’ll do whatever pays money. “Certified specialist” means that you participate in the State Bar Marketing Assistance Program, a.k.a. Legal Specialization. “Practice limited to” is what you have to say nowadays if you really mean it.

Those with Yellow Pages experience might regard the above as a fair “starter” ad. What can be done to improve it? Mostly things that cost more money.

Color is one. You can highlight your ad with red or blue. Wow.

Another is the photograph. There isn’t one. Replace (or supplement) the logo [in the original Bryce Wilson News article, Figure Two contained a clip-art drawing of a knight on horseback as John Doe's logo] with a picture of the lawyer. A reasonable-sized portrait shot will do but the bigger the better. If you can afford it, use a big photo of yourself as a background on which to superimpose the rest of the ad. Yes, we said “yourself.” With one or two possible exceptions we aren’t sure about, Yellow Pages ads use pictures of the real people.

That doesn’t mean, though, that your picture has to look like you. Browse through the book some time and you’ll wonder who all those people are that you’ve never met. It takes a minute to realize that, hey, you do know that guy, you’ve just never seen him smiling/wearing a suit/sober/standing up, etc. If you publish a picture of yourself, you want it to show you at least at your very best and preferably very much better than you ever could be. Good Yellow Pages photos show people who are young, smart, attractive, and energetic. Most of us need a professional photographer to get that way.

Please remember to focus the camera and to get your face in the picture. Look at the book and you’ll see that these things do not go without saying.

A few people show their families in the picture. A few people have beautiful families but the point is obscure. Is being a solid family man/woman important to your prospective clients? If it is, what happens if your marriage runs into problem? Does your ad become false advertising? If it doesn’t, what is it advertising?

Many ads have no photographs. Some lawyers don’t think the cost worth the extra benefit. Others eschew them as irrelevant and ephemeral. The latter are correct, of course, but miss the point. Picking a lawyer based on looks or personality is like picking a doctor based on bedside manner: its irrational and dangerous but people — maybe even you — do it all the time. The ephemeral and irrelevant are what professional advertising is all about. No ad can ever really convey how good a lawyer you are compared to the next guy and if they could then a lot of the people who advertise now wouldn’t dare. Ads are hooks to get people to come through your door rather than someone else’s. You bait the hook with what the fish eat, not with what they rationally ought to. Advertising is done for the advertiser’s better health, not the fish’s.