Small Firms Should Advertise To Real Potential Clients, Not To Other Lawyers Or Their Own Egos

It is nice to be a highly credentialed lawyer. I am a highly credentialed lawyer. However, nobody else really cares whether or not you are a highly credentialed lawyer.

All those awards, articles, presentations, and certifications are perfectly reasonable things to pursue for a variety of reasons. It feels good to be recognized for your work. It is gratifying to know enough, and be entertaining enough, such that other people want to hear what you have to say on a given topic. Yet, you should not pour resources into this sort of thing for the specific purpose of attracting clients to your firm, because it won’t work.

Nobody cares. The big glass shield representing the award I received three years ago at the Supreme Court delightfully throws little rainbows all over my walls when bathed in sunlight, and occasionally gives me a pang of nostalgia when I look at it and remember a good professional experience. But that’s about the extent of its practical usefulness. Laypersons who have seen it don’t know what the organization I got it from is, what “pro bono” means, or, about half the time, what the Supreme Court is.

That is hard to believe for a lot of lawyers. The reality, though, is that as we live and breathe this stuff, the rest of the world goes on in blissful ignorance of the internal jostlings of attorney prestige.

Go ahead, ask someone who is not an attorney (or married to an attorney) what the best law firm is in the area. If they can do that without naming whatever local personal injury firm is flooding the advertising marketplace, see if they can even come up with the names of three other law firms. As much as law firms pontificate about their reputations, law firms do not really have reputations outside of the small circle of other nearby law firms. Regular people are not paying attention to that sort of thing.

Big firms already have big corporate clients. When these sorts of clients are in the market for new representation, large companies and very rich individuals use their existing networks to find it. For almost everyone else who needs a lawyer, these days, they simply turn to Google.

When people are searching for an attorney online, they do not type in, “Which attorney in [local geographical area] has won the most industry awards?” or “Are there any nearby lawyers who are Certified Civil Trial Law Specialists?” It’s almost always something more like “[geographic area] [whatever the potential client thinks the practice area for their issue is called] lawyer.”

Obviously there is a lot of value to be had in showing up near the top of the page in these kinds of search results. Beyond that, potential clients are making some very rough judgments on quality before deciding where to go.

I’m not here to tell you what attribute of your firm is most important to advertise to potential clients — if you’re wondering about that, you could try asking a few of your best clients what attracted them to you in the first place. What I am saying is that if you are focusing your marketing efforts on piling up legal industry awards, certifications, and publications, you are probably advertising more to other law firms than to the general public.

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing some accolades. I’m kind of an accolade pursuer myself. Just realize that when you’re doing that, it’s for your own personal satisfaction, not for a real marketing return on your investment of time and money.

Check your local ethics rules about attorney advertising, of course, and comply with those. Then advertise to real people. Coming off as someone who will really listen will earn you a lot more clients than any obscure legal industry award ever will.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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