Article on Legal Advertising

When I first decided to produce a brochure advertising my law firm's bankruptcy services, I did so with some trepidation. The source of my hesitation wasn't fear the public might see me as an "ambulance-chasing" lawyer; I was more confident in both the public and my advertising plan than that. Instead, my apprehension was about the response of other lawyers. Since I planned to mass-distribute my brochure through the News Journal, I couldn't help but get nervous when I envisioned the partners in some plush Wilmington firm being told by one of their secretaries, "Hey, in the newspaper today, sandwiched in with the Domino's Pizza coupons, there's an advertisement from some lawyer about bankruptcy services."

To be honest, the threat of mockery from my peers intimidated me. But since I had come to the legal profession late, and had held a variety of jobs before that, including race-track worker and barmaid, I'd already taken plenty of risks in my life and so I figured, "What the hell, one more risk can't hurt." So, with the help of one paralegal and one professional writer, I got my advertising copy together. Then I made a hefty payment to the News Journal and crossed my fingers. Fortunately, the gamble paid off. My business improved dramatically. That was in 1990. Periodic use of the same advertising tactics since then has further boosted my business.

Although I adopted a light tone above, the truth is that advertising legal services raises some serious questions about how to "present" ourselves, what it is we have to "sell," and how we view ourselves in relation to our clients.

As this magazine's readers know, the public's regard for lawyers is not at a high point these days. Consequently, lawyers as a group have retreated into a kind of Puritanism when it comes to showing our public face. As a result, we have imposed a group pressure on ourselves to always appear very "professional."

Unfortunately, this obsession with looking good to the public has its down side: we are often judgmental, and even snobbish, with our peers. We look down our noses at the struggling, lower-class lawyer who publicizes her/his services in "unseemly" ways. Yet "unseemly" is never, in reality, clearly defined; it is a loose cannon of a word that can mean a number of things. For instance, it can mean that you're an embarrassment to the legal profession if you try to drum up business in ways that don't conform to the laid-back, Oriental-rugged, cool-corporate strategies of the "true professional." Or it can mean that you haven't done your "lawyerly duty" by convincing the public that, although you're interested in making money, your real concern as an attorney is to be people's "helpmate" when they're in trouble. This latter approach to lawyering is what I call "the Mother Theresa-ing of our profession": we like to present ourselves as God's angels of mercy in a troubled world.

Such concern with image, with packaging, is typical of public relations and advertising in all fields. Yet in this day and age when there is such public suspicion of the role of lawyers in society, lawyers do themselves no favors by reducing the complex issue of their relationship to the public to a question of cosmetics, "How do we look?" When Jurassic Park audiences cheer as a dinosaur devours a lawyer, or when TV viewers chuck at a beer commercial depicting lawyers as animals, there is a very real resentment feeding such responses. That resentment is not a frivolous or superficial phenomenon. It is rooted in a U. S. social-economic evolution that touches upon the legal profession, but is not confined to the legal profession.

The evolution I am talking about is as follows--

Our society has undergone profound structural changes in production, consumerism, mass education, communications and the delivery of services since the century's beginning. Coincident with these changes there developed a growing class of professionals, semi-professionals and managerial types whose purpose was to create, oversee, and reproduce the ideas and infrastructures necessary for keeping our ever-more-complex society under control. This class's evolution has had a big impact on the average person, who over recent decades has come to feel increasingly dominated and "managed" by these so-called "experts."

Lawyers are a key part of this "experts" class. We are instrumental in interpreting, applying, extending, and rethinking existing law and developing new law. We also, as a group, produce a disproportionate number of career politicians, high-level government workers, and think tank leaders. It is no wonder, then, that lawyers have come to represent in many people's minds a society dominated by so-called experts.

Yet as the polls show, people also believe that the experts, far from doing a good job, have led society down a dead-end road--i.e., troubled economy, social violence and conflict everywhere, lack of real political choices, etc. Not surprisingly, then, lawyers as a group are not held in high regard. We are seen--along with government commissions, career politicians, yuppie financiers and political consultants--as the architects, not the potential healers, of America's current decline.

My own response to these realities is to face them squarely. I believe people have legitimate gripes about the "professionalization" of our society. For instance, this professionalization often takes the form of mystifying the knowledge that the professional possesses, of making that knowledge seem more complex (and therefore more difficult to grasp) than it really is.

One example of this mystification process that should be familiar to most readers of this magazine is the way legal documents are usually written: It's as if each of us had taken a special course in how to write clumsy, multi-claused, compound sentences seething with polysyllabic words designed for the sole purpose of making sure that only other lawyers can understand what we write. In this way we make sure that people have to hire us in order to interpret for them the law and other lawyer's arguments. This is disempowerment in action, the process by which people, forcibly estranged from the information they need to protect themselves, are then made dependent on those who supposedly "own" that information.

It was my awareness of such issues that led me to do the particular type of advertising brochure that I did. One word guided my approach: "de-mystify." So we produced a single-fold brochure in question and answer form. The brochure explained in everyday language some of the legal and personal aspects of filing for bankruptcy. The brochure also explained that filing for bankruptcy could in fact be done without hiring a lawyer. The brochure also suggested to prospective clients that they should shop around first in order to check out the fees and attitudes of different attorneys--in other words, they should adopt the same mindset that would guide them if they were hunting a new stereo system or the best price this week on kielbasa.

As a result of such advertising, my business has grown. But has the advertising somehow tarnished the profession's standards? You'll have to decide for yourself, but I don't think so. I believe the only thing that can lower our standards or hurt our image is smugness, directed at either the public or the "little lawyer" who has to struggle to stay above water. Such arrogance can only deepen the public's suspicion of us as a group.

PEOPLE FIRST IN THE FIRST STATE: IT'S ABOUT TIME