The proliferation of web sites that offer pirated versions of textbooks has been pointed out as one of the main culprits of the decrease in textbook sales. Contrary to what many believed, that the books published in university presses were too specialized to even attract attention from pirates, electronic files of university-press books have already been spotted on those pirate websites.

The overpricing of textbooks might be the reason why pirate sites even exist. It can be noted that several lawsuits have already been filed over overpriced textbooks. The expense and the fact that a ‘free’ alternative is available might encourage one helpless student who cannot find cheap textbooks for his highly demanding subjects to turn to these pirate sites for refuge.

There is also the issue of electronic reserves and the use of course management software such as Blackboard. In instances where professors make chapters of a book available as electronic reserves or disseminate the materials through Blackboard, buying a textbook may not be necessary anymore. Furthermore, professors may get out of having to pay a permission fee to the publisher.

The situation calls for university presses to start making it easy for people to ask for permissions. Aside from this, open textbooks already exist to assist students in their scholarly concerns. These methods will hopefully eliminate the problem of piracy while helping students get the best learning experience possible without the additional costs.

However, the decline of textbooks sales will continue to be the challenge faced by university presses at present, considering the online alternatives. Not a good sign for the traditional textbooks industry indeed, but this is something that they need to deal with.

Mr. Queen states “The attrition challenges presently confronting Clean Development Mechanism validators are not new to the business world, however; nor are they unique throughout time. They are the precisely the same challenges facing large corporate law firms everyday due to the interactions between their brightest younger associates and the wealthy business clientele and institutions they represent.“

Mr. Queen postulates that the types of salary adjustment decisions and scales utilized by large corporate law firms are precisely the mechanism that could rectify their attrition problems and would have a significant impact on the streamlining of the overall validation process.

• Big law firms typically are not understaffed and can grow to match client demand.
• Though in law firms there is widespread attrition among young to mid-level associates, it is manageable from a business point of view because more experienced senior associates and partners tend to stay rooted.
• Law firms maintain and slowly grow out their partner and senior associate base, while simultaneously calculating the hiring numbers for junior associates to reflect the degree of attrition they can expect based on historical statistics.

“Validators should simply recognize that CDM is a multi-billion dollar industry heavily focused on the skills and expertise their employees possess; and as such their personnel are highly valuable, and they should re-assess the financial packages presently being offered to mid-level and senior employees.” says Jon Queen, Esq.

Finally, lawyer Jon M Queen summarizes, “Validators must transition into a more commercially oriented employee compensation mindset, to set the CDM validation and registration process back on track. That is the best and most direct solution to the present bottleneck.“

So interestingly enough it seems as if a major success factor for major law firms is attributable to their compensation packages, structures, and scaling capabilities. Obviously HR practices play a significant role in any successful business, but I found it interesting to see other large industries that could potentially see such significant benefit from adopting a close model.

One indicator of such misleading marketing tactics is when the offered plan is just too good to be true. And because of the implementation of ‘lock-in’ rule, wherein beneficiaries are not allowed to switch plans; all the more that this misleading advertising poses a great threat to the public than ever before.

Here are some marketing tactics HMOs use to lure beneficiaries to sign up for coverage:

• Unlimited prescription drug coverage. Consumers must be warned about this unlimited generic and brand name prescription drug coverage offer by several HMOs. The ‘unlimited’ catch is misleading since most HMOs cover only medications listed on a formulary or preferred drug lists.
• Better than Original Medicare. Some medical plans are actually offering more benefits than Medicare but they are not really for free. They come at a cost.
• $0 Premium offer. Plans often boast of a $0 premium while in fact individuals are required to pay their Medicare Part B premiums, done monthly at $78.20.

There are I guess a lot more, but the point here is that beneficiaries should really be on-guard against these marketing tactics. A nationwide list of healthcare specialist attorneys is available for those who might need some assistance in this particular issue.

They propose four possible answers:

“Most widely read product liability blog” = “World’s tallest midget”: 25,000 pageviews is a drop in the bucket, and there’s essentially no institutional benefit to blogging. If the two of us — Beck and Herrmann, the blogging morons — want to waste our Saturday mornings feeding this beast, we should go ahead and entertain ourselves.

Power of blogosphere eludes firm management: Management is basically folks over 50 who start their days sipping a cup of coffee and reading the Journal. Only people under 40 start their days sipping a cup of coffee and checking [legal blogs].

Blogs attract the wrong eyeballs: The target market for big firms such as ours is the general counsel and C-level management of Fortune 500 companies. With all due respect to our visitors — and we love you guys; really! — you folks are younger and less important.

Where’s the money in this? It takes many hours of effort each week for the two of us to provide regular, fresh content to this site, and the amount of business generated doesn’t justify the effort. If the two of us get some personal satisfaction from blogging, no one will interfere, but firms do cost-benefit analyses of marketing initiatives, and this one flunks the test.

What do the leaders of Dechert and Jones Day have to say about the commentary? We’ve reached out to both firms and will let you know if we hear back.

Ok, LB readers, are firms missing big marketing opportunities by not encouraging more lawyers to blog? Internet marketing companies would say otherwise - but are they right?

Forget the television commercials, radio ads, and other gimmicks. This is a year that law firms are focusing on their presence online. Not only will a great online presence boost the brand and image of your law firm, it can also be a great tool for generating traffic to your firm’s website, which in turn can become leads, which in turn can become clients.

Here are the top online activities law firms should do in 2008.

1. Optimize your own website.

If you don’t already have a website, you have probably heard from
someone or read somewhere what a great promotion tool a website can be for law firms. If you are considering getting a website, a great starting point is to plan what you want your website to look like and write some content pages to put on the website. Then, contact a firm about building a
professional website that your law firm can be proud of. If you have a
website, but you are not getting the traffic from it you think you could,
consult an internet marketing agency. One firm, Ephricon Web Marketing
(http://www.ephricon.com), based in Baltimore, MD offers clients search
engine optimization which includes on-page optimization, content creation
and link building as well as pay-per-click services to help online
searchers find what they are looking for easier.

2. Add new content to your website.

New content can be in the form of new pages your site may need, such as information about your firm’s practice areas or informal articles about law topics in the news or tips on a legal topic for the layperson. A quality internet marketing agency can take an article and send it to various sites that accept articles. Particularly, sites on legal topics that accept articles would be especially beneficial. The main purpose of the articles is the fresh content that they provide your site but adding a couple links in an article that is posted on other websites helps boost traffic to your website.

3. Announce news with press releases.

Most internet marketing agencies can help spread your news to
newspapers, television stations and industry sites on the web through
services like PR Newswire and Market Wire. Because of their ability to be
picked up by many sites, press releases are a fantastic way to add bursts
of traffic to your website through links that you may include in them.

4. Add photos to your website.

Pictures of the firm’s partners and other staff, a photo of the office building if it’s in a desirable location, or a photo of inside an
attractive, professional office can give visitors to your website a reason to trust you and can convey that your firm is a successful one. One Baltimore, Maryland firm, Ingerman & Horwitz LLP (http://www.ihlaw.com) has a photo of their Park Avenue office location and photos of the firm’s
principals on the homepage. These help put a face on the firm, making it
easier for website visitors to relate. Photos are especially powerful for
professional service organizations, such as law firms.

5. Send an email blast a couple times a year.

Gather a few hundred client email addresses and send a mass email.
Topics in the email newsletter could be informative information from the
articles, interesting cases worked on or new laws that may be of interest
to the public.

6. Join directories that will link to your website.

Both directories that you must be paid to be listed in and directories that are free give links to websites along with a one or two sentence description. Local-Attorneys.com is a directory specifically for law firms that list lawyers by region and specialty. For example, search under tax and Maryland and you will find law firms like Fried & Rosefelt, P.A. (http://www.frtaxlaw.com), who focus primarily on tax-related legal issues.

Another worthwhile pursuit is to try to get listed on sites that are
specific to your practice area. In the tax law space, for example, exists a notable website for tax problem resolution specialists — the website for the American Society of Tax Problem Solvers at http://www.astps.org. Steven N. Klitzner, P.A. of Florida Tax Solvers (http://www.floridataxsolvers.com)
is listed on this site, which can provide quality, relevant traffic. A
handful of directories are also profile sites, which are basically the same as directories but allow you to expand upon your description, instead of a couple sentences, usually a couple of paragraphs.

If you want to improve the amount of leads your firm receives, consider the online activities above. Though offline marketing activities like print brochures can also see much value, focusing attention online is very useful because your clients come to you, searching on what they need and then
finding your site. Doing it right means you can spend less time on
marketing and more time practicing law.

Local-Attorneys.com is a law firm directory that sorts attorneys by
practice area and region. For example, someone who visits the site having
been involved in an auto accident will click on auto accident and the state where they are looking for an attorney. With over 1,000 law firms listed so far, Local-Attorneys.com continues to grow. For more information on getting your firm listed, visit http://www.local-attorneys.com. Local-Attorneys.com
is owned by Net Focus Media. Visit http://www.netfocusmedia.com/lawfirms/
for more info.

A kid steals a candy bar because he wants to enjoy the taste; a dope addict sticks up a grocery store, shooting the owner, in order to get the money he needs to get “high”; a bank executive embezzles a million dollars so he can run off with his girlfriend to enjoy life in the Bahamas. What is the common motive behind these crimes? According to Jagad Guru Chris Butler, the desire for sense gratification. Chris Butler is “Jagad Guru”, or teacher of Yoga’s ancient spiritual wisdom.

Criminologists and social scientists have almost completely overlooked the fact that materialism is the root cause of crime. False identification of the body as the self leads people to believe that sense enjoyment will satisfy them; and most crimes are directly or indirectly connected to the attempt to find satisfaction in sense enjoyment.

The media saturates us daily with the message that the goal of life is sensual pleasure, and that success in life depends on the acquisition of those objects that make such sensual pleasure possible. From a young age, we learn that we should strive to be the controllers and enjoyers of all we survey. We are promised that such “lordship” is the way to happiness.

The criminal is just responding to this message the best way he knows how. He’s just trying to get the things the TV says he needs to be happy. He’s just trying to be the central enjoying agent—the lord—that he’s been taught he needs to be. So he needs a flashy car, fine clothes, a big house, a color TV, a gold watch, a yacht, etc.

Since no amount of sense gratification is ever enough to satisfy us, we always feel we need “more.” From the poorest person to the richest person, from the homeless to the person who lives in a mansion, everyone wants more sense gratification and thus more material wealth. If you are poor, you feel you need a color TV to be happy; if you’re rich, you feel you need a new yacht. “No amount of material wealth is ever enough” says Jagad Guru Chris Butler.

So we have crooks from all income levels. The poor crooks commit crimes so that they can get what they think they need; the rich crooks commit crimes so that they can get what they think they need. The street crook robs people so he can buy some nice clothes or drugs; the corporate crook robs companies so that he can buy 50,000 acres of land or a new Lear jet.

The fact that there are at least as many “wealthy” criminals as there are “poor” criminals effectively destroys the materialists’ theory that the root cause of crime is poverty and that the solution to the crime problem is to make everybody rich. Obviously, if poverty were the cause of crime, then no wealthy people would commit crimes. Besides, the term “poverty” is relative. A poor American, for example, would be a wealthy Ethiopian. In fact, criminals, whether rich or poor, are criminals not because they are poor or rich, but because they are in the illusion that material things will satisfy them. And, of course, the reason they are in this illusion is because they erroneously identify their body as themselves.

Because our materialistic society teaches that the acquisition of wealth and power is the goal of life, the more wealth and power you possess, the more “successful” you are considered to be. If you are materially poor, you are considered a failure in life, whereas if you are wealthy and powerful (regardless of how you acquired such wealth and power), you are considered a great success. So obtaining material wealth is not only essential for your direct sense gratification, but also for your feelings of self-worth.

In other words, you feel only as valuable as the things that you possess and control. Lacking appreciation of your real value as an eternal, blissful spark of life—falsely identifying the temporary body as yourself—you try to achieve feelings of self-worth by the acquisition and control of material things. To achieve such economic development, you may end up engaging in illegal activity—in other words, you may become a crook.

If people understand this practical knowledge about the root cause of crime, then they can effectively deal with the criminal problems facing us today. Only by knowing this real root cause can an effective solution be found.

For more materials by Jagad Guru Chris Butler, visit the Jagad Guru Chris Butler Wisdom page.

http://flickr.com/photos/bhartzer/

Since when do guys getting busted on “Major Drug Charges” need “…a price you can afford!”?.

Resources:

• Info on drug possession penalties here.
• Drug treatment options are available: a full drug rehab center directory
• National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)

Technorati Tags: bad ads ]]>

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a brief yesterday saying just that, appealing a July decision by a federal district judge’s who held that the new restrictions on lawyer ads violate First Amendment free speech rights and issued a permanent injunction against them.

The new rules, which debuted February 1, sought to forbid, among other things, client testimonials, monikers or nicknames implying the ability to get a result or attention-getting techniques unrelated to attorney competence or the fictional portrayal of a judge.

Public Citizen won the case on behalf of Alexander & Catalano, a Syracuse personal injury firm that bills itself as “The Heavy Hitters” and uses an aggressive advertising campaign, one that offended the sensibilities of some upstate judges who are charged with setting the state’s rules for lawyer advertising.

The attorney general’s brief describes the Alexander & Catalano advertising campaign as “frequently embellished with exaggerated images of the firm’s attorneys as giants towering over local buildings, running to assist clients so fast that they appear as a blur, and counseling space aliens on insurance claims.”

Clearly not as funny or deft as Geico’s gecko. But it’s a shot. Some of us might like to see the Skaddens in our midst lighten up a bit, and try this sort of thing. Not Cuomo: The brief asserts that the U.S. Supreme Court, which first green-lighted lawyer ads as protected commercial speech in 1977, is no fan of humor.

“It has never held that puffery, dramatizations, unverifiable statements of opinion, slogans, or promises, absurd portrayals, extreme use of humor, appeals to emotions, fears or prejudices, special effects, nicknames or other techniques in attorney advertising unrelated to rational decisions about selection of counsel are protected commercial speech,” the attorney general said in his brief.

The First Amendment protection, according to Cuomo, extends only to “truthful, factual, nonmisleading information relevant to the attorney’s services.”

Gregory Beck of Public Citizen says the state should not be in the position to make these judgment calls. “Who is going to make the decision about what information is relevant or too funny?” says Beck. “Humor is not protected, in their opinion, by the First Amendment.”

The Alexander firm is cross-appealing another part of the decision by U.S. District Judge Frederick Scullin, who upheld a restriction in the new rules that puts a moratorium on solicitations of accident victims for 30 days following the accident.

Meanwhile, the Skaddens of the world remain on the sidelines, quietly accepting the hassles of the new rules. Another requires any firm that practices in New York—which means just about every large firm in the country—to put an “Attorney Advertising” notice on their websites, with the disclaimer: “Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.”

So far, no corporate firm has stepped forward to challenge it.

by Karen Donovan Technorati Tags: andrew cuomo ]]> http://lawfirmblogging.com/2007/12/11/humorous-lawyer-ads-cuomo-is-not-amused/feed/ http://lawfirmblogging.com/2007/12/11/humorous-lawyer-ads-cuomo-is-not-amused/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/law-firm-marketing/~3/IGh-sdVhemg/ http://lawfirmblogging.com/2007/10/19/handvertising-advertisers-looking-at-your-skin-in-a-new-way/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:51:03 +0000 Law Firm Marketing Blog Law Firm Marketing Lawyer AdvertisinghandvertisingLegal marketing http://lawfirmblogging.com/index.php/2007/10/19/handvertising-advertisers-looking-at-your-skin-in-a-new-way/ So you have seen advertisements from commercials to billboards. Now
advertisers are looking at your skin to place their ads! Look at how
this Orange County based company is getting venues to let advertisers
on their customer’s hands.

This is a new form of advertising and is completely different from the
television commercials and magazine ads people are used to. What do you
call advertising on your hands? “Well I like to call it Handvertising”,
said Mike Brown CEO of Handvertising USA.

Handvertising USA is transforming the way advertisers are looking at
your skin, more specifically your hands.
“Almost everyone has been to a county fair, swap meet, bar or club and had had their hand stamped for proof of entry. We have found a better use for this space that could make everyone happy”
said Mike.
“Advertisers are always looking for a new and exciting way to promote their brand. Handvertising USA offers a unique way to do this and everyone benefits”
said Mike.

“We find venues also use the stamps to increase business. For example venues are offering special prices on drinks if the customer has a particular Handvertising stamp. People are requesting particular stamps because they want to fit in and they want the drink special.”
Mike says.

If you would like to see some samples of what Handvertising USA is
doing visit their website at http://www.handvertisingusa.com/ for
pictures, FAQ’s and more.

Here’s my take on it…

You would probably get a lot of calls if stamped at a busy nightclub or concert!

BOCA RATON, Fla. — Legal marketing is a key ingredient for an attorney’s success in today’s competitive legal environment, but it is rarely taught in law school. The art of rainmaking - how to attract and retain clients - remains a mystery to many lawyers at all levels of their legal career.

Now a new legal marketing book, “Courting Your Clients: The Essential Guide to Legal Marketing,” provides a practical guide to creating and implementing a successful legal business development strategy. Written by legal marketing consultant Margaret Grisdela, President of Legal Expert Connections, the book reveals how to get speaking engagements, publishing opportunities, press coverage, and other proven techniques that build an attorney’s visibility and reputation as an expert in their field.

“Courting Your Clients is written for attorneys, legal marketers, law firm administrators, managing partners, practice group leaders and sole practitioners,” said author Margaret Grisdela. “The book contains a sample lawyer marketing plan, attorney marketing checklists, and the top ten legal marketing mistakes to avoid.”

CLIENT Rainmaking[R], a methodology introduced in the book, creates a strategic step-by-step approach to lawyer business development. Readers will learn how to make effective use of networking, referrals, community relations, legal directories, Internet marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

An entire chapter is devoted to client retention, since most new business comes from current clients. Attorneys will discover how to up-sell, cross-sell and measure client satisfaction.

Three key concepts in this legal marketing book include: 1) the importance of focus; 2) educating prospects as a way to build a reputation; and 3) never stop marketing.

“Courting Your Clients” (ISBN 978-0-9795674-0-7) can be ordered online at www.legalexpertconnections.com.

EDITORS: For review copies or interview requests, please contact the author.

About Legal Expert Connections, Inc.

Legal Expert Connections specializes in marketing and business development exclusively in the legal and litigation support markets. Founded by legal marketing consultant Margaret Grisdela, the firm’s services include legal business development seminars, attorney marketing plans, rainmaking programs (arranging speaking engagements and publishing opportunities), law firm brochures, expert witness marketing, direct mail, web site development and more. The firm’s web site is www.legalexpertconnections.com and lawyer marketing blog is www.rainmakingclub.com.

Technorati Tags: courting your clients ]]>