Yesterday, I received a call from a potential new client who had “found” me by my website.  After speaking with him for a bit, he asked about my fee.  It was clear from our conversation that he would be unable to pay my fee, and his question was awkward.  Calls like these are disturbing, and I shot off an email to Mark Bennett complaining about how technology has changed how clients come to me, but mostly for the worst.  I believe my email may have generated Mark’s post, If You Have to Ask . . .

Historically, my clients come to me by referral only.  Whether client referral or lawyer referral, they have a fairly decent idea of the nature of my practice as well as the relative cost of my services.  In my 25 years practicing criminal defense, I have never advertised.  Not only do I find advertising demeaning (yeah, I’m old school, as I’ve conceded many times here), but I’ve founded it more troublesome than productive to seek out clients who are more concerned with price than quality.  I don’t think less of them for it, but that I’m not the right lawyer for them.

One day last February, when I didn’t have much to do, I decided to try my hand at putting together a website.  It wasn’t constructed with much forethought, more on a lark.  I had run across many criminal defense lawyer websites and found most of them to be far worse than crass.  For the most part, they were flagrantly unethical.  Designed to suggest outcome (“I will win your case!  I’ve won millions of cases!), the goal of these websites is clear.  They want to suck in as many potential clients as possible, without discrimination.  They cry out VOLUME!

Such is the nature of the internet.  It cannot discriminate between the attorney who provides quality and the one who seeks volume.  After all, no website screams “I’m a lousy lawyer, but I’m cheap!”  For this reason, I’ve complained quite a bit about the use of websites, their limitations, their self-aggrandizing deceptiveness and their potential for changing the way clients relate to lawyers.

My website is poor.  I put it together in about 15 minutes, without any particular model in mind.  It made me uncomfortable as I did it, and I kept thinking that these were 15 minutes of my life that I would never get back.  My wife looked around at other criminal defense lawyer websites, and couldn’t find any that she liked.  She was trying to help me not look like too much of a schmuck on mine.  She finally gave up.

Lacking much that seems appropriate for the main page, I decided to put up a picture of me.  That turned into a fiasco.  Like most fathers, I have plenty of photos of my kids, both alone and with my wife.  But someone has to shoot the picture, and so there are no pictures of me.  Except the occasional swimming suit pic at the beach, and no one wants to see one of those. 

So I went in search of a photograph.  Unlike other lawyers who do a lot of TV commentary work, I never get a copy of the tape showing me on the small screen, so I had no stills of me looking serious and important.  Finally, I found a group shot of me at a NYSACDL dinner with a few lawyer friends where I looked quite happy.  A few drinks will do that to you.  I edited out the better looking lawyers and stuck what was left on my website.  My wife hates that photo too, but it was the best I could do.

The upshot of my website has been calls like the one I received yesterday.  It was a low-level case.  Serious to the person involved, but not particularly serious in the scheme of my practice.  That wouldn’t matter a bit to me, as I treat every case the same, but the call came from a nice fellow who would do well to use public defender.  Websites draw people who don’t know where to turn, and don’t understand why some lawyers don’t have a price list. 

Significant cases don’t find criminal defense lawyers on the internet.  They speak with people and get names. Whether this works much better is debatable, but it’s how it’s done.  It’s very different for other fields of law, like personal injury, where they want to get as many cases in the door as possible so that they can pick the cherries and set the rest adrift.  If a criminal defense lawyer tries to get as many people in the door as possible, by definition he will not be a lawyer with enough time to handle his clients properly.  It’s just a matter of logistics, and the number of hours in the day doesn’t change.  Clients like to pretend that the laws of time and physics don’t apply to them, but of course they do and hiding one’s head in the sand isn’t going to change that.

So if anyone out there has an idea of how a website can be used to communicate what a lawyer like me does, I would like to know.  Note to web promoters:  This is not an invitation to tout your service; We get all your junk mail and already know that you have no answer to this question. 

I don’t enjoy turning away people who are in trouble.  It’s not in my nature.  But I just don’t see how a website reaches the sort of clients that I represent, and helps those who have serious cases and need serious representation to find high quality representation.  Conversely, I represent so many clients who went to some schlock lawyer first, who blew many opportunities, before realizing that they were being poorly represented and finally found their way to me.  Many of these clients were referred by their real estate lawyer to some dolt with whom they went to law school who promised to kick back a third for the referral.  How do these defendant learn the difference?  I have no answer to this question.