When Avvo decided to put on a play in beautiful Seattle, one about lawyer marketing (as opposed to its roadshow to sell lawyers across the country on the benefits of claiming their Avvo profile and thereby acknowledge Avvo’s existence), it struck me as almost as bad an idea as the Get A Life Conference. 

These are the places where lawyers go to take comfort in the fact that they aren’t the only scoundrels who care nothing for the client and only for how a once-honorable profession can make them wealthier or their lives easier.  But having been asked to participate in the conference, and liking the Avvo guys, Mark Britton, Conrad Saam and Josh King, as much as I do, I couldn’t resist watching from afar.  And offering the counterview, since no one there would be questioning how lawyers look in hotpants.

I’ve got a great deal of respect for Mark Britton, and what he’s accomplished at Avvo.  I’m not always a fan of the ways he’s trying to monetize what he’s built, but I can appreciate that it’s a business and, like all businesses, needs revenue to survive.  Mark, on the other hand, sees me as a thorn in his side.  He told me just the other day that my comments sound to him like “Grumble, Grumble, Quack, Quack, Nay, Nay, Nay.”   He’s wrong. I don’t quack. 

But the Avvo guys like me enough to list SJ as one of their favorite blawgs, so I can’t be all bad.  And as Josh King wrote in his AvvoBlog post about Ghostblogging,

What’s more, they’re ATTORNEYS. I don’t know about these lawyers, but having people tell me I’m full of crap or don’t like what I’m doing has been a regular occurrence throughout my legal career. Grow a thicker skin – and don’t think about blogging if you can’t be authentic and have a real conversation.

Josh gets it.  The Avvo guys get it.  Authentic doesn’t mean blow kisses or smoke.  That’s not how lawyers roll, unless their brains have been consumed by the self-promotion endorphins caused by starvation and desperation, and they think that it will endear them to someone who will throw them some crappy case so they can pay the phone bill for another month.

When I had  some free time during the Avvocating conference, I followed it on twitter, where it could be accessed through the hashtag #avvo.  It wasn’t just a matter of idle curiosity, but a means of checking the pulse of the profession.  Our health was at stake, and the Avvo prescription was marketing.  Talk about quack. 

Brian Tannebaum must have had some free time too, as he was doing the same as me.  As we followed and twitted, others asked us what was going on, how bad did it look, how much did it smell.  We twitted amongst ourselves, being authentic and engaging.  It’s the way to be, you know.  I eventually got bored, there being only so much marketing chatter that a reasonable person can take.  Meaningless jargon takes its toll after a while, and little was coming out of it beyond the cheerleaders extolling the virtues of streetwalking.

There was one serious question I posed:  Were there any real lawyers at the conference?  What became fairly apparent from the chatter was that this bore a closer resemblance to marketing bootcamp than any conference relating to lawyers.  This scared the crap out of me, all the inherent zeal of marketing with no comprehension of professionalism or ethical constraint. It’s like holding the AA meeting in the tasting room at Two-Buck Chuck’s.

That’s when I met Sonny. I had never heard of Sonny Cohen before.  I asked if anyone else had ever heard of Sonny Cohen.  No one had.  The question spread from lawyer to lawyer, and nobody had ever heard of Sonny Cohen.  In the legal sphere, he didn’t exist.  But Sonny existed, at least in his own mind.  In there, he was a giant, a person of monumental importance.

Out of the blue, Sonny chose to let me in on the secret of his existence.  He twitted at me:

To his credit, he packed more into one little twit than any I’ve ever seen before.  Unfortunately, it was also the singular most bizarre and disturbing demonstration of a failed grasp of reality that has come out of any marketer.  Or in Sonny’s case, a man who wanted to be a lawyer marketer but didn’t hitch his mule to the wagon when he was still young enough to grasp that the day’s of marketing laundry detergent as “new and improved” were enough to make a living. 

I felt badly for Sonny.  In one twit, he branded himself as wholly disconnected from the very marketing niche that he paid good money to learn.  Obviously, he was no kid.  He wasn’t perky and popular, like Alexis Neely.  He didn’t have a bunch of followers, like Adrian Dayton.  He didn’t have a thriving business, like Kevin O’Keefe.  He didn’t have a novel concept, like Susan Cartier Liebel. 

Sonny didn’t grasp the absurdity of what his twit said about him, or the significance of his introduction to the legal sphere.  In less than 140 characters, a man who would be a marketer managed to prove to lawyers that he had no grasp of who lawyers are or what lawyers do.  Whether he has a lot of criminal friends, certainly a possibility, is besides the point.

Sonny disappeared from the twitter stream quickly after being ridiculed widely by lawyers following Tannebaum and me.  It was cruel, but he was just too pompous and disconnected, and clearly asked for a good kick.  It made for a good joke amongst lawyers on twitter, but we moved on.  Just another clueless marketer, trying desperately to not appear pathetic.

But he couldn’t let it be.  While it’s not like anyone was in the room listening, Sonny felt compelled to continue the fight, defending his old man honor in a new-fangled medium about which he understood little.  Ironic, given that he calls himself Director of Internet Marketing.  I would guess that he’s also the janitor and chief bottle washer of internet marketing.  Titles are fun.

At his Social Media Tyro blog, Mark Bennett posts about Sonny’s still fighting the lost battle.

Mark is younger, better looking and smarter than I am, but my advanced age experience leads me to a different conclusion.  While there’s certainly a strong element of narcissism in Sonny’s view, he’s more Willy Loman than Slackoisie.  He’s fighting for the last vestige of dignity, having made the critical mistake of revealing himself to the legal world as someone so far outside, so utterly disconnected, that he thought the marketing was more important than the lawyers.  After such a fundamental error, the likelihood that any lawyer would entrust his reputation and license in the hands of such a fool was essentially nonexistent.  Sonny had killed any chance of moving into legal marketing with a single twit, and he had nothing left to lose.

I feel badly for Sonny.  As we get older, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep pace with change.  Blink and the world can pass you by, as happened to Sonny.  That has to be a horrible feeling, knowing that there’s a Brave New World out there and you’re not a part of it.  The arrogance of youth is only surpassed by the hubris of age.

Sonny has no future in legal marketing.  He doesn’t “get” lawyers, what distinguishes selling a professional from selling laundry detergent.  He clearly doesn’t understand the internet, from twitter to blogs, having made such a horrendous error to start his downward spiral and to compound it by challenging the blawgosphere to salve his hurt marketer’s pride. 

But if you’ve got new and improved laundry detergent to sell, I bet Sonny is your man.  And I’m sure he could use the work.  Don’t hold this against him.