The concept behind the Legal Arena provided a curious juxtaposition to the other schemes promoted as the magic bullet for success.  Rather than lowball your way to wealth and prestige, or deceive as many “legal consumers” as you can, the claim is to promote lawyers based on their “consumer approval.”
 

HOW IT WORKS 

In a nut shell, TheLegalArena.com provides consumers the ability to privately post their legal matter and  then THEY select the BEST attorneys in their local area to view and compete for their case. Consumers remain in 100% control of the site by selecting as few or as many attorneys as THEY wish to view and compete for their case.

 

Now, here is where it gets very interesting…. To assist the consumers with their selection, they can view each attorney’s profile and view the number of “Consumer Approvals” each attorney has received. Each attorney is ranked on the site based on the number of “Consumer Approvals” they have received. The more the attorney has, the higher they rank. The higher they rank, the more likely they are to be selected to view and compete for cases.

Certainly, consumer approval is a good thing, right? Well, yes. Yes it is. The idea of lawyers being initially promoted based on a metric, even if imperfect, of competence, and only then proposing a fee structure or relationship, addresses one of the fundamental issues with prior efforts to great an innovative new means of connecting lawyers and clients.  If the foundation is quality, and only afterward price, then it won’t serve to deceive and take advantage of the public.  Are these guys onto something?

So I asked Catherine if she could explain how exactly this worked. She did some poking around and reported back:

I just played the videos on the website. To get approvals, you post your Legal Arena “profile” on Facebook, etc., and ask your “friends, family and lawyers you know” to click on the “approved” button. I guess you could even ask your dog, because on the internet, nobody knows . . . .  Some of the approvals might come from clients, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell that.

Once again, too good to be true.  Your dog loves you? Yeah, well, not enough to make you the best lawyer in town.  Thanks for playing.

The argument that lawyers are just resistent to new concepts, to entrepreneurs who want to revolutionize something, whose marketing rhetoric about helping consumers while, miraculously, making money for lawyers, is wearing thin. 

I applauded the mall lawyers, and think there’s merit to lawyers working out of Walmart.  The reason I look at these “new and innovative” concepts is that I want to find better, more effective ways for lawyers to serve underserved populations. And I’ve got nothing against lawyers making money.  We need to find new, better, ways to fulfill our mission.  But that doesn’t mean any new way is better.

The interests in providing quality lawyering at an affordable price are not well served by schemes and scams.  While the “consumer approval” concept may emit the fragrant odor of a marketers’ dream, it’s ripe for deception and abuse.  If anybody can “like” a lawyer, then the concept is worse than meaningless.  It’s an invitation for deception.  That doesn’t mean that every lawyer who uses it is unethical, but the very concept penalizes the honest lawyer who doesn’t put the keyboard in front of his dog and hope his paw hits the right button. 

Is there a way this could be used in an ethical fashion? Of course. If the lawyers who join behave ethically and honestly, by only having actual clients approve (or disapprove?) of them.  Want to count on that happening?  Me neither. And there is still the quantity over quality problem. And the list goes on.

Had Catherine not sent over her invitation, there’s little chance I would have heard about this latest foray in the race to the bottom.  The Legal Arena isn’t a “player,” and its just one of the morass of websites hoping to catch sufficient interest from lawyers and clients to gain a niche.  Whether you will ever hear of it again has yet to be seen, but it serves to further an important point.  It’s fairly easy to come up with some latest, greatest, marketing scheme for lawyers and clients that will “change everything,” provided you don’t mind jumping into gutter.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that as much as the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive when it comes to trying to skim a piece of the legal services pie, no one has been able to come up with a means of doing so that isn’t fraught with functional problems and ethical pitfalls.  It would be great if all lawyers engaging in online self-promotion and marketing would do so with the utmost integrity, and it these “innovative” concepts could figure out a way to prevent the unsavory from making their way to the top of the list.  It would be great. And yet, it hasn’t happened.  The 99% always find a way to make the 1% look bad.

Much as I’m beginning (beginning?) to sound like a Negative Nelly, even to myself, the stream of flawed, even dangerous, concepts that claim to be the next great thing for lawyers on the internet only adds to the downward spiral, the race to the bottom.  Believe it or not, I truly hope someone, whether kid or geezer, whether lawyer or lay-person, anyone, comes up with a better way. I don’t know if it exists, but I hope it does.

But it has to be legitimate, honest and capable of precluding the myriad ethical dilemmas that lend themselves to abuse, where its predecessors have failed.

One of the reasons we keep doing it the old way is that it’s not easy to come up with a new way that isn’t worse.  Sorry, but no amount of marketing adjectives are going to change our ethical obligations.