In a post that will surprise many,  Kevin O’Keefe rips legal marketing for its disgraceful lack of dignity.  This follows an “incident” yesterday where an interview conduct by his son, Colin, of someone from ConsultWeb at Avvocating 2012 was spammed across twitter.  Kevin was pissed, so he let loose in a colorful post :

Lately I think of Kodachrome most “When I think back on all the crap lawyers learn from legal marketers, it’s a wonder lawyers can think at all.”

Some legal marketers don’t know how lawyers grow their practices. Some legal marketers intentionally keep lawyers in the dark.

Either way it’s a shame. A shame that marketers act with no dignity in serving a profession that deserves, or at least should demand, dignity. A shame that otherwise intelligent people believe the crap taught to them.

While there are quibbles to be had over claims that the internet offers any meaningful opportunity to get filthy rich and famous, Kevin is still one of the good guys in that his thrust has always been to develop first as a competent lawyer and then spread one’s earned reputation around.  Whether it works that way isn’t the point of this post.  Kevin has always put competence and client service first, even if what follows is subject to debate.

But in the process of flying too close to the sun, Kevin, and his baby, the Lexblog Network, got burned.  Colin, who happens to do a terrific interview, “covered” a marketing conference.  At the time, Kevin saw the attendees as his peeps, worthy of a listen and even an interview.  And then, these very people, the ones to whom he showered his love and good words, burned him. They took his well-intended promotional video and spammed it across the internet, pulling on their pink hotpants and black patent leather hip-boots, and strutting their stuff down the boulevard.  And Kevin’s stuff too. 

Kevin now sees what happened in painful living color.  He was used. ConsultWeb took his interview and turned it into cheap and tawdry marketing.  Instead of developing relationships, the thrust of Kevin’s message, they put bright red lipstick on it and pushed it in everyone’s face.  It made Kevin the pimp, having created the streetwalker, and Kevin was outraged at being put in that position. I can’t blame him.

But it can’t surprise him.  Kevin O’Keefe may have given his talk about accelerating relationships a thousand times, but it’s still part of the marketing scheme the drowning lawyers grasp before they go under.  It’s may be more dignified than others, but it’s still marketing.

I twitted back at Kevin, during his fit of pique, bemoaning the death of dignity.

You can’t force dignity. Once you slide down the marketing slope, it’s baby steps to hot pants and the boulevard.

While my message was aimed directly at the spamming, it was meant for Kevin as well. Once you hoist yourself up on the fence between “dignified” marketing and the sleazy stuff, there is no way to avoid getting splinters. Big, nasty splinters in your butt.

People don’t go to these marketing conferences because they want to learn how to be dignified. They go because they want to get clients, and they want to get clients because they want money. And if they want clients and money enough to go to conferences, they want it pretty badly. And they will do whatever they have to do to get it. When the sweet rhetoric of dignity doesn’t make them rich, they push a little farther, until one day they find themselves walking the boulevard in hot pants.

Kevin  later twitted :

Why do lawyers have such a shitty reputation? Because of advertising like this.

The irony of the bus rolling down the boulevard shouldn’t be lost.

There are many lawyers, and former lawyers, who believe that marketing serves sufficiently valid purposes, leveling the playing field between solos and firms, or letting the public know that a lawyer with a particular speciality exists and sits next to the phone awaiting their call.  They have only the best of intentions in promoting the better aspects of marketing.  And they similarly decry the awful, deceitful, undignified crap that demeans the profession.

The belief that lawyers can somehow control their worst impulses, engage in marketing yet conduct themselves with dignity, is a fantasy.  There is no conceptual ledge that stops lawyers from sliding down the slippery slope into the gutter at the bottom.  If one lawyer puts up a “dignified” ad, the lawyer next door will find a way to undercut him.  And so the downward spiral goes, as they race to the bottom.

No one has the ability to draw a line in the sand to explicitly define where the dignified marketing ends and the sleaze begins.  No one has the ability to enforce it in this vast wasteland called the internet.  And those who try to sit atop the fence are going to end up with big, nasty splinters in their butt.

The rest of us may not feel the pain, but we will suffer for it as well, as the uniform of our profession changes from blue pinstriped suits to pink hotpants.