Larry Joe Davis was pissed.  He was rated 3.7 by Avvo.  3.7.  Bricks are rated higher than 3.7.  Well, that’s certainly not going to get him any business.  From the Courthouse News :

Davis claims Avvo misleads the public by failing to disclose that the attorney ratings on its website depend upon an attorney’s level of cooperation with the site.

Davis says he has been an attorney in good standing in Florida since 1992, and has been board certified in health law by the Florida Bar since 1999.

Davis says he does not challenge Avvo’s subjective opinions, but its misrepresentations of facts and material omissions of “so-called public information.” He claims, for example, that Avvo.com identified him and at least eight other board-certified attorneys in health law in the Tampa area as practicing “100 percent employment/labor law.”

Uh oh.  Misrepresentations of fact and material omissions are generally frowned upon.  So Larry Joe Davis sued.  What is Avvo thinking?  According to its Mr. Davis’ free Avvo Profile, which includes an editorial Avvo Rating of 3.7 “Caution,” is impacted by the fact that he was reprimanded and placed on probation by the Florida Bar in 2007 after twice being found guilty of willfully refusing to pay court-ordered child support, failing to appear for his court dates and willfully obstructing the Bar’s disciplinary process.

Oh, Larry Joe, you nasty miscreant.  You didn’t mention anything about a reprimand and being on probation by the Florida Bar.  Or did you?

Davis said he contacted Avvo and that initially his ranking on the site improved. But he says the details in his listing did not change. When he decided he had had enough and tried to delist himself, he says, his rating declined into the “caution” category.

While his Avvo profile at the moment seems pretty clear, it’s hard to say what it looked like before Larry Joe get angry.  Did Avvo retaliate against him?  Did Avvo dig a little deeper and find out that there was some additional information that needed to be addressed in his profile?  Who’s got transparency on their side?

If I had to take a wild guess about such things, I would tend to go with Avvo.  My experience is that they aren’t out to wreak havoc with the legal world, upon which they depend for their bread and butter.  If it was simply a matter of correcting an erroneous profile, I can’t imagine any reason they wouldn’t be happy to comply. 

Really, it’s no skin off their nose, not to mention that it’s all fairly easy to change by any lawyer who dedicates 47 seconds to cleaning up the mess.  Sure, Davis is right that it requires some degree of personal involvement by the lawyer to get things right, and it’s really not the victim’s duty to clean up the mess of the attacker, but then there’s a bit of a glitch in Larry Joe’s story in the first place.

Davis said he found out about the erroneous listing when he a potential client contacted him about an employment law matter. 

He says the woman told him he was he listed as an employment law attorney, and that he was lowly rated. She told him she had called higher-rated attorneys but none had returned her calls, Davis says. He says she told him she finally called him, believing that as a low-rated attorney, he’d be more eager for work and more likely to return her call.

So if this incredibly low rating and caution came only after Larry Joe complained about Avvo, but he first learned about Avvo from some gal who went to him because he had a god-awful crappy rating and would be more appreciative of her call then, say, good lawyers, we’ve got a bit of a conflict in Larry Joe’s story.

So how do we explain Larry Joe’s potential confusion?

Davis, who is representing himself, seeks punitive damages for libel.

Davis is representing himself.  Well, thanks for that clarification.  Carry on, Larry Joe.

A theme amongst social media pseudo-gurus is that it works, but only if a lawyer identifies a peculiar, underserved, niche of the law. 

Even if your skills and abilities allow you to practice broadly, you need to market yourself very narrowly. Here are a few great examples: 

• Mixed Martial Arts Law Blog
• Spatial Law and Policy (that’s right, spatial as in outer space)
• Furniture Law

Now if you have a passion for mixed martial arts law (and who doesn’t?), then this could be sound advice.  The problem is that the “advice” is worthless, bordering on idiotic, if outer space law isn’t your thing.  The gurus might be aware of this is they were lawyers.  Not lawyers in the sense that they have a license to practice law, but lawyers in the sense of being a member of a learned profession. 

Marketing philosopher Seth Godin expressed the problem this way.

If you want something done, perhaps you would ask a professional to do it. Someone who costs a lot but is worth more than they charge. Someone who shows up even when she doesn’t feel like it. Someone who stands behind her work, gets better over time and is quite serious indeed about the transaction.

Or perhaps you could hire a passionate amateur. That’s a forum leader doing it for love, not money. An obsessive in love with the craft. A talented person willing to trade income for the chance to do what he loves, with freedom.

Please, though, don’t hire someone who just thinks it’s a job.

While the amateur in his post may not apply to this situation, his point remains.  It’s better to have someone who cares than someone who couldn’t care less.  Better still to have someone who cares and has the ability to perform.

Don’t look to the verbiage to guide you.  The pseudo-gurus use language that conveys the impression of substance, often stealing substantive words from some other use and inserting them in a manner that renders them utterly meaningless.  They love this stuff so much that others jump on board, repeat the pointless words as if its lack of meaning suggests depth of thought.  Then others applaud them, express how amazing their deep thoughts are and bask in their reflected awesomeness.

These folks speak to people who want jobs and call them professionals.  They aren’t professionals.  Professionals don’t change direction on a dime to follow the possibility of making a quick buck. 

Most lawyers enter the profession for a reason, with a goal in mind.  They want to practice law.  Perhaps they want to prosecute the accused or defend them, but there is a practice area that draws them in and holds their interest.  Perhaps they just want to help people, itself a worthy goal.  Perhaps they enjoy the thrill of the megadeal or the closing argument.  What it’s not about is getting a paycheck.  If that was the case, they would do far better to contract with a factory in China to make women’s dresses, and save a fortune on law school tuition.

But if you weren’t making the big bucks you hoped for as a public defender, would you switch gears and become a furniture lawyer?  Not because you’re into the intricacies of hard wood and eight-way-tied-springs, but because there was a big opening in the blawgosphere for furniture law and you have the chance to fill it?

There are quite a few new criminal defense lawyers that come around here, and flit about twitter, who are full of exuberance about their chosen legal niche.  It’s really pretty cool to see so much interest and zeal, though I can’t help but wonder what they’ll be doing 20 years from now.  No doubt most will assure me that they will be right in the thick of criminal defense, but experience suggests that for some, criminal defense will be nothing more than a distant memory.  It happens.  Things change.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.

It may be that lawyers find themselves gravitating to other practice areas, some due to fortuitous circumstance and others due to necessity.  Some will find a different niche more interesting, satisfying or worthwhile.  All of these are perfectly fine reasons to hitch your wagon to an area of law.

But if you decide tomorrow to become a mixed martial arts lawyer because there’s an empty hole in the blawgosphere that some social media pseudo-guru suggests you can fill, then you do so merely to try to grab a quick buck.  You may be a lawyer, but you aren’t a professional.   For you, it’s just a job, and as Godin says, “don’t hire someone who just thinks it’s a job.”

The path to wealth and fame as a lawyer isn’t by finding an empty hole, no matter what proponents of social media tell you.  It’s by wanting to fill that hole. 

Given my opposition to Orin Kerr’s “technology neutral approach” to the application of search and seizure law to technological advancement, largely due to my belief that the 4th Amendment is a bundle of exceptions in search of rule, and that Orin’s approach will leave us with no meaningful protection at all, the question remains: If not tech neutral, then what?

Dan Solove at Concurring Opinions has written an article urging an alternative, called Fourth Amendment Pragmatism , to be published in Boston College Law Review this year.  Here’s the abstract:

In this essay, Professor Solove argues that the Fourth Amendment reasonable expectation of privacy test should be abandoned. Instead of engaging in a fruitless game of determining whether privacy is invaded, the United States Supreme Court should adopt a more pragmatic approach to the Fourth Amendment and directly face the issue of how to regulate government information gathering. There are two central questions in Fourth Amendment analysis: (1) The Coverage Question – Does the Fourth Amendment provide protection against a particular form of government information gathering? and (2) The Procedure Question – How should the Fourth Amendment regulate this form of government information gathering? The Coverage Question should be easy to answer: The Fourth Amendment should regulate whenever government information gathering creates problems of reasonable significance. Such a scope of coverage would be broad, and the attention wasted on the Coverage Question would be shifted to the Procedure Question. This pragmatic approach to the Fourth Amendment is consistent with its text and will make Fourth Amendment law coherent and comprehensive.

Step one is the tossing out of Katz’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” foundation, which Dan calls a “fruitless game.”   He explains further in his introduction.

For a long time, I believed that with the appropriate understanding of privacy—one that is well-adapted to modern technology, nimble and nuanced, forward-looking and sophisticated—Fourth Amendment jurisprudence could be rehabilitated. I now realize I was wrong.

The entire debate over reasonable expectations of privacy is futile, for it is not focused on the right question. . . . We should sidestep the contentious debate about expectations of privacy—or about any other specific value as a trigger for Fourth Amendment protection. Instead, whenever a particular government information gathering activity creates problems of reasonable significance, the Fourth Amendment should require regulation and over-sight.

Having omitted a rather tedious analogy, it appears that Dan’s point is that expectation of privacy, “or about any other specific value as a trigger,” is subject to contentious debate.  While true, it doesn’t explain why it’s the wrong question.  Worse still, he merely swaps it out for a different phrase, Dan’s idea of a better trigger, “problems of reasonable significance.”

Application of the reasonable expectation of privacy test is increasingly difficult in a time of huge technological advancement.  The fact that ordinary people have little idea of what does on inside all the electronics that they use daily, where they think things like their emails, text messages and IMs are private, but the harsh reality is that they fall fairly clearly within one of the many exceptions, renders the test unworkable.  This gives rise to my problems with Orin’s approach, in that exceptions developed for bootleggers strain public expectations today.  Essentially, our subjective expectations may be just as strong, but it’s just not objectively reasonable in light of technology, which has the power to access every aspect of our lives without the physical intrusion that was needed in the past.

But then, substituting a test that has some modicum of meaning for a test that is wholly incomprehensible, doesn’t move us away from the problem.  What is meant by “problems of reasonable significance?”  Who knows?  To whom is the problem significant? There’s likely to be a wide divergence between the individual’s idea and the government’s. Dan supposed that it would be broad and inclusive, covering a large swathe of our life.  I suppose that’s largely up to whoever gets to define this totally amorphous phrase.  Given the history of both legislative and judicial definition of areas into which the police are given a free pass, Dan’s expectation may be a bit rosy.

It’s certainly encouraging for lawprofs like Dan to give some hard thought to alternative ways to frame 4th Amendment issues going forward, as we’re now on a trajectory that will provide no privacy whatsoever as we embrace each hour’s new technology, with all its shiny bells and whistles, without giving a second thought to how its use sends our private information to a computer somewhere in the bowels of the FBI building.  It won’t be easy, however, to come up with a paradigm that works.

We are currently trying to jam square pegs into round holes, with the closest viable analogy substituting for  legitimate protection of our privacy.  This results in applying the rubric despite the rationale having absolutely nothing to do with the purposes for which the police are relieved of the obligation to obtain a warrant before accessing our private information.  While the issue of the moment is GPS tracking devices placed on cars, we need to stop trying to fix the problems one device at a time as new technology is developing at such a rapid pace that each bit of tech will be like a horse and buggy by next week. 

We need a viable framework that protects us from intrusion.  Another approach, what Orin calls the Mosaic theory, and seems to me to be a variation on the “totality of the circumstances” approach that federal courts have long used to reach any result they want, seems to serve as a line in the sand beyond which even federal judges are just disgusted with the level of intrusion into personal privacy.  And yet, it’s essentially an abdication of the warrant clause until it reaches the point of unbearable disgust.  My hope is that we have a bit of protection before that point.

Dan Solove should be applauded for thinking outside the box, trying to resurrect the moribund concept of freedom from the government’s nose sticking into our undergarments (there’s an image for you), with his reasonable significance approach in lieu of a reasonable expectation of privacy.  While the latter has its issues, at least it’s a phrase that offers some clue as to what’s covered.  But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better approach out there, and it’s encouraging that there are people out there trying to find it.

Just in case you thought that kids don’t think about the Bill of Rights anymore.  They do. Just differently.

(What?  You expected lolcats?)

Oh yeah.  Are you ready for some football?  You’re not the only one.

H/T ATL

It’s just like the old days of the practical blawgosphere, where somebody writes a post on a relatively inconsequential aspect of criminal defense and somebody else quibbles for kicks.  Such fun, and I want in.  Mark Bennett posts about how you never know who your real friends are until you need one, as opposed to the 600 “frends” one has one Facebook, most of whom you barely know and few of whom (if any) would life a finger to help you.

Truth be told, even most criminal defense lawyers don’t have the ethic, though the occupation selects for those who do: sticking with people even when their problems are entirely their dumbass fault is an important part of the job, and those who would do so for love of a friend are naturally willing to do so for a living.

Facebook devalues friendship by calling something that when it isn’t truly: six hundred frends, and if you’re extraordinarily lucky two or three friends.

Mark may have undershot the mark by limiting his point to Facebook.  What about Twitter?  Or any other social media, past or present, where people spend their time “authentically engaging” with people they don’t know while ignoring the real people around them?  These are, of course, “frends” of convenience, and hence not friends at all.

Over at Crime & Federalism , Mike takes up the issue.

Friendship requires elevating the other person – your friends.  When I have money, my friends have money.  It’s really that simple.  Friendship is a sort of voluntary socialism.  Of course there will always be the occasional mooch, but one can get an STD from having sex.  Does this mean you stop having sex  – or that you start being careful?  So, too, it is with friends.

Who are you a friend to?  If you wouldn’t come pick me up at 3 a.m. when my car broke down, you’re not my friend.  Why waste time and energy pretending we’re friends?  We’re not, and that’s cool, and friendship is so great that you should devote your time to someone who is actually a friend.

From this, Mike posits that our “friendship” issues stem not from who is a friend to us, but rather, to whom we’re friends.

We are not what we say or think, but are what we do.  We become what we do.  If we do good things for people, even if we begin as sons of bitches, we change.  This change leads to the Sun Effect : We become the type of person others are draw to.

One need not prove the cause to note the effect.  The person who is a friend to others has friends.

And so if it’s true that, “True friends are few and far between,” there is no mystery.

Friends are hard to find because you are not a friend.

In a vacuum, Mike’s view seems to carry the most theoretical weight, that if we’re good friends to others, they will return the favor.  Granted, it presents a chicken/egg dilemma, but that can be overcome by someone, anyone, starting somewhere by being a good friend and developing the desired effect.  Except, it doesn’t happen that way.

It will likely come as surprise to some readers, particularly those without a sense of humor or a great deal of life experience, that I’m a pretty good friend to others.  Despite my playing the curmudgeon and my refusal to coddle the needy and whiny, I’m usually there for people in need, real friends and even casual acquaintances.  Even those I only know from the internet.  It’s my nature to try to help, regardless of whether the problem is self-induced foolishness or bad luck.  I’m the guy you want standing behind you in a fight.  There are a good many of you out there who I’ve help over the years, and you know who you are. 

And in return, not much.  For some, it’s a matter of narcissism, where you “deserved” help and I did nothing more than gave you what the world owed you.  For others, it’s selfishness, that you are happy to take but disinclined to give. For a few, it’s low self-esteem, where you resented me for helping you (hey, you asked) and became angry with me for your sense of “debt” on your shoulder.  Sometimes it’s a combination of motives and issues, but the net result is the same.  Help someone and make an enemy for it.  Or at least not a friend.

By my highly unscientific calculations, the friend to friend ration is 10:1, with 90% of those you befriend either failing to return the friendship or actively disliking you for having done them a solid.  If you’re looking for a return on investment, being a good friend sucks.  If you help others because that’s just the way you roll, then it doesn’t matter.  You help others without any expectation of friendship in return, and your expectations are met.

But Mark’s post raises a more ominous specter, that those who look for friendship online, and who harbor the bizarre belief [h/t, ironically, @ValentiLaw] that their Facebook friends or Twitter followers are their real, true, honest-to-god buddies, are in for a rude awakening.  A friend on Twitter is a frendship quitter. 

When time comes to post bail, see how many of your followers show up with cash in hand.

It’s long been a truism that a person with two or three good friends is rich indeed.  If anything, the internet may not have enhanced our wealth, but taken from it.  With the time spent online worrying about how to spread our wit about at 140 characters at a time, chances are good that people have neglected their real-life friends for their virtual “frends” and end up with neither. 

He was sitting at the bar of the Fairmont Hotel.  He was drinking for diversion. He was thinking for himself.

It was pure kismet that I sat down next to him.  We had both just come from the Mall.  He from the Lincoln Memorial end and me from the Smithsonian Institution end.  I had no problem finding a parking place on the mall.  He found it difficult to park.  I joked with him that he parked on the wrong end.

It wasn’t until the day before that it dawned on me that the day I planned to visit the Smithsonian was the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I”ve got a dream” speech.  It struck me as a bad idea, but it really didn’t turn out to be a problem at all.  There were a lot people walking around, mostly overweight, wearing t-shirts with similar themes about “honor” and funny camo hats with American flags sticking out of their heads like horns.  They were all white.

It struck me that it made little sense to wear a camouflage hat with flags stuck into them, as the flags defeated the point of the camo. 

When I talked to the guy at the bar, he explained that he was deeply frustrated with the demise of his lifestyle.  He loved the country, he told me, but not the government.  Aside from the fact that Obama and the Democrats were evil incarnate, many of his complaints are the same I write about, and other comment about, here.  He was an unremarkable looking man of a certain age.  About my age.  He was happy, polite and courteous.  He was civil and respectful.  He knew what was wrong, and he thought he knew how to fix it.

The answer was common sense.  Politicians were all in it for themselves, and were selling our legacy for votes to the great mass of people out there who wanted a free ride on the backs of hard working people.  He was suffering.  Money was tight, and people no longer respected the norms and mores by which he lived his life.  Why was he forced to live in some world that seems foreign to him.  What about his freedom to live his life?  What happened to his right to pursue happiness?

He had nothing against blacks, or Jews. He wasn’t too clear about Muslims, given what they did to this country, but it wasn’t a skin color thing.  If African Americans wanted to stand beside him and lock arms in the pursuit of a better America, he would be proud to have them.  It wasn’t his fault that they didn’t join in.  Some of his best friends were black, once.  There weren’t too many where he lived.

I like him. He was friendly and sincere.  I asked some nuanced questions about how it all fits together, how politicians function and navigate between different, conflicting interests.  He waved me off.  It wasn’t that complicated, or at least it didn’t have to be.  All they had to do was the right thing.  They just needed to use some common sense.

He told me that I was being fed misinformation, twisted stories about the country, the world, the tea party.  They were just regular folk trying to stand up for their life before it was completely lost.  It was happening, he explained.  Inch by inch, normal American life was being chipped away, and we couldn’t tell as it happened because the chips were so small.  But look back and you could see how we’ve slipped from a once honorable nation into the abyss. Our greatness was squandered.

He had a kid who was in the service.  His son was a Marine in Afghanistan on his third tour.  Because of this, he knew things that others didn’t.  He knew about the threat of terrorism.  He knew about honor and dedication to his country.  He knew about sacrifice.  He didn’t exactly say it, but it was clear that by having a son in harm’s way, he was entitled to a louder say than those who took from society without giving back.  He was more entitled to a say than I was.  His horse in the race was more important than mine.

I liked the guy.  He was like so many guys I’ve met in my life, at the store, in the courthouse, at classic car shows.  But for his t-shirt and the hat he had removed and placed next to his beer, he would have been pretty much any ordinary guy I’ve ever met in my life.  He believed, deeply, that the answer could be found in common sense.  He stood on the Mall in the very hot sun with a lot of other people who wore similar t-shirts and hats, and listened to Glen Beck and Sarah Palins, both of whom had common sense.

I was on the other end of the Mall, where there was no common sense or simple solutions.  He wore a “Hope” t-shirt.  I saw the Hope diamond.  We were very close, but couldn’t have been farther apart.  And still, he was a perfectly ordinary guy.

I picked a heck of a day to visit our Nation’s capital.

From killer prosecutor to criminal court judge to sex-crazed maniac, James Gibbons has taken an unusual career path.  Via the Daily News :

A cleavage-crazed criminal court judge – who fathered a son with a young Legal Aid lawyer – quit after officials found a massive porn stash on his work computer, sources said Thursday.

Disgraced Manhattan jurist James Gibbons, a whip-smart ex-prosecutor who once convicted rapists and killers, fired off a terse resignation letter last week after the nasty cache was uncovered.

“There was a lot of porn on his computer – all young women,” an investigator told the Daily News. “Lots of crotch and cleavage shots.”

Whip-smart?  Well that’s an interesting choice of words. 

There’s nothing wrong with a judge who, in his spare time, happens to enjoy looking at sexually provocative images.  They aren’t neutered before taking the bench.  But it’s a job that requires a bit of discretion, and one would expect them to exercise that discretion while using their court-provided computers. 

Consider being on trial before Gibbons and, as you rise to your feet to voice a critical objection, you see him staring intently at the computer before him on the bench.  “Objection, Your Honor!” 

Huh?

I said Objection.

What, I’m sorry, objection? Objection to what?

The question that was just asked, it was outrageous judge.  Totally outrageous!

What question?

Weren’t you listening judge?  I saw you staring at your computer.

Well, um, uh, humm, I missed it.  I was doing some, um, uh, research into a fascinating legal issue up here.

There was this little bit of drool coming from the side of your mouth, Your Honor.

Yeah, well, that happens when I read a particularly interesting decision. 

Oh.  I see.

Curious that it’s always the uptight looking guys who seem to get off on the kinky stuff, perhaps to compensate for a gap in their adolescence.  Of course, Elie Mystal at Above the Law thinks that there’s nothing wrong with Gibbons enjoying a bit of afternoon virtual delight under his robe, if only he was smart enough to keep the internal hard drive clean.

Sorry, I’m just not so quick to crucify a man for having porn on his computer. Maybe he should have to step down for being a freaking idiot. Why do people insist on keeping porn on their work computers? The external hard drive was invented for porn, much like the internet itself.

But aside from giant stupidity, I don’t have an inherent problem with a judge bringing some porn into his chambers. It’s better than hiring a prostitute, it’s better than sexually harassing counsel or criminal defendants, it’s better than cheating on your cancer stricken wife.

There are a whole host of things it’s better than, and yet that’s not exactly the criteria one expects a judge to fill.  Would it be so wrong to have higher aspirations for the judiciary, like to keep their porn at home?

I hate to be such a stick in the mud about such things, but I have this wild expectation that guys who assume the position of sitting in judgment of others, deciding their fate and tossing them in jail, might demonstrate the force of will to control their sexual urges long enough to perform their job woody-less.  Is that so wrong?

In preparation of this post, I went to the court’s website to get Judge Gibbons’ bio, and found that it had already been deleted.  He was disappeared awfully quick.  If only something more useful was accomplished by the system as quickly as they terminated his judicial existence.

But regardless, we know that he was a one-time “whip-smart” prosecutor, and that’s usually enough of a background to leave us with a sense of comfort.  After all, there are plenty of other one-time prosecutors who would like to wear a robe.  Now that there’s a seat empty on the bench, they have the chance to fill it.  I would just recommend they wipe it off first.  You never know how sticky it could be.

If Millennials are called digital natives, then I’m a digital illegal immigrant undocumented alien.  While I may spend a few minutes on the computer most days, I’m constrained to learn everything from scratch. Often twice.  Sometimes more.  This must be obvious to all the virtual gurus around, as they constantly send me emails offering me their services.

Then a new offer came in, not the typical coyote solicitation that a guy like me would expect, but an entirely different opportunity.

I would be interested in managing a link exchange campaign for your company as an independant contracter.

As your “link marketing manager”, I can manage your link exchange campaign to insure that, over time, you will have a consistent reliable and steady stream of qualified, interested and motivated prospects viewing your web site. Web traffic is a numbers game, and the more web sites that link to you, the more traffic you’ll get on a referral basis. 

Like any blawger, I get a ton of people asking for “link exchanges,” suggesting that their website offering guaranteed penis enlargement and mine are simpatico and share a dedicated audience.  They might have a point, but it always struck me as a bit unseemly and definitely not the sort of thing people wanted to be constantly reminded about. 

With all these incoming offers, it never dawned on me that I might need someone to manage my link exchange campaign.  Heck, I didn’t even realize that I needed a campaign.  And he was willing to do so as an Independent contractor!  Woo hoo!  No health insurance.  That’s a relief.

Every day, a new job comes into existence online, positions we didn’t even know we needed and certainly never existed the day before.  It’s a miracle, some out of work, unqualified person who is the laughingstock of all his friends for lack of a BMW and an iPad, creating a niche that no one ever knew existed.  Fill the niche, get rich.  It’s the American way.

It seems like only yesterday that there was no such thing as Twitter.  Now we not only have Twitter, but Twitter experts who, for a fee, will teach people to be twits.  These are highly trained professionals who spent hours honing their craft so they can solicit major law firms and teach them how to effectively engage with authenticity using hashtags.  There’s no finer way to develop that mixed martial arts law practice and promote it to those desperate corporate counsel, frustrated by their inability to locate just the right lawyer.

As for me, I’m pretty satisfied with my general policy of not exchanging links with the plethora of websites who have much to offer me.  It’s okay if I’m just a piker in the digital world, limiting visitors here to those who have an interest in the things I tend to write about.  Sure, it’s not much, but the potentially vast popularity with readers seeking viagra might overwhelm me.

But don’t let that stop you.  There are many new folks around the blawgosphere who will do pretty much anything to grab some readers and expand their tribe and influence.  From twitter followers by the tried and true follow-back of anyone with a twitter name of Britney to spam back-link comments, they are welcoming to all and invite eyeballs without discrimination.  If this is what you’re up for, go for it.  In fact, it may prove to be a huge boon in the opening of a new niche of law, the representation of people with small penises.  You can be High Priest of the small penis blawgosphere if you play your cards right.

And don’t feel badly that you’re desperate to make a splash in the blawgosphere.  After all, what’s the point of all this if not to manufacture popularity and community, from whom you can nab a buck or two.  There can’t be any other legitimate reason to type out a few words if not to make a living, and it’s so much easier to fabricate an internet persona that makes other people, similarly desperate for attention and business, love you than it is to be a great lawyer.  That takes work.  More than a few hours.  Heck, who wants to spend all that time when you can become the king of all twitter experts by next Tuesday?

Hey, you never know.

Sorry, Mike Ciaccio, but I’m going to pass on your very kind offer to be my personal link exchange manager.  Even as an independent contractor.  I’m just not ready for all the eyeballs and small penises.

Update:  I inquired of Mikey C about the charges for his services as my personal link exchange manager.  Here’s what he replied:

Thank you for your interest in my link exchange and FaceBook Marketing Service. 

I am an independent contractor with over 25  years of sales and marketing experience. In addition, I have had an internet marketing company since 1996.

I charge $450.00 per month for my service, and there is no obligation after the first month on your part.

*** Here’s my basic plan of action. Every day, monday thru friday,complete the following…

1. spider the internet (daily) to find web sites that are related to you but not your competitors.

2. harvest the email addresses (daily) from these sites.

3. send emails to them, telling them we’d like to link to them, and to link back to us with a specific code.

4. create html pages (weekly), that contain links and descriptions of these sites that reciprocate and upload them to your server or I can email them to you.

***I try to accomplish the following marketing objectives…

1. Create a resource that is so valuable that it will “in itself” keep visitors coming back to your web site over and over.

2. Create a resource that is “HIGHLY targeted to your market” so that the referral traffic from these links will produce highly qualified,

interested, and motivated prospective buyers.

3. Improve your Google rankings for your best keywords and phrases by having other relevant web sites link to you using the keywords in hypertext..

Mike then provides a list of his clients, my personal fav being the one selling crossbows.  It must be hard to rank high when selling crossbows.  Nonetheless, I still demur, meaning that Mike remains wide open to turn you into the High Priest of small penises.