Looking for Better Ads, Plaintiffs Lawyers? Here’s Your Guy

[WSJ_law_blog]

In the opening scenes of David Mamet’s “The Verdict,” the lead character, Frank Galvin, a personal injury lawyer played by Paul Newman, scours the obituaries for accident victims, infiltrates the funeral parlor, pretends he knew the decedent, and then passes off his business card to the grieving widow.

Newman’s Frank Galvin is one of the more cutting depictions of lawyer-as-lost-soul. Apparently, it was this kind of popular perception of personal injury lawyers that motivated Ben Glass (pictured) to try to reform attorney advertising. “When lawyers run ads that show fistfuls of cash and gory accident scenes and the jurors see these ads they think of us as ambulance-chasers, as people trying to get money for nothing, as people trying to exaggerate claims,” Glass tells the WaPo in a weekend profile.

In his efforts to combat these images, Glass (William and Mary, George Mason U. Law) found a side business: advising other malpractice lawyers on how to advertise. He named it Great Legal Marketing and promised an “effective, ethical and outside-the-box” approach. In 2006, Glass created a toolkit for building a personal injury practice including sections on how to craft the right Yellow Pages message, how to build a Web site attractive to Internet search engines and to potential clients, and how to write consumer books.

Check out the financials: Glass sells the packages for $3,995, but they’re free if lawyers join his $497-a-month coaching program. He also offers membership in a “mastermind” group, where, for $15,000 a year, 25 lawyers convene three times a year (and by conference call the other months and on an e-mail discussion group) to work on their businesses. In 2007, the gross revenue from Glass’s marketing business was $300,000, reports the WaPo, about 60 percent of which was profit, and he anticipates grossing $450,000 this year.

Glass says that the marketing business has certain advantages over legal practice. “Everything a personal injury lawyer does, the other side is telling you you’re wrong,” he says. “In the marketing business, if they don’t like me, they just don’t become a client or customer. They’re not, like, yelling at me.”