Special Report: Courting Opinion

For Steve Nober, the hottest trend in the legal profession is Xeralto. And the next big deal is something called morcellators. Nober is chief executive of Consumer Attorney Marketing Group, a Woodland Hills firm that produces TV campaigns for lawyers who sue drug and medical device companies. Every year since he started the company in 2012, his revenue has doubled, and he now has 60 to 80 campaigns running at any time. Xeralto, a blood-thinning pill from Bayer HealthCare AG, is the current lawsuit flavor-of-the-month, with ads for Nober’s attorneys and the drug running on the same cable channels. After those suits run their course, he expects lawsuits about morcellators, instruments for uterine surgery, to grow in number. Nober said the economics of medical legal advertising is impressive. It costs an attorney from $500 to $2,500 to find an aggrieved patient with a documented case. Eventually, the case will settle at the low end in the tens of thousands of dollars, up to the low millions – and the lawyer will get 30 percent. “It’s a ridiculous return on investment,” Nober said. “Once you are into it, it’s really lucrative.” So much so that a lot of Nober’s clients are not big law firms, but small personal injury lawyers who sustain their business with auto accidents and slip-and-falls, then invest their extra income in TV ads for a chance to win a big payout. “Most of my clients are getting active in mass torts as a side gig,” he explained. Nober works in the new world of legal advertising, where lawyers from a wide variety of practices are moving online and on screen. And the San Fernando Valley is a central hub for this industry. At one end, there is Nober and InterMedia Advertising Inc., another direct-response TV company in Woodland Hills. At the other end of the Valley in Glendale, there’s LegalZoom.com Inc., the largest online legal services company that is not a law firm –at least, not yet. While legal advertising on TV has been around for years, Robert Yallen, an attorney and chief executive at InterMedia, said the number and types of lawyers who use it has expanded. Originally, only personal injury lawyers were on the air, but now there are ads for criminal defense, DUI, bankruptcy, divorce, class action and even tax lawyers. And he expects the trend to continue. “The more traditional practices of law, I see expanding into offline media,” he said. Tracking response Nober said about half his business is mass torts on medical issues, but the other half is old-fashioned personal injury lawyers in about 40 local markets across the country. Both types of campaigns have developed sophisticated technology on the backend to buy, track and analyze commercials. For example, Nober uses a different 800 phone number for every station or cable channel in a campaign, so he can track which ads deliver leads. When a particular time, show or channel doesn’t work, he cancels future ads and moves the money to more effective time slots. Each week he provides the law firms with a run-down on how much each phone call, and eventual client, costs in media expenditures. For a typical campaign, the cost starts at $5,000 a week, which will buy 30 to 50 local ads, depending on the market. A law firm can increase spending up to about $20,000 a week. Perhaps the biggest change Nober has seen in legal advertising is the shift away from “branding.” For example, Nober’s medical device ads usually show a woman in a business suit who explains the medical complication and encourages viewers to call. The lawyers never appear on camera, and the law firm’s name is never mentioned. That’s because the firms don’t care about name recognition – they want customers at the lowest cost. But some local ads still present the attorney as a brand. Yallen at InterMedia is running a campaign for Darren Kavinoky, a Sherman Oaks DUI lawyer and host of two shows on the Discovery Investigation cable channel. The ads show Kavinoky in a staged jail cell to promote his 1-800-No Cuffs brand. (An interview with Kavinoky is on page 18.) “Obviously, we’ve used his celebrity to advantage. Darren is an incredible personality, but there are very few like him,” Yallen said. For attorneys who are less camera friendly, Yallen gives them limited lines on screen and focuses on testimonials from real people. In addition to TV, Yallen at InterMedia does online advertising, which he calls the yellow pages of the 21st century. He believes every marketing campaign should have a digital element, especially in Los Angeles, one of the most expensive broadcast markets in the nation. “The biggest focus is on search, but we have done interesting campaigns with proprietary technology to serve ads,” he said. “We can target people who have been arrested or have a specific problem that need an attorney.” Going online A study last year by FindLaw showed the main way people find a lawyer (38 percent) is on the Internet, followed by recommendations from friends (29 percent). An earlier study by Orlando, Fla. law firm Moses & Rooth found that “search engines are the most likely source for new clients,” and “a website and online reviews play a critical role once the consumer makes it to Google.” John Suh, chief executive at online legal document purveyor LegalZoom, said the Internet is changing the entire structure of the legal sector. Currently, large corporations and wealthy families have access to lawyers, and people below the poverty line can access non-profit or government legal help in an emergency. But the middle class is under-served. “The average American and small business has been priced out of the legal system,” he told the Business Journal. “Most of that market is serviced by sole practitioners.” A typical attorney at a firm with 10 or more lawyers will spend 92 percent of the workday on billable hours, Suh explained. For a sole practitioner, that number falls to 39 percent, because he or she must spend time marketing and performing secretarial tasks. As a result, even though a typical sole practitioner’s take-home pay is a fraction of what a big-firm lawyer makes, their fees are inflated to cover the time spent on other work. Enter LegalZoom. The company has established a subscription-based legal plan for small businesses, which allows them to have 30-minute phone consultations with attorneys about an unlimited number of new legal matters for $24 a month. Subscribers visit a website, select an attorney from a list based on specialty and location, and schedule the phone call. If the matter requires more than 30 minutes, the subscriber contracts with the lawyers at a 25 percent discount from their regular hourly rate. Suh said attorneys are willing to spend the time on the phone because LegalZoom pays them for it, and they agree to the discounted rate because in some cases LegalZoom can efficiently schedule 80 to 90 percent of their billable hours. “We can fill up their schedule, and make sure their 40 to 50 billable hours a week are not spent on marketing,” he said. For now, the attorneys are freelance contractors, because U.S. law prohibits a document service company like LegalZoom from behaving like a law firm or having its employees dispense legal advice. However, the company recently set up an “alternative business structure” in the United Kingdom to get around that restriction. An ABS is a law firm in which non-lawyers can own an equity stake. Suh said this structure will allow LegalZoom to invest in technology and marketing, showing how a true online law firm for the masses could work in the U.S. “The U.K. is a few years ahead of us in terms of allowing the ownership of law firms by non-lawyers,” he said. “But a lot of entrepreneurs are taking a swing at new solutions. I expect a lot of success and failure, but in the end, sufficient capital and activity will create forward progress. The next 10 years will see more change for the industry than in the last 60.” Social studies Of course, the latest form of online advertising is social media, but Cheryl Bame, principal at legal marketing firm Bame Public Relations in Los Angeles, said the best strategy for law firm is to invest in its own website. Research shows the most important page on the site is the attorney biographies. Bame said many attorneys fail to tell a story with their bio, since instead of hiring website experts they try to do it themselves. They often start with their education and then discuss general areas of law. Bame believes they should start with their expertise, and give some examples of court decisions or settlements, without mentioning any names. “If you have a niche – for example, comercial real estate leases or cybersecurity – you need to say that,” she said. “Attention spans are short; they will look for it, and if they don’t see it quickly, they will move on.” As for social media, Bame is a proponent of LinkedIn but not Twitter. Again, it comes back to time. A lawyer can post on LinkedIn once every few weeks, but Twitter requires multiple posts daily to be effective. “On LinkedIn, if you write an article, speak at an event, sponsor an event or make a donation to charity, you can post it,” she said. A study last year by Software Advice, an Austin, Texas tech firm, found that Yelp is the most viewed review site for attorneys. However, Bame takes the study with a grain of salt. “Yelp is for specific types of lawyer. If you are a business litigator, then your clients are not going online to find you on Yelp. If you are a DUI lawyer, then Yelp is important,” she said. Meanwhile, Nober’s TV-based model of legal services continues to expand. Although he declined to state his revenue, he said last year he bought more than $100 million in TV time. And despite all the advances in legal advertising and new media, some attorneys find that lower tech responses still work well. R. Rex Parris, co-founder of the R. Rex Parris Law Firm and the mayor of Lancaster, has advertised on Antelope Valley billboards for years to great success. He still remembers when his wife suggested he advertise on billboards 25 years ago. “I didn’t want be a billboard lawyer, but I put one up and we’ve never looked back,” he said. “I was the first one in this part of L.A. County to do it.” Parris estimates he has spent $8 million to $9 million in advertising, plus several million on his website. But he has 92 percent name recognition in Antelope Valley, a factor that played well in his electoral success in politics. “When people have a need for a lawyer, they think of Rex Parris,” he said.