If you dip your toe into the attorney blogosphere (or, to use a term I dislike, blawg-osphere), you can see two sorts of camps seemingly at war with each other. One camp – here called the “Kewl Kids” – seems to embrace internet marketing and style in priority over the practice of law and its myriad problems and concerns including ethical concerns and technical competence. The other camp – the “Nasty Mamzers” – seems to decry the Kewl Kids’ marketing machine in severe language, prioritizing its policing role on attorney ethics at moments over the basics of the civil use of business English. Nobody ever won a war with blanks, I guess, but I’d rather tend to my own crops than levy war online; practicing law and being a politically opinionated jerk take up enough of my time without participating in the attorney redux of the Thirty Years’ War.
In my view, one of the best ways both to show and to reinforce professional (or other) competence in a field is to teach in that field, formally or informally. Skills matter and the act of teaching – online, in person, in a lecture hall, you name it – forces the teacher not only to have knowledge but to organize it, prioritize it, strip it of confusing jargon and garbage buzzwords. The act of conveying – or failing to convey, as well – knowledge about a field provides value to teacher and student alike. Of course, it’s important not to “unteach” i.e. to make the student and probably oneself less knowledgeable through giving bad info or bad judgment. This informational approach is the path that I have attempted to take online with my presentations on unemployment insurance appeals procedure in Maryland, Maryland traffic court procedure and the like. So far, it seems to have been a success.
Fortunately, Google at least partially rewards good content in its search engine service. When I wrote these pieces, I wasn’t thinking about search engine optimization. I have written other substantive pieces on other topics where I was aware of SEO, but wasn’t focusing on SEO on those and wasn’t thinking about it at all for those two back in 2009. I wrote the UI appeals and traffic pieces as a way of providing worthwhile content to visitors including current clients, prospective clients and other attorneys who had already made it to the site, not as “Google-bait.” But “bait” they were and are. All of a sudden I started getting cold calls on unemployment appeals for workers from Google natural search.
Why did my rough content (arguably rough now, more so in its early drafts) get so many calls? I don’t know; the pieces are competent but nothing special. I strongly suspect that most attorneys don’t think to explain law and procedure on their sites; this impression I do get from the many plastic, car-ad looking attorney websites that I see. A lawyer site that explains the law and basic procedure seems … obvious? Maybe not. If you think I am wrong, type in “[your town] attorney] and see what you get, whether you can just smell the “Corinthian leather” coming off of the sites. Go look and come back, tell me if I am wrong.
Google doesn’t like bogus “Corinthian leather” content and tends to penalize it, or so reports and my limited experience seem to suggest. According to my clients and prospective clients who choose to tell me, the top ten search pages for Maryland unemployment attorney/lawyer on Google include my page and the page of another labor attorney whom I respect, and that attorney pays more for web hosting and design than I do. My practice pays $6/month for hosting and nothing for SEO/web design fees, as my platform is a DIY modification of a free WordPress theme, modified through my knowledge of HTML and CSS. In the end, the pages are dull but useful – not Kewl in the least – and that’s what Google seems to like.
My pages are written at maybe a 9th grade level, arguably too high a level for prospective clients but they seem to function. The language has undergone a number of iterations over the last three years to get rid of the “fluff” and the unnecessary jargon. The pages bespeak confidence and competence in these areas; they sell without selling and inform without lecturing. I do not have similar pages for personal injury cases or divorce work because I simply lack the same skill set in those areas, and I don’t do divorce at all. While I am happy enough if prospective divorce clients call me, I won’t represent them but will instead help them get to the proper attorney outside my practice, possibly by “bringing in” that attorney. These pages describe what I do, what I am willing to do from a business standpoint and what I know (not hope, KNOW) I can do competently; that’s what the ethics rules require and also what makes for good business in my experience.
The casual reader may note frequent references to Maryland on my site. This is no accident. I am licensed in Maryland; my office (main and satellite) are here as are my apartment, my family, my high school, my car, my hobbies, etc. Someday my corpse or other remains will be here. I have no desire to live or practice anywhere else (except in the District of Columbia, i.e. Maryland’s gift of Maryland land to the Republic.) I want other attorneys, both here and in alien, hostile countries like Texas and Utah, to associate Bruce Godfrey strongly with Maryland. No one thinks of Ed Koch as being from Kansas City, or Andy Griffith as a Minnesotan, or Garrison Keillor as a Louisiana Cajun. I don’t know to what extent the Maryland accent creeps out of my voice as it does out of Robert Ehrlich’s, Barbara Mikulski’s or NPR’s Ann Taylor’s voices, but my roots and boots are here.
Being loudly a Marylander and having the site scream Maryland aren’t just expressions of the infamous Maryland and Baltimore provincialism. The Maryland references are also part of the effort to avoid practicing outside my bailiwick and to keep my marketing streamlined. If you have a Kansas unemployment case, I cannot help you. If the East Lansing or Des Moines or Carson City police caught you allegedly doing 82 in a 55, my heart but not my legal skills goes out to you. If you don’t have a Maryland issue, calling my office will delay your connection to legal advice though I will try to help you get to a local Bar Association wherever.
As far as the religious wars online between Team Kewl and Team Mamzers, I will simply load my Mossberg 12-gauge, ask all sides to stay off my little green pepper and onion patch, request that all sides honor the much-ignored 3rd Amendment and not quarter their troops in my barn without compensation, and in due season harvest my crops from out of the rolling Maryland piedmont where I planted them. Veggie fajitas await the diligent….