There are many, many personal injury firms in the world, and they often have to come up with gimmicks to set themselves apart. Those gimmicks have landed a fair number of them in our Adventures in Lawyer Advertising series.
A tipster recently sent along the website for The Doan Law Firm: The Ultimate Fighting Law Firm. It’s based in Houston and run by a Texas Wesleyan Law ’00 grad, Jimmy Doan.
Why don’t you click here and meet him? Make sure your speakers are on.
Upon graduation, some degrees grant graduates more than a few extra letters at the end of their name. Some degrees are transformative. An MD turns an anal, highlighter-happy med student into a “doctor.” A PhD does the same thing for disheveled grad students. A JD makes you an “esquire.” (Other degrees are not transformative: MBA and masters grads get nothing but debt.)
While the MDs and, to a lesser extent, PhDs get to be called Dr. on a regular basis, no one ever uses “Esquire” aloud. It’s a silent, written title, and that bothers some lawyers, who want an honorific that people actually use in conversation. Lawyers do have Juris Doctorates, after all.
If you’re among those who feel entitled to a more regularly used title, there’s a Facebook group for you:
The movement only has 113 fans as of this writing, but there is a history to this movement. In 2006, the ABA Journal looked into the matter, and determined that the ethics rules around calling yourself “Dr. Ima Lawyer, Esquire” are unclear…
Forget Queer Eye and the Biggest Loser. When it comes to makeovers, we’re far more entertained when Biglaw firms overhaul their websites. Especially when they involve mind games (MoFo), body shots (Ballard Spahr and Cox Smith), or hotties (Davis Polk).
Cravath previously had an Internet 1.0-type website. It was extremely basic; its sole function seemed to be to list email addresses. The dull site failed to capture the arrogance prestige of this elite law firm.
The new site, on the other hand, does capture this aspect of Cravath. The Biglaw way is not to be the biggest, but to be the best, according to Cravath’s philosophy page:
At Cravath, we hire only the top students from the nation’s finest law schools, we train those associates through rigorous rotation of practice, we elevate partners exclusively from within and we compensate partners on a lockstep model throughout their careers. The Cravath model has been adopted by many prominent law firms and consulting firms. While some firms have abandoned the model over time to promote lateral growth and global expansion, we have not. We do not seek to be the largest firm by number of offices, lawyers or specialty groups. We promote excellence in client service, at the expense of short-term profit. We believe that maintaining a true partnership of the finest educated and trained lawyers is the single, best manner of handling our clients’ most challenging legal issues, most significant business transactions and most critical disputes.
The new site also has a newsy feel about it. Check out the front page — it looks like The Cravath Swaine Journal.
And Cravath has learned to embrace photos. At least for its partners and senior associates. Though Cravath attracts the best and the brightest young lawyers, as noted above, it doesn’t want to show them off on its website. If you’re a junior associate, no bio or photo for you on the site!
Their commercials got picked up by the New York Times earlier this year. The firm’s other humorous commercial can be found over at Copyranter.
Apparently, humor pays dividends. According to its advertising agency, the Levinson Trachtenberg Group, the commercials and the buzz around them have increased client leads by 25 percent.
Personal injury law firms do not tend to have the classiest advertising campaigns. But Greenstein & Milbauer has taken the art of terrible law firm advertising to new heights. Or new lows.
The firm has an official rap (sample lyrics: “have a neck broke from an accident you didn’t provoke?”) and its mascot is a squirrel that looks mildly mentally impaired.
In its commercial, the firm’s squirrel channels Geico’s Gecko, with a little Speedy Gonzalez-style ethnic diversity thrown in…
Yesterday, as part of our series on clever — or, at least, interesting — business cards, we shared with you the card for Adam Reposa, Texas “lawyer/winner.”
Reposa’s card included his stats in terms of cases won. As one commenter pointed out:
Must be a pain to update your business cards every time you win a case. Lucky for him the victories seem few and far between.
It turns out Reposa has a second, evergreen card:
He offers advice to prospective clients on the card’s flip side…
Texas attorney Adam Reposa is not shy about singing his own praises. The man registered with the State Bar as “Bulletproof,” after all. He’s not jailproof, though. He was slapped with contempt of court charges for making the “jerk-off gesture” within sight of the judge, and sentenced to 90 days in prison.
After we posted our call for lawyerly business cards, someone sent Reposa’s along:
I’ve attached a copy of Texas attorney Adam Reposa’s business card — a friend of mine got it at a bar last year. I’m not sure if it’s clever — it probably violates 4 or 5 Texas Rules of Professional Conduct — but it is hilarious.
Check out the flip side of the card, which is just as egregious….
On its face, this looks like a rather straightforward business card for one James A.W. Mahon, a Canadian divorce lawyer up in the Yukon:
But perhaps there’s a catch, eh?
Many job seekers would love to work as lawyers for the federal government but haven’t had luck landing a position. Openings for attorneys on USAJOBS attract hundreds of applicants. In light of massive law-firm layoffs and the relative stability of government employment, high demand for federal jobs is unsurprising. You have to be a positively brilliant lawyer to land a government gig these days.
Or not. If you’ve applied to the U.S. Department of Justice without success, ask yourself: Do I have a normal or above-normal IQ?
If you do, you might be… overqualified. From a Justice Department job posting (emphasis added):
The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine.
Quips former DOJ lawyer Ty Clevenger: “Having worked there, I think CRD has plenty of mentally retarded lawyers already. Mostly in supervisory positions.”
Says another tipster who brought this to our attention: “I understand how you can have a few missing limbs or be partially paralyzed and still be a trial lawyer, but someone with an IQ less than 70?!?!!?”
Recruiting mentally retarded lawyers to litigate civil rights cases for the DOJ may take the expression “good enough for government work” too far. But, in fairness, there is a caveat to all of this….
When we reviewed Morrison & Foerster’s new website yesterday, a commenter advised us to check out the firm’s career page for those who think they might have “that MoFo mojo” (in the words of the firm).
The commenter was amused by MoFo’s comparing new lawyers to pigeons, and its advice on how to avoid being “@$%#@! Pigeonholed.” We were amused, though, by its assessment of “what makes a whole lawyer” and how to be successful as a new associate at MoFo.
If you’ve ever felt like Biglaw just saw you as a beast of burden, MoFo confirms it, using a cow to illustrate the various cuts of a good lawyer:
Intellectual curiosity is important and is, sensibly, the flavor found in the cow’s head. What does MooFo ascribe to the rump?
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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