 Using the Internet
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All lawyers would benefit if potential clients better understood what they
do well. The Internet provides new ways to communicate with the world, and thus provides
new opportunities for lawyers to communicate the nature and depth of their expertise. The
Internet provides lawyers with new opportunities, but a few words of caution and guidance
are in order to temper some of the natural enthusiasm the Internet creates. Leaping before
you look could alienate potential clients, cause you to run afoul of ethical limitations
on advertising or lead you to waste time in ineffective pursuits.
Some of the first lawyers to discover the business potential of the Internet used methods
of advertising that were offensive to many in the online community. They sought new
business by "spamming" USENET newsgroups, the online discussion groups that have
proliferated on the Internet. What was worse, in the eyes of some, was their claim to see
nothing wrong when their actions created an online uproar. Spamming newsgroups, posting
the same commercial message to hundreds or thousands of newsgroups, can be cost-effective
because it does not require postage. And spamming can bring in some business, as the early
lawyer-spammers discovered. But this technique has always had serious flaws. As some of
those lawyers discovered the hard way (with a crash), unhappy spammees have been known to
resort to self help to discourage spamming. Spamming has always been viewed with disfavor
within the profession, and regulatory authorities have become increasingly more concerned
with such techniques. Recently, the lawyer who pioneered "spamming for clients"
newsgroup techniques was disbarred, in part because of his advertising practices.
While spam is not a good way to reach potential clients on the Internet, there are many
more acceptable methods you can use to get your message across. There are at least five
ways to increase recognition of your legal skills using subtler and more acceptable
methods of communication over the Internet.
Participate Online
The first thing you can do to increase recognition of your skills using online
resources is to participate actively online. The Internet provides many opportunities for
participation. There are thousands of newsgroups and mailing lists on a wide variety of
topics, and you should have no problem finding discussions that relate to your particular
area of expertise. Participation in those discussions requires only basic Internet skills.
If you are not aware of the newsgroups and mailing lists that might be of interest to you,
locate likely newsgroups through web sites specializing in newsgroup access. For example,
try
As you participate, remember you are making a public record of your views. This point, if
not clear when you begin, will be made very clear the first time you use Dejanews to
search, by name, for a person's comments in newsgroups. While this is a good feature when
you are looking to see what the other side's expert witness may have said online, the
knowledge that this feature is readily available should cause you to think out your
comments before you post them.
Over the last few years, as netiquette has broken down and the spamming of newsgroups has
become much more common, moderated mailing lists have become more popular. Moderated lists
require that posts pass a moderator, so spam and irrelevance can be weeded out. Good
moderated lists tend to have dedicated readers who have self-selected by area of interest.
Your posts to such lists are particularly powerful because they have made it past the
moderator (so are probably relevant and relatively astute) and are being read and
responded to by people who care about the substance of your communication.
Lawyers need to be careful about what they say in any online forum. Lawyers should be
especially careful about giving legal advice online. While lawyers may feel the need to
give advice to impress potential clients with their great knowledge and skill, giving
advice online is risky for several reasons. First, it is unlikely that the lawyer knows
all the relevant facts from a short post by a potential client. If you were counseling a
client face to face, you would probably not just accept the client's report of the facts
without asking questions. Is it wise to do less online? Second, the jurisdictional
parameters are not always clear, and the lawyer may incorrectly assume that what law
applies to the problem or that the lawyer is properly licensed to give advice. Third,
giving advice in an open post may show off your skill to third parties, but it is not the
way that lawyers traditionally provide advice to clients and could under some
circumstances raise ethical concerns about failing to preserve client confidentiality.
Also, third parties may read the advice you have given and incorrectly apply it to their
own problems. This is especially true if your advice was based upon the exception to the
general rule.
Lawyers do not need to dispense free legal advice online to make good use of the medium.
Your posts can include updates on recent legal developments in your area of expertise,
discussions of those developments, practical aspects of problems that you know how to
solve, or they can direct people to online resources that you know are available. If you
have created a home page that has good resources on a topic, you can point people there.
The trick to effective participation is to participate over time and establish credibility
within the groups in which you participate.
Identify Yourself
When you participate online, make sure you identify yourself. The old adage that
"online no one knows you're a dog" reinforces the need to make sure that people
who read your posts know who you are and where to reach you. When you participate in an
newsgroup discussion, you can use your newsreader to create a signature or "sig"
file. A sig file is appended to your message, and is traditionally used to identify the
sender of the message and provide some information about the sender as well. Sig files can
include your name, your firm name, your e-mail address, your telephone and street address.
But they need not stop there. Within the bounds of governing ethics rules, you can say
more. Traditionally, sig files are six lines or less, but there is a lot of useful
information that can be placed into those six lines.
You should also create and use a sig file for your e-mail. Some e-mail programs allow you
to create more than one sig file and decide which one to append to a given message. Taking
advantage of these features allows you to communicate appropriate information about
yourself with every message.
Your Web site should also make it easy for people to know you are the person who created
the useful information the site presents, and it should make it easy for people to contact
you from your Web site. Consider the different ways you can facilitate contact, for
instance, by designing your pages with pop-up e-mail on the page, by including telephone
and address information on every page or on a link reachable from every page. If every
page does not have direct access to contact information, make sure that the pages are
linked together well so that people do not have too much difficulty finding the contact
information. If your site motivates someone to action, they should not have to look too
far to find a way to contact you.
I am an advocate of including your picture on your Web site. I include my picture on my
site, and when I meet people who have seen my site but have never met me in person, they
come right over and introduce themselves. Electronic communication can be impersonal, and
the inclusion of a picture adds a personal touch.
Create Content
It is conventional wisdom that, on the Internet, content is king. Creating a Web site
with good content is not as difficult as it may sound. If you already write newsletters or
articles or give speeches about what you do, it is not difficult to convert content you
already have to Internet content. If you can discipline yourself to write a monthly
feature that focuses on developments in your area of the law, you will find that, in
several months, you will have a body of useful information. Most new versions of standard
word processing programs now include a feature allowing conversion of word processing
files to html, the language of the web. Once the documents are in html, it is not
difficult to add them to a web site.
You do not have to create an extensive Web site in order to offer a valuable one. If your
information is particularly current or insightful it is valuable to those seeking
information about your topic. Also, there is nothing wrong with beginning small, with just
a few good articles, for example, and developing the size of the site over time. Waiting
to launch a site until it contains everything you hope for can delay the launch
indefinitely. Another way to add value to a site is by providing good links to other
Internet resources. The caveat here is to keep the links updated, as links do go bad over
time.
Promote Yourself
Any new Web site that you create will be a needle in a very large haystack. There are
literally tens of millions of sites on the Internet. Even people who are looking for your
site will have difficulty finding it unless your site has been listed with search engines
and linked to by other sites. As the Internet grows every day, the importance of effective
promotion grows with it.
Promotion tends to be difficult for lawyers because of cultural and ethical restraints on
lawyer advertising. Lawyers must be careful in the way that they promote their sites
because of these restraints, but they cannot ignore the need for promotion if they hope to
have people visit their sites.
I have developed a free promotion site on the Internet that is designed to address the
special concerns of lawyers. It can be found at
Involve Others
You must do more than involve yourself online if your firm is to take full advantage of
the Internet. You must involve those you work with, and get them as involved as you are in
online participation, identification, creation and promotion. This requires a commitment
to motivating those who are uncomfortable with computers to learn more about them and to
training those who are willing to learn more about the Internet. Formal training will
assure that everyone has basic knowledge and is progressing at a similar pace. The
training should not only include nuts and bolts training in going online and locating
legal resources, it should include an overview of the legal issues that have arisen in
connection with the growth of the Internet. The law in the area of defamation, trademark,
copyright, personal jurisdiction and legal ethics has already been affected by the
Internet. A overview of these changes will help lawyers spot issues for clients and make
them more comfortable with developments in this rapidly changing area.
About the Author
Stephen T. Maher is a Miami lawyer and legal educator who has practiced and taught law
for more than twenty years. He regularly writes and speaks on issues of law and
technology. After serving as a member of the full-time faculty at the University of Miami
School of Law for many years, he returned to private practice with Stephen T. Maher, P.A.
He also serves as the Director of Attorney Training at Shutts & Bowen, the oldest law
firm in Miami, and trains lawyers in law firms throughout the United States through his
consulting company, The Practical Professor Incorporated. He maintains an award winning
site on the Internet at
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