Advertising for lawyers, particularly law firms providing services to individuals, is usually direct response advertising which presents different advertising issues than those seen in traditional TV brand advertising.

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A TV advertising campaign requires sufficient capital to produce or license TV commercials and maintain an uninterrupted weekly budget to buy media on several TV stations. The financial requirements can be difficult for a solo law practice to afford. Where the advertising is for personal injury cases, which can take from several months to years before income is realized, cash flow difficulties require an even larger amount of available capital. If you don’t have use of a 1-800 vanity phone number, which can reduce advertising costs by more than 50%, even more money is needed for advertising. Shared TV lawyer advertising programs or group lawyer TV advertising programs offer lawyers on a limited budget the opportunity to participate in TV lawyer advertising by combining the advertising dollars of many lawyers to form a competitive advertising budget. The only group lawyer TV advertising programs I am aware of are for personal injury cases.

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Your law firm needs a website, but how do you pick a domain name for your web site? What exactly is a domain name?

Your web site address is also known as an IP (Internet Protocol) address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and looks like this http://67.15.4.94. Instead of typing a series of numbers which are difficult to remember, you can register an easier to remember domain name which becomes associated with your IP address. For instance, lawyer-advertising-blog.com is the registered domain name for my new blog, which is about lawyer advertising. When you type that domain name, the domain name servers on the Internet know that you’re looking for http://67.15.4.94. You can register multiple domain names, all pointing to the same web site. I registered LawyerAdvertisingBlog.com, which, when you type that into an Internet browser address bar, will forward to lawyer-advertising-blog.com.

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Considering lawyer advertising for your personal injury law practice? Be prepared to commit a sufficient amount of money every month without interruption. Already advertising? Get even more clients for free!

Businesses and advertising agencies have long ago realized that whether you’re advertising in a newspaper, magazine, TV or Radio, effective advertising must be consistently seen by your target audience over a long period of time. Additionally, there are other factors which require sustained advertising campaigns. There are good months and bad months for any business, but even more so for a personal injury law practice because there are so few good cases. A short test of advertising over a period of one to three months to see “if it will work out for me” is simply gambling.

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Competition is the bedrock of American democratic society. Competition fosters better service and fairer prices. For instance, competition may force a smaller law firm to provide better and more personal service in order to compete with a larger firm which spends more money on advertising or which offers lower fees. The consumer always wins when there is competition and advertising fosters competition. Societies which abhor competition are either socialist, communist or dictatorships. According to the Adam Smith Institute, Adam Smith, LL.D., in An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), “…showed convincingly how the principles of free trade, competition, and choice would spur economic development, reduce poverty, and precipitate the social and moral improvement of humankind.” “So persuasive were his arguments that they not only provided the world with a new understanding of the wealth-creating process; they laid the intellectual foundation for the great era of free trade and economic expansion that dominated the Nineteenth Century.”

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This article will briefly examine the various media available for lawyer advertising, including TV, Radio, Billboards, Newspapers and the Internet.

Dollar for dollar, TV is the first choice for lawyer advertising. Any additional funds can be spent on other media to cross brand with TV. The public’s perception of media shows television trumps all other media as the most effective media among adults, age 18 and over, in every category: Most Authoritative, Most Influential, Most Persuasive, and Most Exciting.

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Lawyers have several sets of rules to consider when creating advertisements. The FTC regulates all advertising in every state; each state may have its own regulations concerning general advertisers; and the attorney ethics rules of the state in which you are advertising will regulate lawyer advertising. A review of FTC rules can be seen at FTC Advertising Guidance. Most rules are just plain common sense and are meant to protect the

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You need a vanity phone number for advertising. But what’s the value of a vanity number? That depends upon the vanity phone number, what it’s used for and whether you are a licensee, buyer or seller (vanity telephone numbers cannot be sold, but can be transferred with money exchanged, however, this is a topic for another discussion).

1-800 vanity phone numbers and 1-888, 1-877 or 1-866 vanity numbers using other area codes are like diamonds. All diamonds are rare and come in many different qualities. A “D Flawless” diamond with perfect proportions is the rarest of all. There are thousands of vanity telephone numbers, but probably no more than 3 or 4 “D Flawless” vanity phone numbers for any particular field of business.

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