Personal injury lawyers beware.  Scammers are pretending to have been in an accident and need your legal services to settle the case.  There have been email scams aimed at the public pretending to come from real law firms (I wrote about that in my article “Is Your Law Firm’s Name or Brand Being Used to Commit Fraud?”) and there have been e-mail scams targeting law firms. Now, e-mail scams are targeting personal injury lawyers.

Websites can be great for attorney marketing, but this  e-mail was not part of a bulk e-mail scam sent to millions of people as most e-mail scams are.  This e-mail was sent by someone who was on my attorney website and claimed to have been in an accident while visiting in New York.

Retailers and some lawyers have long known that credit cards create more sales and larger sales. Now, the Salvation Army has reported that their experiment with accepting sidewalk kettle donations by credit card from wireless credit card processing transmitters has been a success.

The Associated Press reported today, “Major George Hood, spokesman for the Arlington, Va.-based charity, said that the donation sizes are similar to online donations, which average about $75. CNN reported that the Salvation Army claimed that sidewalk donations increased from $1-2 paid by cash to $14 paid by credit card.

For almost any field of law, other than personal injury, credit cards can allow you to:

• Retain clients who otherwise could not afford an upfront retainer;
• Allow you to discount your fees less often;
• Reduce situations where clients are not keeping up with billing;
• Reduce the cost of billing and collections; and

The first rule of both marketing and advertising is to make it as easy as possible for your customers, or clients, to contact you, yet some law offices are actually turning away new clients.

Last week a large personal injury law firm, interested in advertising on TV, found my other website and sent me an e-mail requesting that I call with more information about 1-800-HURT-911. I called them from my private phone line, instead of my office phone line. Because my private line has caller ID blocked, I heard “Your call has been properly delivered but the party you are trying to reach is not accepting calls from callers who do not allow delivery of their telephone number.”

No matter how many times I encounter this, and its happened several times, I am still astonished that a business could intentionally present an obstacle to potential new clients and existing clients when trying to call.

Famous NASCAR driver Robby Gordon loves racing, but he likes to make money and knows how to do it. He may not have the best finish times, but he probably became a financial success quicker than anybody else on the NASCAR circuit. What’s his secret? Robby Gordon turned traditional priorities upside down or, rather, right side up. Robby said, “I own a marketing company that happens to race cars”. Robby obviously spends a considerable amount of time with marketing. He recently spent three days mentoring the owner of a floundering racecar school to appear on a great new television show for small-business entrepreneurs, The Turnaround on CNN. He also knows something else, how to adapt with the times.

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.

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.”