I received an e-mail today from Jerrold Parker, senior partner at Parker Waichman Allonso, LLP, the well-known New York personal injury law firm more well known for asbestos litigation. Jerry was writing to ask me to evaluate and list his new personal injury case management software called SmartAdvocate. Apparently, Jerry invested a substantial amount of money to develop custom case management software for personal injury and mass tort cases and is now licensing it to other personal injury lawyers.

I responded to Jerry’s e-mail and he called me back a few minutes later. During our telephone conversation, we began discussing my vanity phone number 1-800-HURT-911, vanity phone numbers for lawyers and Parker Waichman Alonso’s new vanity phone number 1-888-BIG-CASE.

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.

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.