TO-WIT: SIGNS OF THE TIMES

by S. Sponte, Esq.

So I’m sitting in a traffic jam on the highway at the edge of town the other day, primarily because a bit ahead of me two motorists who care about us lawyers had run into each other at breakneck speed. So far, so good, but I’m the sort who just can’t abide traffic jams of any kind, even those laden with significant financial portent. So as is my wont under such circumstances, I raised my head to the heavens above to have a word or two with my Creator about this bothersome and unwarranted delay. I had some suggestions.

Its a conversation we’ve had many times before, my Creator and I, but judging by the results thus far, I suspect I have not had His undivided attention. This time though I thought things might be different, for as I began the dialogue I swear to God (which is actually how I always begin these dialogues) I clearly saw Him looking down at me and smiling.

Ah, but my eyes aren’t what they once were, and after a few hard blinks I realized I wasn’t actually staring at the heavens at all. Rather I was staring at a billboard towering above and to the side of me, and what I had mistaken for the beaming countenance of my Creator was only the familiar face of a colleague advertising his services.

“Thank God,” I thought to myself. I had a case coming up against him and if in fact he and the Lord were One and The Same, I might have had to reevaluate my position.

Thus snapped out of my religious reverie but still with traffic jam time left to kill, I took a more measured look at the billboard. My colleague had had that unsightly facial wart airbrushed out, but in truth it wasn’t necessary. Left alone, it would have nicely dotted the “i” in the phrase “…injured on the job.”

When it comes to legal advertising, I suppose that a billboard is one of the less vulgar forms of the genre. It’s far less unbecoming, for instance, than the television ad in which two law partners hawk their services by suggesting that filing for bankruptcy is merely a simplified alternative to balancing one’s checkbook.

But I come from a pre-diluvian age in which any form of legal advertising, other than a respectful listing in the yellow pages, was banned as unprofessional. In this era we are told that such self-aggrandizement is constitutionally protected speech, much the same as pornography but without nearly the fun quotient.

Nonetheless I can’t get comfortable with this plastering of one’s face on a billboard, a TV screen, a full color print ad, it just seems so tacky. When it comes to drumming up business, I so vastly prefer the more artful, elegant ways of the past, the skillful cutting of fees, the subtle vilifying of competition, the surreptitious and uninvited hospital visits to bare but injured acquaintances. “Oh, he’s a good man,” I might have said at the cocktail party when someone advised they had just hired someone else as counsel, “now that he’s conquered that pesky problem.”

But if you’re going to advertise in the garish customs of the times, well, I have a few suggestions. After all, I did work my way through law school writing advertising copy for a local radio station, and I remain quite the clever wordsmith. You may rest assured that what I bring to the table is an approach both effective, elegant and well written.

In my view, billboards are not the best use of the advertising dollar, they don’t really reach a target audience. Even billboards outside hospital emergency rooms are ineffective. What’s the sense of spending money to reach an audience most likely to be unconscious as they pass by?

I suggest we advertise on the sides of liquor bottles. If it works for missing kids on milk cartons, it can work for us. Few need lawyers more than those who regularly relish the juice of the barley, or better yet, imbibe alcohol by the Imperial gallon. Now that’s a target audience.

Life cycle establishments – houses of worship, wedding chapels, funeral homes and the like - also present fertile walls for the festooning of ads. Nothing generates legal work quite so nicely as when a cycle of life hits a bump, careens off the road and ends up in a ditch.

So if you’re gonna do it, do it right. I’ve set up my own advertising agency geared specifically to the legal profession and I’ve ordered color flyers embossed with my photograph. Soon I’ll be plastering them up all over the walls at every county bar association in the state - liquor bottles too. You’re bound to see at least one, so give me a call.

Well, okay, the photograph isn’t me, it’s Paul Newman as a younger man, but it’ll serve my purposes admirably. Like I say, if you’re gonna do it, do it right.

Ó 2008, S. Sponte, Esq.