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'TopLawyers' Floods YouTube, Web

Want to see 99 nearly identical videos of the same woman making the same lawyer-referral pitch, each different only for the city it names? Better yet, for a truly surreal experience, open multiple versions of the video in multiple tabs of your browser, so her voice becomes a late-night-TV echo of itself, starting with the same bad joke and ending with her urging viewers to "click and connect." All this fun can be yours, thanks to "Top Lawyers in (Name a City)."

Over the last few days, YouTube has been flooded with these videos, all posted to the page http://youtube.com/user/TopLawyers.  Each bears a title such as Top Lawyers in Reno or Top Lawyers in Newark. And each has the same woman repeating the same words, save for naming the particular city at the beginning and end. Somewhere along the line, she changes her outfit, from a red jacket and black blouse to a black jacket and red blouse, but that is the only deviation. The videos are tied to a series of Top Lawyers Web sites, all appearing to have been recently launched, one for each of 99 cities, from Akron and Albuquerque to Winston-Salem and Yonkers. All are identified as owned by Domain Marketing Resources in Houston. 

The sites are heavily weighted with mentions of a Houston law firm, the Johnson Law Group. The Top Lawyers in Boston page, for example, prominently shows its "Featured Lawyer Video" for "Nick Johnson, Boston Mesothelioma Lawyer," even though Johnson's firm site does not show a Boston office. Some Top Lawyers pages come up blank, such as Top Lawyers in Las Vegas, even though there is a Top Lawyers in Las Vegas video. Others have strange errors, such as another "Featured Lawyer" profile on the front page of the Boston site for birth-injury lawyer Joseph A. Pellegrino that links to a page for brain-injury lawyer Kenneth Kolpan (and misspells his name as Koplan).

I don't understand lawyer-marketing sites such as these. In the wake of Avvo's launch earlier this year, there has been much discussion about the need for reliable and neutral resources that consumers can use to find lawyers. To me, this latest string of Top Lawyers sites underscores that need and demonstrates why attempts by Avvo and others to provide "unbiased" ratings will prove better for consumers in the long run.

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on October 12, 2007 at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Comments

Thanks for catching this Bob. It's reall garbage and further proof that some lawyers are addicted to SEO like crack cocaine. They'll do anything to get their fix.

Posted by: Kevin OKeefe | Oct 12, 2007 4:55:18 PM

Great Kevin...
And adversely, the cocaine is giving extortionate amount:-)

Posted by: | Oct 12, 2007 5:30:40 PM

Great Kevin...
And adversely, the cocaine is giving extortionate amount:-)

Posted by: Avish Sharma | Oct 12, 2007 5:31:38 PM

Bob – Thank you for catching this + your kind words regarding Avvo. The videos are interesting on many levels. It was certainly behavior like this that made us think, “There must be a better way for consumers to choose a lawyer!”

Also, expanding on Kevin’s SEO comment, these videos are an attempt to take advantage of Google's "universal search" initiative. To learn more about this initiative go here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/universal-search-best-answer-is-still.html. The good news is that Google is usually pretty good at rooting out those that are trying to game their system, and they punish them mercilessly by downgrading the sites/content in their algorithm.

Posted by: Mark Britton | Oct 16, 2007 3:06:52 PM

This Avvo site looks like someone pulled out a phone book and stuck in a bunch of attorneys. I bet most of them don't even know they are on there.

Posted by: Fredrick Smith | Oct 17, 2007 7:37:07 AM

Frederick - I am guessing that is not a compliment. Your comment may stem from the fact that we have every licensed lawyer in our database (for the states that we currently cover). But that is a good thing – most legal directories will only show those lawyers that are paying them. That is NOT Avvo’s approach. As Bob correctly points out, we are unbiased in that our Avvo Rating and search results are not for sale in any way. We simply serve up those lawyers that we believe are most responsive to a consumer’s request. To allow monetary incentives to influence our guidance would only lead to the type of behavior that Bob blogged about here in the first place.

Additionally, I would ask you to put your comment to the test: Start by putting yourself in the shoes of a consumer that needs an attorney. Then pull out the yellow pages and search for a particular type of lawyer in a particular geographic location (e.g., DUI in Seattle). Then do the same search on Avvo. Please write back and tell us which you believe provides more information and guidance for the consumer. While I certainly have an Avvo bias, I don’t think that the Yellow Pages can hold a candle to our Avvo Rating (which evaluates a lawyer’s background), client ratings, lawyer reviews, attorney misconduct information, etc., etc.

Avvo: Ratings. Guidance. The Right Lawyer.

Mark

Posted by: Mark Britton | Oct 22, 2007 5:19:41 PM

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