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Legal Advertising's Biggest Spender
Three years ago, James Sokolove invited me to lunch. The Massachusetts-based legal advertising pioneer wanted to pick my brain about Internet trends and discuss a possible business arrangement. We had a nice talk and met once more, but nothing came of it. When I got home after that first meeting and mentioned where I'd been, my 11-year-old son -- who could hardly name a lawyer outside our circle of family and friends -- knew exactly who James Sokolove was. "The lawyer on TV," he exclaimed.
I should not have been surprised. No lawyer in the country advertises more or spends more on advertising than Jim Sokolove, according to a profile of him in this month's Boston Magazine. In 2007, he spent more than $20 million to advertise his firm, twice as much as the next biggest spender. Somewhere in the United States, a Sokolove ad runs roughly every eight seconds. That means, as profile author Francis Storrs observes, that somewhere, a Sokolove ad is always running.
A pioneer of lawyer advertising, Sokolove ran his first TV ad in 1982. More notably, he pioneered a business model built on referrals. Sokolove does not handle the cases his ads bring in. He has not seen the inside of a courtroom in nearly three decades. He refers the cases to other lawyers and collects a percentage of their recovery. His success in advertising and referrals has made him the idol of some within the legal profession and the whipping boy of others.
And now he is expanding his reach even further.
Until 2000, his ads aired only in New England. That year, he set out to become a national "brand." By 2003, he had quadrupled his number of affiliates, from 14 to 50. In 2006, he branched out with commercials on Bloomberg Television targeting aggrieved inventors who could become patent plaintiffs (registration required). And by 2008, he had established 400 relationships in all 50 states. Next month, he is rolling out a marketing effort that seeks to add another 200 affiliates to his network. "It's all about national branding," Sokolove tells Boston Magazine. "If you're a realtor, you can't exist unless you become part of a system. That's the same thing that is going to take place in legal services -- consumers want to have trust in a name."
Writer Storrs quotes Sokolove telling a group of Suffolk law students, "I'm not in the religion business." Even his family has become used to people thinking of him as a heartless ambulance chaser. But during my meetings with Sokolove three years ago, I detected a different side of him. He proudly emphasized his work after law school as a VISTA volunteer and in legal services and his decades of charitable endeavors. Just recently, he joined with Stanford University's Center on the Legal Profession to launch Roadmap to Justice, a project that aims to create a national action plan for building broad access to civil justice. Maybe it isn't religion, but Jim Sokolove does seem driven to make it easier for consumers to find a lawyer. Not everyone applauds his tactics, but it's tough to argue with that goal.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on January 6, 2009 at 02:38 PM | Permalink
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