legal culture – LAWYERS & LIQUOR

Avoo Maria, Part 1: Talking About The Avvo Legal Services Shutdown

Welcome to another session of the profane legal ramblings that appear on this site, which we have politely named Lawyers & Liquor. I’m your host with the half cup of coffee and the stained suit, the Boozy Barrister, here to curse the day that I decided a scholarship offer from a law school was a good idea.

There are a lot of useful legal services available online for both legal firms and consumers to use. For example, the solutions available at remotelegal.com can help progress court proceedings online. However, there are also resources that aren’t at all useful. Avvo is one of these.

So the big news, or rather the not so big news, in the legal world this week is the shutdown of Avvo’s fixed price legal services platform. You may remember Avvo if you’re a regular reader as the high-pressure sales environment that puts on its slimy car salesman suit to harass the hell out of any lawyer stupid enough to claim their profile on the site.

Well, imagine if the guy that was showing you your own car and then calling you twenty times a day to see if you wanted it painted decided to move on from that and then offer a service where other people could drive your damn car at a certain price that they decide, not you! That was essentially Avvo’s fixed price legal fee service, and like all bad ideas it was destined to either go down in flames or get elected President. Luckily, in this specific situation, it was the former.

So let’s spend a little time today providing erotic elucidation (because anything that negatively impacts Chris who calls my office to get me to buy ad space certainly gives me a half-chub at the very least) on what Avvo was offering and why it was shut down faster than a nerdy kid gets shut down by the head cheerleader. Break out the marching band and let’s move on ye of little experience as we discuss why a lawyer advertising service somehow decided that exempted it from impermissible fee sharing agreements in today’s Lawyers & Liquor.

Continue reading “Avoo Maria, Part 1: Talking About The Avvo Legal Services Shutdown”

“Hi, I’m Goliath from Goliath & Goliath.” – A Philly Lawyer Takes on Morgan & Morgan

Let’s take a minute and talk about these huge, multi-state law firms that swoop into the local area and start slinging their advertising dollars around. These are the candymen of the legal advertising industry, keeping radio jingle writers and shady TV commercial producers in dollars so they can run all of their ads during Rush Limbaugh or the seventeenth mid-day rerun of Judge Judy. We all know the types of guys I’m talking about, with ads that say shit like “call us, we’ll get you your money” and some 1-800 number that takes you to a switchboard before directing your ass to a regional office in some big city. You’ll get better service if you work with an injury attorney like Kirkland & Packard LLP. They provide great customer service. But the dirty little secret of lawyering is that these places are really just mills, gigantic firms from out of state with not a single named partner who could find your podunk little shithole on a map unless their private jets were flying overhead.

These guys are, basically, the Waffle House of the legal world, with a branch every damn place. They’re the bane of the small law practitioner, and especially the small PI guy, who can’t compete with the advertising and the crisply pressed suits of some partner that shows up in the commercials but never in court. But there are instances where people stick to their local practitioners, for example, Arkansas personal injury attorneys might to more sort after by a resident of Little Rock. But that dosen’t justify big firms flooding the local airwaves with commercials, lining the streets with billboards, and getting the name recognition that used to go to the decent guy down the street, they’re gonna take every call from a dog bite to a fender bender and move on.

These are the personal injury mills.

Continue reading ““Hi, I’m Goliath from Goliath & Goliath.” – A Philly Lawyer Takes on Morgan & Morgan”

Guest Post: The Three Major Components of a Lawyer’s Job – Sam Castree a/k/a IndieGameLayer

[Today’s guest post is from Sam Castree, the Head of Entertainment Law at Crawford Intellectual Property Law out there in Barrington, IL…you know, the state you have to go through both Ohio and Indiana to get to from here. Sam can be found on Twitter at @IndieGameLawyer, and has graciously agreed to provide me with a break. Sit back and enjoy the…less profane…take on the job of a lawyer. -Boozy].

Hello out there! My name is Sam Castree. I’m the head of Entertainment Law at Crawford Intellectual Property Law in Barrington, Illinois. Today, I’m doing a guest post for the Boozy Barrister, which is clear proof that I’ve finally made it in the legal world.

Continue reading “Guest Post: The Three Major Components of a Lawyer’s Job – Sam Castree a/k/a IndieGameLayer”

“Fees Fi Fo Fum:” Part 4 – Fees Flatter Than a Pancake

We’ve reached the end of the road in the discussion of fee arrangements popular among attorneys here at Lawyers & Liquor. So far we’ve covered three topics: that impending death of indigent representation with the proposed defunding of the Legal Services Corporation, the soul-sucking nature of the billable hour, the questionable concept of contingent fees, and now we’re moving on to the final major fee agreement you, as a new lawyer or a pigheaded client, may encounter in the day-to-day practice of law. This is the unicorn of all forms of fees paid for litigation purposes, the one that makes battle-hardened attorneys look at you askew and wonder the weight of the anvil that must have struck your ass firmly on the head.

Of course, we’re talking about the amazingly unprofitable, but always requested, Flat Fee Agreement.

Continue reading ““Fees Fi Fo Fum:” Part 4 – Fees Flatter Than a Pancake”