Michael J. Evans: Law + Technology
How lawyers can use technology to attract clients, be more effective, make more money, and have more fun.
From the monthly archives:
More than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, meaning the retention rate is a mere 40%, says Nielsen Online.
By comparison, Facebook and MySpace have retention rates of nearly 70%. “Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty,” David Martin, Nielsen Online’s vice president for primary research, said in a blog post on www.nielsen.com.
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One of the reservations I’ve heard some lawyers express about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is that you don’t know who is clicking on your ads. If you’re paying $85 for someone to click on your mesothelioma ad to visit your site, is that person a mesothelioma victim or a competitor? Now comes a study from U.S. based Click Forensics that says the average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.2%, up from 27.1% in the previous quarter. See article here.
Note that this figure applies to the “content” networks, such as ads that appear on blogs and news sites using Google’s AdSense program. There is a built-in incentive for the publishers of the sites to engage in fraudulent clicking, as they share in the revenues from each click. The article does not give an estimate of the number of fraudulent clicks on Google’s and Yahoo!’s search engines.
One user of PPC ads suggests that you factor the fraud rate into your calculations. Tony Jewell , chief technical officer of job search engine Workcircle, advises factoring in a degree of risk and focusing on return on investment. “If 20% of clicks are invalid, are the other 80% good enough for it not to matter?” he said. “If the traffic sends customers who convert, and hence is profitable, then we’re happy.”
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The ABA Journal reports that the latest version of Black’s Law Dictionary is now available for download on iTunes. This is the first venture by West (publisher of WestLaw) into the iPhones app arena. For those of you who are interested, be forewarned that the price is a litlle high compared to that of typical iPhone apps. Whereas iTunes offers Law Pod apps for 99 cents, and a version of the Constitution for free, Westlaw is asking $49.99 for Black’s Law Dictionary. I think somebody at West may be just a little overly optimistic.
The Law Pod apps on iTunes include 99 cent versions of the Federal Rules of Evidence, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure, the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, and the U.S. Constitution. Another publisher, David Finucane, offers a variety of legal apps at the iTune store. These include a $4.99 version of California statutes, a $2.99 version of Florida statutes, a $2.99 version of the U.S. Code, and more. There are other legal apps in the iTunes store, but many of these are aimed at law students. I think we’ll see a wider number of legal apps as the iPhone market matures (the app store has only been open a little over 9 months).
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Twitter was originally created as a way to keep in touch with friends by answering the question, “What are you doing?” Posts have to be 140 characters or less. According to a January ABA Journal article, many blogging lawyers are now posting on Twitter as well.
Now comes an ABA Journal article reporting that Seattle personal injury lawyer Bill Marler will donate $25,000 to charity if he obtains 25,000 additional Twitter followers by the end of the month. Apparently, Marler was insprired by Ashton Kutcher’s agreement to donate 10,000 malaia nets if he won a race with CNN to sign up one million Twitter followers. Marler, who represents victims of food-borne illnesses, said his followers include “foodie-type people,” government health workers, journalists and other lawyers. He says doesn’t view the service as a way of generating clients, but he does see it as a way of communicating with government and media representatives interested in food-safety issues.
Marler says he’s a little surprised that the post hasn’t generated more followers. Somehow, I’m not surprised that people aren’t falling all over themselves to sign up to follow the tweets of a health food lawyer.
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Only nine months after Apple opened the App Store to let people download applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple reports that customers have downloaded one billion apps. Connor Mulcahey, a 13 year-old kid who downloaded a free game app, will receive a $10,000 iTunes® gift card, an iPod® touch, a Time Capsule® and a MacBook® Pro. Pretty nice stuff.
Although many of the downloaded apps are free, Apple receives 30% of the price of all paid apps. There are 35,000 apps available at the App Store, and everyone I know who owns an iPhone, including me, struggles with App Store addiction. Would someone organize a 12-step program, please?
This summer iPhone OS 3.0 will be released, and it will allow developers to do even more creative things. One of those more creative things will be the ability to copy and paste, just decades after Apple invented the concept.
I use a variety of apps that weren’t designed specifically for lawyers. Apps which are more lawyer-specific include the ABA Journal, an app with lawyer jokes, and a free copy of the Constitution. I haven’t seen any must-have apps for lawyers, unless you’re a lawyer who bills your time by the hour. If that includes you, they have some nice time-keeping apps you may find interesting.
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After sitting there for a year without much use, Google Profiles are today getting a push from Google, according to TechCrunch.com and a number of other sources. Beginning today, all Google search queries for a person’s name will now feature a section on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) dedicated to Google Profile results at the bottom of every page. These profiles allow people to fill out their basic information, like current employer and links to various web presences, without having to maintain a personal website. Google is allocating four thumbnail spots to these profiles at the bottom of search engine results page - anyone who doesn’t appear in those four spots can be found by clicking a link to show more results. Getting one of these four thumbnail spots is going to very desirable to some people. According to Google, the four top spots will be chosen by an algorithm that favors “complete” profiles, but Google wasn’t very specific about how the algorithm will work.
The folks at Google say, “[a] Google profile is simply how you present yourself on Google products to other Google users. It allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are. With a Google profile, you can easily share your web content on one central location. You can include, for example, links to your blog, online photos, and other profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. You have control over what others see. Your profile won’t display any private information unless you’ve explicitly added it.”
You can go to the Google Profile Creation Page to create your profile.
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Plaintiffs’ attorneys are spending more on TV ads in 2009 than they spent during the same period in 2008, according to Harlan Schillinger, vice-president and director of marketing for Network Affiliates, the nation’s largest lawyer advertising agency. Schillinger, in an interview with legalnewsline.com, said plaintiffs’ lawyers are spending significantly more so far this year on marketing and advertising.
Network Affiliates’ clients, which include such big name firms as Jacoby & Meyers, The Cochran Firm and the offices of Fleming & Associates of Houston, are spending about 11 percent more than they did last year on TV spots, according to Schillinger.
The legalnewsline.com article also quotes Richard Samp of the Washington Legal Foundation, who says he expects securities class action filings to soar amid the Wall Street meltdown. “Certainly, all of the major banks and security houses are being sued already in a number of well-publicized suits,” Samp said.
But Samp has a word of caution based upon the recent meltdown and criminal charges involving some former members of the plaintiffs’ securties class action firm known as Milberg Weiss LLP. “It’s well known that many firms keep a stable of clients who own small numbers of shares in lots of companies, and that is what got all of the leaders of Milberg Weiss thrown in jail because they were in a sense bribing stockholders to serve as their clients,” Samp said.
The article also quotes a couple of pro-tort reform lawyers. If you want to read what they said, you can click here.
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The Wisconsin Bar recently published an interesting article with 10 Internet marketing tips for new, small law firms. While the article is sometimes short on specifics about implementing its suggestions, it is a very good beginning point for lawyers without experience in online legal marketing. I’m just going to list the 10 headings here without the full text of the article; you can read the full article here. I’m going to add some explanations/suggestions based on my own experience.
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The Official Google blog today reports two new services you may want to try. One is the “Similar Images” search which allows you to find images that are, well, similar to another image. Another toy that may prove more useful to some of us is the “Google News Timeline.” According to Google’s blog, “Google News Timeline organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can navigate through time by dragging the timeline, setting the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or decades, or just including a time period in your query (i.e., “1977″). To see this in action, check out the results viewed by month in the summer of 2006.”
As someone who has created a number of websites dealing with recalled products, I’ve found that most clients appreciated a timeline explaining the history of the product, from the time it was introduced until the time it was recalled. To the extent that Google News Timeline can help with that, it could be very useful to people building sites devoted to particular defective products. I tested it with a search for “Yamaha Rhino.” I currently represent clients injured on Rhinos, and operate a Yamaha Rhino recall site and an ATV and Yamaha Rhino lawsuit site.) Unfortunately, Google News Timeline was not as helpful as I hoped. It failed to turn up several relevant news articles. For example, it failed to list a single article from January 1, 2009 through March 31, 2009, although there were very relevant news articles about Yamaha Rhinos, including the establishment of an MDL and consolidation of all federal lawsuits involving Yamaha Rhinos.
I’m going to put Google News Timeline down as an item to check back on in a month or two. It’s too early to tell how helpful it may be.
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