Communication is key to success. Start with great Service, make your service well-defined and allow the marketing plan to grow organically from there. For example, take the attorney-referral website, Who Can I Sue. In a Time Magazine article by Siobhan Morrissey, the company’s usefulness is questioned more than it is substantiated.
Curtis A. Wolfe, Ft. Lauderdale-based attorney and founder of Who Can I Sue, provides a cogent response to Morrissey’s antagonisms: “With our system [the consumer] can either find a lawyer or find out by talking to our lawyers that they don’t really have an interest in that case.”
In other words, the client can use Wolfe’s site to discern whether or not they have a legitimate case to make before a judge. Morrissey notes that consumers may do that with the local bar association at a fee of $25 for a 30-minute consultation. But free versus $25 raises an eyebrow or two. Perhaps Wolfe’s website will lower the consultation cost; this is what competition does.
The reason that a lawyer will pay $1,000 annually for Who Can I Sue and also pay the $125 fee to join their state bar’s referral system is because it casts a wider net in order to procure more clients. Why the cost differential? Who Can I Sue is a business that traffics in identifying consumer needs and giving lawyers a return on their investment. If their is no ROI, then lawyers will not want to join. Best to incentivize the lawyers to join, then. The marketing backbone to Wolfe’s website dwarfs what any state bar referral system can achieve.
As for the Time article’s additional qualm, that Wolfe’s service will clog up the legal system, it leapfrogs a more telling aspect of our legal system. Who Can I Sue establishes the plausibility for a case to be made, if there are laws on the books that justify this counsel, then that is the fault of the legal system, not the counselor.
One of the many perks of the private sector is that, without a demand, useless commodities disappear. Morrissey wrote his Time Magazine article back in 2008. Looks like Wolfe’s website won the war.
