Lawyers Advertise To Snap Up Clients

When most people think of Ron Bumpass, they either think litigator or alligator.

That’s because the Fayetteville lawyer is wearing a cowboy hat and holding a six-foot-long stuffed alligator in his advertisement in the city’s “SBC Yellow Pages.” Bumpass thinks it makes him look like a regular guy, as opposed to a traditional suit-wearing attorney.

For Bumpass and many other lawyers in Arkansas, advertising changed the way they do business.

“I made an active decision to change what I was doing,” said Bumpass, who switched from general practice to public injury law in 1999 after 25 years in business.

But many traditional lawyers think advertising is a crock.

“I prefer no advertisements, but it’s a sign of the times,” said Bobby Odom, who has practiced law in Fayetteville for 35 years and has a full-page ad in the Yellow Pages.

Odom, a partner in Odom & Elliott PA, said word-of-mouth is the best advertisement.

“Your reputation is based on your past performance,” he said.

The Ad Fad

Traditionally, lawyers haven’t advertised their services. Like doctors, they took the stance that it just wasn’t dignified. Besides, across America, it was considered illegal.

But in 1977, three years after Bumpass began practicing law, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona that preventing lawyers from advertising would be a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Lawyers in Northwest Arkansas didn’t budge for almost a decade. In 1985, though, one Fayetteville lawyer took out an ad in the Yellow Pages.

Walter Niblock, who founded the Niblock Law Firm in Fayetteville in 1961, discovered that the advertising lawyer had stolen one of his clients not long after the ad appeared in the phone book.

The former client, who had been in an accident, told Niblock, “Don’t worry: I’ve hired a specialist,” remembers George Niblock, Walter’s son and a partner in the family firm. The “specialist” had graduated from law school six months earlier.

George talked Walter Niblock into buying a Yellow Page ad the next year.

“He hated it,” George Niblock said. “Only because he was getting older and I insisted, he acquiesced … I can tell you that it absolutely worked.”

After advertising, the Niblock firm’s personal injury business doubled. In the mid-1980s, it accounted for about 30 percent of the firm’s work. Now, personal injury law accounts for almost all of the Niblock firm’s case load.

“He hated it every year when Ma Bell sent the sales people around,” George said of Walter Niblock, who died in 1999. Raymond Niblock, George’s brother, and Jason Hatfield are now George’s partners in the law firm.

Walter Niblock might have hated the idea, but he kept buying ads in the Yellow Pages.

“Eventually, he came around to the idea that people were really uneducated about what lawyers do,” George Niblock said.

The firm now spends about $250,000 per year on advertising, which includes television, the Yellow Pages and occasional print ads in newspapers, George Niblock said. Chester Storthz Advertising of Little Rock handles the Niblock firm’s advertising.

Old Yellow

Before the Bates decision, lawyers met potential clients the old-fashioned way, by being involved in the community through everything from civic organizations to politics.

“Marketing was done based on personal contact,” Bumpass said. “So you had to get out in the community. Some of my older mentors told me to join the PTA, get involved with community activities.”

But that changed when they were allowed to advertise.

Bumpass said his business was “very successful” before shifting focus, but it has only improved since then. He has between 225 and 275 active files at any one time, including about 100 that pertain to a class-action lawsuit over defective breast implants.

“I’d say it’s a boutique firm specializing in personal injury,” Bumpass said. “What we have done is concentrate on people who’ve never had a lawyer.”

That seems to be the target market for many of the law firms that advertise in the Yellow Pages and on television.

Like most lawyers, Bumpass has an hourly fee ($175), but the majority of his cases are taken on a contingency-fee basis. He’ll take them if he thinks he can win them, and the clients don’t have to pay if he loses.

Bumpass has run a few radio ads, but he still believes telephone directories are by far his best bang for the buck, and he spends more than $100,000 per year on advertising. When an injured person gets fed up with an insurance company, Bumpass believes they reach for the yellow pages to find a lawyer.

That’s why he has a two-page spread in the SBC Yellow Pages, in addition to a one page ad on the inside back cover and a half-page ad in Spanish. He has a similar amount of advertising in “The Community PhoneBook” published by DataNational Inc. of Chantilly, Va., and the area’s Spanish language telephone directory.

“You buy these spots, and that guarantees you the same spot next year,” he said. “I think it has been extremely helpful, and I’m glad I did it.”

Apparently, other lawyers agree. Ads for attorneys take up 33 pages of Fayetteville’s Yellow Pages, up from 27 last year.

Bob Mueller, a spokesman for SBC Yellow Pages in St. Louis, said package deals are available, but the standard annual rate for Fayetteville’s 2004 Yellow Pages was $24,936 for a one-page, full-color ad; $62,244 for a two-page spread; and $33,336 for the back cover. Rates for the 2005 book haven’t been set.

Mueller said the attorneys section was the eighth largest in the Fayetteville Yellow Pages, averaging 433 daily references. He said about 75 percent of those references resulted in telephone calls to lawyers. The restaurants section was No. 1 in the Yellow Pages with 2,161 daily references.

“The bottom line is because it works,” Mueller said. “We reach every home and business at every hour of the day.”

Nationally, Yellow Page ads resulted in 264 million references for lawyers in 2003, and 65 percent of the calls came from new clients, according to a study by Statistical Research Inc. Fifty-four percent of those clients said they based their decision on who to call from information in the lawyer’s Yellow Page display ads.

Catching Lightning

But Anita Davis sees red when she talks about the Yellow Pages.

“Advertising in the Yellow Pages is like catching lightening in a bottle,” said Davis, who is business manager for Davis and Associates of Springdale, her father’s law firm. “It is a waste of money.”

Anita Davis is particularly peeved because she said the firm’s ad was bumped from the back cover of the Yellow Pages last year. Nolan Caddell & Reynolds Law Firm of Rogers has had that spot secured for the past several years.

“It’s not only that,” Davis said. “They don’t return phone calls. There’s no customer service. They have a captive audience.”

Davis said her father, Charles Davis, prefers to advertise on television instead. That strategy builds brand recognition. The theory is, when someone needs a lawyer, instead of reaching for the phone book to look for one, they’ll think of Davis & Associates and Charles Davis saying, “Don’t go into a courtroom without an experienced attorney.”

“It’s a long haul, though,” Anita Davis said.

She said her father had never considered advertising. He was from the “old school.” Charles Davis put everything he owned in a paper sack and hitchhiked from Wynne to Fayetteville back in the 1940s to go to college. He killed moles for a local judge to make a little money.

“He would pay Charlie $1 a mole,” Anita Davis remembers.

Charles Davis was one of 15 special agents under J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI before he moved to Springdale in the late 1950s to open his law firm. Later, he served as city attorney, Springdale mayor and state representative.

Davis employs one other lawyer, Lucky McMahon, and is looking to add more to the staff.

Decision Allowed Attorneys to Advertise

Throughout most of Arkansas’ history, lawyers didn’t advertise their services.

In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona that lawyers could advertise their services under the First Amendment to the Constitution.

In 1999, the state Supreme Court amended the Arkansas Model Rules of Professional Conduct to outline the specifics.

Amended rule 7.2 states: “a lawyer may advertise services through public media.” It also requires lawyers to keep recordings of their ads for five years as well as a record of when and where they were used.

Some restrictions apply.

“Advertisements may include photographs, voices or images of the lawyers who are members of the firm who will actually perform the services,” rule 7.2 states. But if actors are used, they must be identified as actors.

“Clients or former clients shall not be used in any manner whatsoever in advertisements,” rule 7.2 states. “Dramatization in any advertisement is prohibited.”

In the comment section of the ruling, the court said advertising would help poor people find an affordable lawyer.

“Advertising involves an active quest for clients, contrary to the tradition that a lawyer should not seek clientele,” the court stated. “However, the public’s need to know about legal services can be fulfilled in part through advertising. This need is particularly acute in the case of persons of moderate means who have not made extensive use of legal services. The interest in expanding public information about legal services ought to prevail over considerations of tradition. Nevertheless, advertising by lawyers entails the risk of practices that are misleading, overreaching or unduly intrusive.”

Amended rule 7.1 prohibits “false or misleading communication” about the lawyer or their services.

Rule 7.3 says lawyers can contact prospective clients by mail but not in person or by telephone.