Lawyers.com Editor in Chief : Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, sales training, practice development, training, marketing consultant, legal consultant, individual lawyer coaching, business development, client team, practice development, business development, law firm coach

Imagine a law firm where:

• A supervisor like a drill sergeant calls associates "little maggots" and bellows, "no cells phones, no Internet, no chit-chat and no eye contact" during work.
• Jaime, the cute blond associate who sings in the bathroom, walks out and meets a male associate with his zipper down. He can explain.
• Nick, an associate up to his eyeballs in files, meets weeping colleagues in the hallway who have been laid off. In his own review he's searched for weapons because a fellow associate called security on him for joking that he wanted to kill the managing partner.
• Red-headed associate Tim says, "Yep, obviously I'm Irish. Does that mean I have to drink excessively and have heated arguments with my girlfriend over trivial matters? Yes I do."

It's from The Bottom Rung, an online web show that is a humorous take on document review hell. Created by lawyer and comedian Matt Ritter, the show brings the dysfunction of the TV show "The Office" to a law firm where second-tier lawyers toil in a basement. Episode One and Two are online now and they cracked me up.

"I created The Bottom Rung out of my own experience doing document review in Los Angeles," says creator Ritter. "Until I moved out to LA in 2010, I worked as a big firm corporate associate in New York and had never heard of document review. A former lawyer and TV writer told me that if I was short on cash, document review was an easy way to earn a stress-free paycheck, allowing me to focus on my comedy work."

The reality was nightmare bosses, no windows, no ventilation, no personal space, sick people everywhere and no running water. "During the entire season I am highlighting the doc review characters and the world of some of these darker document review projects. It’s all loosely based on the places I’ve been assigned and the people that I’ve met on some of the more hellish projects," he says.

Check out Episode One below.

In this interview of Stephen Fairley, CEO of the Rainmaker Institute, we talk about marketing for lawyers, including:

• The Rainmaker Retreat has trained 8,000 lawyers from solo and small law firms. The two-day program distills 65 different strategies that can be used to market and grow a small firm. Among other things, it covers using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to develop more business.
• Every successful law firm has the right people and the right systems in place. There are 7 critical systems that every successful law firm has. The people run your systems and the systems runs your law firm. However, most law firms are run by people without any systems in place.
• A memory tip from presidential candidate Rick Perry.

Want a taste of what it's like to be a law firm marketer? Experience the joys of working with blockheaded partners who are more concerned with being in the Sunday newspaper magazine that their neighbors read than speaking engagements that will actually generate new business. Can you tell that an exasperated law firm marketer wrote this based on their actual experience?

Hat tip to Heather Morse of the Legal Watercooler Blog for finding this.

With the holidays upon us, what gift do you get for your favorite law grad, partner or associate?  To bring a smile to their faces give them a funny drawing featuring the lawyer's name at www.yournameherecartoons.com.  Lawyer Laughs lets you choose the person’s name (or law firm name) to be inserted into the cartoon caption.

Every personalized cartoon is reproduced with an archival process called giclée printing, which is French for "spraying of ink." This creates precise coloring and razor-sharp detailing, and has become the benchmark for fine art reproduction. The combination of HP Premium Photo Plus paper and HP Vivera dye-based inks produce exceptionally fade resistant, consistent vibrant color images, rivaling traditional photo processing of up to 100 years. Every cartoon is personally signed by the artist, Richard Stergulz.

Other cartoons include giant cats, jurors being like Olympic judges holding up "10" cards for a superb closing argument, and faces on Mt. Rushmore. The cost is $75 per drawing.

Don't live with pain, disfigurement, disability, scars, broken bones, burns, paralysis or permanent injury. Berger & Green will get what's yours! A exploding car on fire!  (Somebody must have critiqued this video. Visit the firm's website and you'll see the current soothing and calming videos).

I was sitting in my study, reading Wikileaks to catch up on what our government was up to. To my horror I discovered a clear and present danger to our privacy as citizens, an incredible government program to spy on Americans, harvest and collect the information, and deliver consequences -- some really dreadful consequences. It involved having a terrorist spy run the government program.

The description was redacted, but here's what I made out:

• The spymaster can see you when you're sleeping.
• He knows when you're awake and monitors your activities.
• He knows if you've been "bad" or "good" according to some undefined standards.

This goes waaaay beyond stoplight cameras that issue traffic tickets, or food stores monitoring what you eat when you swipe your store card, or a GPS program that can tell exactly where you are.

Code named the S@ЙT@ program, it involved doling out rewards and punishments without any right to due process or equal protection.  The head of the agency is obese, so he's definitely an American.  He wore red garb so he was probably a Communist.

I called up my local Tea Party leader, who had already informed me about FEMA concentration camps, impending 'door-to-door' gun confiscations and that 9/11 was a government plot. And he knew all about the S@ЙT@ program. He whispered fearfully, "So be good for goodness sake!

Thanks to Mashable for these ineffable internet homonyms. You may have thought you were using a three-letter acronym to say something simple, but it turns out to have a secondary meaning that you didn't intend.

There are dozens of poorly thought out web addresses, largely from companies who naively slurred their innocent-sounding names into a single word without noticing the resulting double entendres.

One example of what can go wrong when choosing web addresses is Big Al's bowling alley in Vancouver, which presumably did not notice when naming its site that "I love Big Al's" with spaces removed could equally be read as "I love bi gals".

Andy Geldman, author of Slurls: They Called Their Website What? said, "In a world without spaces we mentally insert out own. And you might not stick yours where I stick mine."

Among the 150 web pages featuring in the book are Pen Island's home page, www.penisland.net, and Les Bocages, a British firm of tree surgeons working in France who are named after the French word for "groves" but also have the unfortunate web moniker "lesbocages".

The potential for amusement has also led to a number of spoofs, notably the website purporting to be the Italian home page for energy company Powergen – powergenitalia – which is really unaffiliated with the company.

For the firms affected, however, the errors are not always taken lightly. A spokesman for Choose Spain, a holiday company found at choosespain.com, told the Sunday Times: "It was too late to change it once we realized."  ("Chooses pain")

Experts Exchange – a site where programmers can trade advice – is found at www.expertsexchange.com

La Drape – a British company selling high-end quilted bedspreads – is listed at www.ladrape.co.uk

American Scrap Metal – a scrap metal recycling firm – has its website at www.angelfire.com/alt/americanscrapmetal  ("Americans Crap Metal")

Speed of Art – a collective or art designers – are online at www.speedofart.com

Therapist Finder – a directory for therapy services – can be located at www.therapistfinder.com

Have you got any more? Submit a comment please!

Wolf Greenfield, a 60-lawyer intellectual property law in Boston, has once again created a clever holiday greeting -- a sheet of flexible holiday magnets that combines marketing with fun.

Drawing on the talents of Sally (only the cops call her Sara) Crocker, Director of Client Services, and Jay Wager, Senior Manager of Business Development, the firm sent out a 7" by 9" sheet with 110 individual words that can be pulled apart and rearranged.

The sheet's arrangement already spells out their uniform selling proposition, including synonyms: "We are IP counsel in Boston and protect defend enforce your valuable new technology and innovation." Sally said the firm added the word "pony" as one of the words, to counterbalance the word "wolf," illustrating the firm's offbeat sense of humor.

It includes several industries the firm serves: "biotech chemical cleantech electrical mechanical pharmaceutical."  And there are blank rectangles where you can write in your own word. 

Adroitly, the late line of words spells out "but what a magnetic winter present you have from ... Wolf Greenfield."

Click on the picture to see it full size.

SymetriColour has mystically transformed this benign plastic toy into a creepy electronic jack-o-lantern with flashing eyes and creaking theremin sounds, sure to scare away those pesky trick-or-treaters. Halloween for audio-hackers never looked (and sounded) so good.