The Mac Lawyer

Guest Post :: Lawyer Uses His Mac to Create Online Video To Get New Clients

The following guest post is from Gerry Oginski, a Mac-using medical malpractice & personal injury trial lawyer in Great Neck, New York:

As the internet has taken hold and more lawyers have recognized the benefits of marketing online, one marketing tool is defining the standard of advertising on the web. Online videos. It is the newest, hottest tool available for lawyers to communicate their message on the web. Admittedly, attorney videos are one-way communication, but they offer significant advantages over every other advertising medium.

Most attorneys have failed to understand the true value of video and how it can improve their chances of a potential client calling them over their competitor. Legal marketing experts agree that the sooner you start to see the value of video marketing, the sooner you’ll see the results. Legal marketing expert Larry Bodine recently commented that putting video on your website is “...a great opportunity to present how you look, how you talk, what you're like, and make yourself more attractive to clients. It's a great business-getting technique.” The key to encouraging a website visitor to call you, is with video. Static websites and fancy graphics just do not cut it any more, and fail to distinguish yourself from your competitor. Tom Foster, CEO of Foster Web Marketing says “If you get in early by putting video on your website, you can take advantage of good search placement on the video search engines.”

If you thought that internet video was for the MTV crowd, you'd be wrong. If you thought that video for your website was only for geeky techno-lawyers, you'd be wrong too. If you thought that putting a video of yourself online was useless, you'd definitely be wrong. In fact, Google thinks you're so wrong that they recently paid one billion dollars to buy a video sharing site called YouTube. To give you an idea about the reach that internet video has, consider a ten minute video clip by comedian and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham: his video has been viewed over 60 million times. Most attorney videos are viewed in the hundreds of times, but it shows the potential that video has. Plus, if done correctly, does not cost you anything more if it is watched 100 times or 100,000 times.

Intellectual Property Lawyer Describes His Switch from PCs to Macs

Daniel Coolidge is an intellectual property attorney in Unity, New Hampshire, and he is a recent convert from PC to Mac.  What might make his conversion more meaningful to you is the fact that he also has a degree in computer engineering.  Dan recently published "One Lawyer’s Journey from the Dark Side: Leaving Microsoft and Learning to Love the Mac" in the September 2008 ABA Technology eReport.

His article explains the reasons for his "conversion," many of which are the same as other attorneys who have made the switch.  Dan said, "I type my own documents, and I used to live with an almost constant subliminal rage.  I referred to it as the wheel-spinning ratio: the ratio of time trying to fix something on the computer over productive time."  He said that Vista was the straw that broke the camel's back and made him realize that "there had to be a better way."

He summarized his conversion experience as follows:  "And what was most delightful to me was, the longer I used the Mac, the lower became my background level of rage. The Mac just worked. The wheel-spinning ratio dropped nearly to zero. For the first time in years, the computer had become a delightful tool, aesthetically pleasing and regularly useful."

Well said, Dan, and welcome to the fold.  I hope that you'll share more of your Mac experiences with us in the future.