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LEGAL CENTS: How to brand your practice through cause marketing

By: Jane Pribek//June 19, 2012//

LEGAL CENTS: How to brand your practice through cause marketing

By: Jane Pribek//June 19, 2012//

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Jane Pribek

About a year ago, Milwaukee plaintiffs’ personal injury lawyer Steve Gabert decided he’d heard one too many defendants testify that “I just didn’t see” the bicyclist.

So he launched Action Law Firm’s “Be Seen” campaign, proving that helping a cause can also help market your firm, and it doesn’t have to be expensive.

In addition to creating website text and fliers with bicycle safety tips, Action Law has distributed thousands of “Safety Green” T-shirts bearing the firm’s logo at community events. The shirts, bought in bulk from a custom printer, cost just a few dollars each.

Gordon Johnson, of Brain Injury Law Group in Sheboygan, employs a similar “cause” marketing strategy.

Johnson posts several informational websites or blogs devoted solely to brain injuries. They include general information on the firm website’s Brain Injury Information page; TBI Voices, where he interviews brain-injured individuals; and Waiting.com, which is geared toward families of comatose patients.

Analytics reports find that, monthly, thousands visit his websites and 2,000 to 3,000 dig deeply into them.

The websites require daily updates or revisions, making them a greater investment of time than money. But the work mostly is done in-house, Johnson said, and costs significantly less than a Yellow Pages ad.

Gabert and Johnson are using variations of what PR experts have dubbed “cause marketing,” traditionally defined as an organization partnering with a nonprofit to drum up business for the organization, while raising money and visibility for the nonprofit’s cause.

These Wisconsin lawyers have simply eliminated the nonprofit, which simplifies the strategy somewhat because there’s less concern about compliance with sec. 440.45, Charitable Sales Promotions.

Cause marketing can be very effective. Look at Paul Newman’s salad dressing, for example. I buy it because it not only tastes delicious but also profits charity.

Now, no one has told Gabert or Johnson that they were hired because of a T-shirt or an educational website.

But, Gabert said, it gives him a warm feeling when he sees a child wearing an Action Law shirt. It doesn’t hurt that the shirts both demonstrate the firm’s commitment to safety and help get the firm’s name out in the community in a cost-effective manner.

“We’re in the business of personal injury,” Gabert said. “We care when someone gets hurt, and we want to reduce that.”

Johnson said his commitment to brain injuries has allowed him a niche practice with clients across the country.

“I’ve probably represented a couple of hundred people with brain injuries over the past 15 years, and I would say 197 of them found us on the Internet,” he said. “It has enabled me to be a small-town, general-practice lawyer who doesn’t do anything but a very, very specialized brand of personal injury law.”

More important to him, he said, is that he feels good about the work he’s done.

“I’m sure my life’s achievement is not what I’ve done in the courtroom,” he said, “but what I’ve written and the educational benefit it’s provided to the people reading it.”

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