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Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Law - "Competing for Clients, and Paying by the Click"
This story from yesterday's NY Times amazed me.
Legal columnist Adam Liptak writes this week about Google "per per click" lawyer ads. Some quotes:
You can do cool things with Google, like take the pulse of the legal profession.Google is, of course, more than a search engine. It also sells advertising, including the shaded “sponsored links” that run next to the real search results. It auctions off those ads to advertisers, who agree to pay a given amount each time someone clicks on their link.
“Christmas recipes,” for instance, was going for 54 cents per click the other day. “Britney Spears” cost 36 cents, and “Britney Spears nude” only 21 cents.
But “Oakland personal injury lawyer” cost $58.03. “Asbestos attorney” cost $51.68. And “mesothelioma attorney Texas” — mesothelioma is a kind of cancer caused by inhaling asbestos — cost $65.21.
A Web site called CyberWyre, at www.cwire.org, posts a regularly updated list of the most expensive search terms. “The four leading industries are definitely law, medicine, finance and travel,” said Sam Elhag, who writes for the site. On a recent visit, lawyers and lung cancer dominated the top 10.
Ted Frank, the director of the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute, said the fact that some personal injury lawyers were willing to pay $60 a click was telling, particularly given that relatively few of those clicks would bring in actual business.
“These lawyers don’t really litigate cases — they settle cases,” Mr. Frank said. “And they need a big inventory of cases. The only job of the attorney is to come up with the clients.”
“There is nothing wrong with what Google is doing,” he added. “There is nothing wrong with advertising for clients. It’s just fascinating that clients are worth so much.”
And there is no client more lucrative than one with mesothelioma. That word has hovered near the top of the CyberWyre list since 2003, Mr. Elhag said. * * *
Personal injury lawyers are not the only ones who advertise on Google. “Tax lawyer” cost $34.32 the other day, “bankruptcy lawyer” $8.46 and “patent lawyer” $5.08.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 16, 2007 07:26 AM
Posted to General Law Related