By Don Keenan
ATTENTION: The Keenan Law Firms fellowship program will soon go into month 4. Our first fellow has already been in two trials. She has another 8 months to go. We are now ready to accept our second fellow. We have adjusted the fellowship to provide the fellow with two weeks a month to return to their practice rather than a solid year. If you have applied before we invite you to reapply. For an application or questions contact Wentrekin@keenanlawfirm.com.
Many of you probably don’t know this, but the Reptile© was the origin of our wholesale abandonment of the phrase “trial lawyer.” The marketing patriarch of the Reptile© technique is, of course, Frenchman Clotaire Rapaille. Many of you may also not realize it, but he ventures into areas other than products.
Several trial lawyers from South Florida approached Rapaille to determine if there is anything that can be done about our perceived poor reputation. The story goes that Rapaille quoted a million dollar fee but the lawyers came up with $800,000 and he took it.
HISTORY OF FLORIDA AND LAWYER PR
Permit me to deviate for a minute about the history of my now-state-of-residence, Florida, in the area of lawyer perception among Bubba and Bubbette. In the mid-to-late 1980s, the State Bar of Florida wanted to do something about the perceived poor image of lawyers in general (not just trial lawyers). They took an attitudinal survey to measure the public’s negativity with lawyers, as a benchmark to compare after their advertising campaign.
The State Bar threw a ton of money into beautiful television advertisements, trying to cast the lawyer in the best possible light to the general public. One I remember well was an elderly, grandfather type who was taking very short steps on his way to the front porch, where he took a spot on the swing next to a little girl and the voiceover said something like, “These are the people who take care of justice and take care of little girls as well.” The sun indicated it was obviously morning and the water sprinkler had just come on the lawn. I give you all these details because those ads were dubbed the “Massengill lawyer douche ads,” because at the time, there was actually a Massengill douche ad that had a young woman walking through a similar front lawn with the sprinkler system on.
While the ads were beautiful and took up tons of money, when the Florida lawyers went to do the attitudinal survey after the six-week advertising run, it turns out negativity against lawyers had only gone up even more.
ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS
Bubba ain’t stupid. He saw it as a direct manipulation and pandering, in an attempt to improve our image; equivalent to when Nixon said, “I want to assure the public the President is not a crook.” Now, after Rapaille spent the $800,000 on various focus groups, he made a startling discovery:
“Trial lawyers have a negative opinion amongst Bubbas.”
My God, this was truly earth shattering – a shazam moment! “Oh my,” said lawyers everywhere, “What are we going to do?” To which Rapaille said, change your name and the world will be good.
NAME CHANGE WAS HYPOCRISY
The Florida Trial Lawyers had long been one of the truly great trial associations in the country. They neutered themselves by changing the organization’s name to the Florida Association of Justice. Thereafter the domino effect of name change bounced to the West Coast, where the mighty California Trial Lawyers Association overnight became Consumer Advocates. Having nailed down Florida and California the die was cast, and the American Trial Lawyers pulled a sheet over its head and instantly became whatever they’re called now (I always forget…something about justice).
Meanwhile, Rapaille was laughing to himself all the way to the bank, knowing full well that the imprint of “trial lawyer” would never go away. That is, any media that sourced the new name would only put an “A.K.A.” afterwards, acknowledging no matter what that we were “trial lawyers.” So whether we intended it or not, we became hypocrites (at best); that is, saying one thing and being another – or liars, at worst.
Guess what? We only made things worse. What has always been strange is that the answer was right under our noses, via our evil opposition’s genius Frank Luntz (author of Words that Work, 2007), at the very time the trial lawyer name transition was occurring around the country. I say we should have listened to him because Frank didn’t have a problem with “trial lawyer.” What does he say in the book?
“It is difficult to distrust a trial lawyer in part, because we see them portrayed so favorably on television and in the movies.” He went on to say that when you think of trial lawyers, Bubba thinks of Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, etc. Y’all, we need to be like Abraham Lincoln and Clarence Darrow.
However, Luntz does advise not to use “trial lawyer;” rather, he and his team of experts suggest you use “personal injury lawyer.” (He then goes on to say that people don’t really have a bad connotation about personal injury lawyers so “if you want to get an additional level of intensity, talk about ‘predatory personal injury lawyers’”).
There it is my fellow woodpeckers. Our own worst adversary clearly said it – at the time we were abandoning the word “trial lawyer,” we didn’t need to abandon it at all, we needed to be proud of being a trial lawyer.
I believe that with the advent of the Reptile© (it creating an environment of truth, candor and authenticity), it is now time to destroy the words that never defined us: Association of Justice or Consumer Justice Advocates. We have always been trial lawyers and we should always be proud of that.
At the end of all my trials, in closing argument (at a time when I’m convinced I’m completely off-code) I always tell the jury that I’m proud to be a trial lawyer; I’m proud of the sacrifices that my ancestors made coming to America, living a life of hardship in order to give me the opportunity to be a trial lawyer – so you bet I’m proud to be a trial lawyer and I will challenge any lawyer that says they are more thankful or proud than I am.
BOTTOM LINE: Reclaim the phrase “trial lawyer” and be proud of it.