I was in contact this morning with a former colleague at the Philadelphia public defender’s office who eventually plans to go into private practice herself and who tells me she has always been impressed by my willingness to take the plunge. But, she told me, she has no clue about how you go about bringing in new clients. Below is the perspective of someone who has been doing this for less than a year.  My approach is still a work in progress. I am always open to suggestions.

I should first note that I don’t do any paid advertising.  I am not opposed to it.  I know that sometimes you need to spend money to make money and all of that.  It’s just that I have tried it, it hasn’t worked for me, and I eventually decided it wasn’t worth the investment.

Last winter, for example, I spent $100 or so on an advertisement in the Washington City Paper that appeared for three months both on-line and in the hardcopy version available on the newsstands.  The ad generated a single phone call from a jurisdiction in which I am not licensed to practice.  I also spent $147 a month for three months to appear as one of three lawyers at the top of the Avvo DWI/DUI page for Washington, D.C.  That investment generated zero calls.

That said, the best way to develop a steady stream of clients, as everyone knows, is to develop a solid referral base.  I checked on the criminal defense lawyers I respected in Philadelphia and found that not a single one of them seemed to do any type of advertising at all.  They don’t need to.  Referrals generate more clients than they can handle.

Most clients with enough money to hire lawyer will either already have a lawyer or will at least know a lawyer who can make the referral. Referrals also tend to be good clients. Because you have already been endorsed (pre-approved) by someone they know and trust, they are favorably disposed towards you even before they have met you. They are serious, and there seems to be very little of the tire-kicking that some lawyers complain about. In fact, some of my best clients have come in by this route, bringing with them some very interesting cases.  Thank you to the lawyers who have made these referrals. I have also gotten one client through the Legal Referral Service of Bar Association and have recently signed up a similar referral service run by the Virginia State Bar.  We’ll see.

While I hope to eventually base my practice entirely on referrals, I am still relatively new to the D.C. criminal defense arena.  Still working to develop my reputation and referral network after only nine months of solo practice here in D.C., I am not there yet.  As a result, I continue to rely on this combined website/blog to bring in new clients.

I know there are many criminal defense lawyers who scoff at this way of bringing in business.  All I can say is that it works for me. I don’t tend to get complicated or serious cases. It’s hard to believe, for example, that a person charged with a very serious crime would hire a lawyer off the Internet.  But the misdemeanor DWI/DUI, assault, and theft cases I have secured this way have gotten me into court. They also pay the bills. And I have liked all the clients I have gotten this way.  Once we start working together on a case, it is irrelevant where the client came from.

(I should note that I have not spent a single cent on any of the private legal referral services or firms promising, in exchange for a hefty fee, to improve your website’s Google ranking.  While there may be some lawyers who swear by these services, I don’t see the value.)

Finally, I am still waiting to get onto the panel of lawyers in D.C. approved to take court-appointed cases.  I missed the deadline for applying for this panel by just a couple of months upon relocating back to D.C. last year, and I am told that the panel will not be reopening until next fall or winter.  The D.C. court system pays court-appointed lawyers very well, and there are many lawyers in D.C. who do nothing but court-appointed work.

While I hope to eventually get on the panel as a way to get more experience and to even out my flow of income, I will continue to emphasize the retained work.  The pay is better, and clients seem to prefer services they have paid for.  Such clients also tend to cooperate more with you in preparing their defense.

A boss once told me that the reward for good work is more work.  We’ll see if I can be that lucky.

Courtesy of Jeff Adachi and the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, here is a public service video entitled “Innocent Until Proven Guilty.”

A couple of weeks ago, somebody appropriated my name, photograph and biographical information for over a month to tweet some of the most inane things you have ever seen on Twitter.  (And that is saying a lot.)  Although my impersonator avoided tweeting anything blatantly offensive or crude, it was still distressing to see my name and photograph associated with some of the stupid things the impersonator was putting out there.

I was also bummed, I have to admit, that the fake Jamison Koehler was able to garner over 10 times as many followers as the real Jamison Koehler.

Five or six months ago, Mark Bennett posted on Social Media Tyro about the so-called “reacharound followback”; that is, the strategy of following someone with the hope that the person will follow you back.  Bennett noted that many people will follow anyone who follows them back.

To test this theory, Bennett set up a Twitter account in the name of FollerbackGirl and ultimately had the account follow over 5100 people. He was completely straightforward about the purpose of the account:  “I exist to boost your follower account,” FollerbackGirl tweeted last September.  Then a week or so later:  “If you follow me, I’ll follow you back!  Please retweet!”  As of this writing, a Twitter account without a single substantive post had generated 4600 followers.  In other words, 90% of the people FollerbackGirl followed were willing to follow back based on nothing more than the fact that FollerbackGirl had followed them.

Bennett also discussed the strategy of continually following and unfollowing someone with the hope that you can prompt that person to follow you. He wrote specifically about a colleague who had followed Bennett four times in a single month.  “To do that,” Bennett wrote, “he would have had to unfollow me three times in a month.  I asked him what was up with that.”  The colleague’s response:  “I’ve found that I don’t like to ‘follow’ without being ‘followed’ back.  Seems a one way conversation – not fun for me.  I found that some people would follow back after the second time I followed them.  Assumed the email we get was the reminder, soon buried under more recent ones.  The theory has worked, with people I know who are less tech savvy.”

The 90% return follow rate for FollerbackGirl would indicate that there are a whole lot of what Bennett termed “worthless followers”; namely, followers who have no intention of actually reading anything that you have tweeted.  Wrote Bennett in a different blog entry back from last September:  “[F]ollowers are like money you can’t spend.  They  are like money because they have zero intrinsic value, and are only worth something because some people agree they are worth something.”

All of this makes me feel a whole lot better about the large number of followers my Twitter impersonator was able to generate.   By the time my impersonator’s account was finally taken down by Twitter, he had generated close to 500 followers while following over 1000 people.  This means that his follow-back strategy and mumbo-jumbo posts enjoyed less than a 50% rate of success, far below the 90% rate Bennett’s fictional twitterer achieved.  It would also suggest that very few of the impersonator’s followers ever bothered to read what he had tweeted.  No harm, no foul.

A far better method for measuring Twitter success – based on the notion that “more interesting is better than more followers” – is what Bennett has termed as the Twitter Interesting Index v1 (or TII-1).  Writes Bennett, TII-1 “is the number of followers a person has, divided by the number of people he follows (v2 will be recursive, so that being followed by more-interesting people increases your Interesting Index more).  A person gets more followers than he follows by being interesting.”

Based on current numbers, Bennett has a TII-1 of 2.5, I have a 1.5 and Lindsay Lohan has a 3,532.  More telling, FollerbackGirl has a TII-1 of 0.90 and my impersonator an abysmal 0.46.  That I was able to beat out my impersonator in the interesting index also make me feel a whole better. I’m just sorry I couldn’t outdo Lindsay Lohan.

Norm Pattis was in town this weekend, and Mirriam Seddiq and I joined him last night for dinner at Oyamel restaurant.  Seddiq’s brother works as the head bartender there, and he made sure we were treated like royalty. Pattis and Seddiq were in the bar area waiting for our table when I arrived.  Pattis commented on how much smaller Seddiq is in person than he expected.

Pattis has written about the odd experience of finally meeting someone you have previously only known through a blog (the person is often not what you expected), but the Pattis in person is very much like the Pattis on his blog.  There was, of course, the sandals, the rumpled shirt, and the long, graying hair pulled back into a ponytail from his photograph. Though not particularly tall and still trim, he has a large physical presence.

Pattis has been criticized recently for not being the Pattis of old, but now, having met him in person, it is hard to imagine there was ever any one Pattis.  The man in person seems to be someone of many contradictions and shades of gray.  He is self-confident, almost arrogant.  He is also humble.   He knows what he wants and he knows who he is.  He also seems capable of tremendous self-reflection and doubt.

There is not one speed with him – full steam ahead, certainty, attack — but many speeds.  He is warm and calm in person.  At the same time, you get a sense of a certain unease, even anger, lurking just below the surface, and it is not hard to imagine him bottling up this anger to unleash at trial in a spasm of controlled violence.  To try to categorize him would seem to diminish him.

There has been some fun poked recently at the so-called Happysphere.  I don’t know exactly what the Happysphere is supposed to look like but I suspect that, if there is a Happysphere, Pattis is already there.  He plays the game according to his own rules, and he directs his anger, his venom, not at his fellow bloggers – there are no ad hominem attacks, no pettiness masquerading as some high-minded purpose — but at opposing counsel, the police, the courts, in fact at anyone threatening the interests of one of his clients.  You get a sense that it is only in defending a client that he ever feels fully at peace. Let’s hope that the rest of us can eventually join him there.

Back in the days when I tried to write fiction, my greatest aspiration was to get a short story into the Best American or O’Henry anthologies of best short stories for the year. Alas, I was never successful. No nominations. No honorable mentions.  Not once. Not even close.

Given my need for outside validation, I was therefore very pleased to learn upon starting this blog that there is a similar anthology – a “best of” collection of sorts — for law blogging.  Specifically, through the Infamy or Praise website, Colin Samuels does a once-a-week wrap-up of the best blog entries in something he calls  “A Round Tuit.”

I have to admit that the first thing I do every time Round Tuit comes out is to scroll through the blog entry looking for my name.  Only after I have done that do I go back and read the entire post.  Even then, I have to admit that I skim over some of the stuff that doesn’t appear to be of immediate interest.

In so doing, I am reminded of the toast a friend of ours delivered many years ago at a book-signing party for one of those tell-all memoirs by an outgoing member of the Administration.  Our friend, who featured very prominently in the book, referred to the practice of checking the index first to see if you can find your name and then going directly to those pages.  There probably isn’t a single person here today, he told the author in his toast, who has actually read the book through cover-to-cover. But don’t be discouraged, he said, because between all of us assembled here today the entire book has in fact been read.

There has occasionally been some light-hearted lobbying to get a blog entry included in Round Tuit. I particularly enjoyed Gideon’s tongue-in-cheek lobbying on Twitter a month or so ago to get one of his, shall we say, less than serious blog entries  – an entry titled “Every Day Is Caturday” — into Round Tuit.  There was also some good-natured kidding after the fact when it turned out that “Caturday”, exemplary piece of criminal law blogging that it was, had not made the final cut.

The best strategy obviously for getting a blog entry into Round Tuit is to write an original and quality post on a topical issue of great interest. For those of us who may have difficulty meeting those qualifications, however, there are also other strategies. I have found, for example, that Samuels likes to juxtapose different bloggers’ handling of the same issue.  As he himself wrote just last week:  “Each week (well, most weeks), the bulk of the posts gathered in these Round Tuits tend to fall into a couple of broad categories.  Sometimes it’s a major case decided; sometimes it’s a major event; sometimes the stars (of the blawgosphere at least) just happen to align and a particular subject inspires many.”

It therefore makes sense to write on a topic that other bloggers are also addressing.  A couple of weeks ago, for example, Norm Pattis posted an excellent piece on flat fees and hourly rates. I quickly typed out my own entry and, presto, Pattis’ coattails were enough to carry me to Round Tuit glory.  I was so pleased Mirriam Seddiq said I acted like a high school student who had just made the honor roll.  But only because, I’m sure, high school students tend to be pretty mature when it comes to that type of thing.

Though still unproven, I am now developing another strategy for achieving Round Tuit fame and fortune:  shameless, Eddie Haskell-like flattery.  Samuels has mentioned that his mother follows Infamy or Praise and that she will occasionally link through to one of the blog entries mentioned in Round Tuit.  This tidbit of knowledge gives me a tremendous tactical advantage over my fellow bloggers.

You sure are looking great today, Mrs. Samuels.   Who does your hair?  And, my, what a fine job you did of raising your son.

This post may be no “Caturday” but I’m thinking my chances are pretty good.  Because, after all, what kind of son would Samuels be if he didn’t include this homage to his mother?

I don’t own my cases, and they aren’t mine to write about.  They belong to my clients, and my clients don’t want the worst experience of their lives strewn across the internet.  I respect that, so I don’t kiss and tell.

– Scott Greenfield, “Letting Go”

While I consider myself an ethical person and an ethical lawyer, I am not an expert on legal ethics, and I often struggle with the question of whether and to what extent I should write about clients in conceptualizing and drafting a blog entry.

The question is not whether to betray client confidences.  That one is easy — it’s an absolutely no-no – and would include situations, as Scott Greenfield has cautioned, in which something a client told the lawyer in the context of the attorney-client relationship could unconsciously seep into the blogger’s entry.

The question is also not whether a client reading a blog would recognize him/herself in an entry and feel embarrassed by it. This would violate, among other things, the lawyer’s duty of loyalty to the client. As Mirriam Seddiq has pointed out, we have no interest in humiliating our clients publicly, even if everything we might write is included in the public record.

Finally, the question is not even about usurping ownership of a case, as suggested by Greenfield’s quote above.  Greenfield is right.  In most situations, the cases do belong to our clients.  They are their cases to write about.  They are also their cases NOT to write about.

No.  The answer to these questions is pretty clear.

At the same time, recognizing that the specifics of a case can often make a blog entry come alive, the question I have struggled with is the extent to which there may be  circumstances in which we can write about clients without violating any ethical or moral duties to the clients, without violating their trust.  In other words, can we have our cake and eat it too?

How about writing about hypothetical clients? As any fiction writer knows, the characters that emerge in a short story, novel or play are often composites of people the author has known in real life. Blonde Justice, for example, talks about “truthiness” in the posts she writes about clients. A couple of years ago, she posted a funny piece in which she described a conversation with a client about “double jeopardy.” It is possible that she did in fact have this conversation with a particular client. More likely, she took a number of misconceptions she has heard about “double jeopardy” from multiple clients and, using some creative license, combined them into a single conversation for the purposes of her blog.

Alternatively, how about if we got the client’s permission to write about his or her case?  A couple of days ago, I wrote about watching the recorded interrogation of a client and, in this case, the client I had in mind while writing the blog entry was very real.  I justified my posting of this entry a number of ways.  First, I told myself that there was nothing specific to my client in this entry other than the fact that he had agreed to give a statement without his lawyer present, that he repeated the same story eight times, and that the recording continued to run even after the detective had left the room.

Second, I told myself that the story I told was not the client’s story but my own story. It was not the story of a person facing custodial interrogation without a lawyer present but the story of a lawyer watching his client being interrogated and wondering what was going through the client’s mind.  (In my world, after all, everything is really about me.)  Finally, I emailed the client the entry in draft before I posted it and asked him if he would have had any objection to my using it.  He emailed me back with his blessing.  He said he was flattered by the attention.

Did I violate any ethical or moral duties to this client by posting the entry?

The safest course, obviously, would be to draw a line in the sand and to decide never to write about a client or a client’s case. Scott Greenfield has said, for example, that he does not write about clients or their cases.  I could say to Greenfield, yes, but how could you hold out on us like this?  How could you not draw from your own experience with specific clients and cases to enlighten the rest of us?  To which Greenfield would reply:  This is not about you. This is not about making my blog entries more interesting and more relevant to you. This is about my clients.  And it is about my duty to the clients.  Why take any chances when it comes to the client’s life, rights and interests?

This is the decision Greenfield has made, and I respect it.  It is not, however, one I believe needs be made, at least not to the same extent.

Writing about a real client is one thing, and I am not suggesting that, in including a real client in a blog entry, the lawyer is performing the same function as in, say, talking to a newspaper reporter about the case to further the client’s interests. I would agree with Greenfield that this practice comes dangerously close to exploiting the client in the interest of a better blog entry, no matter how flattered the client may have been by the attention.  I wrote about a real client in the blog entry I talked about above. I don’t think I will be doing that again.

But writing about composite or fictionalized clients is another matter.  A couple of months ago, I wrote about a client who entered into a deferred sentencing agreement on an assault case.  Toward the end of the entry, I described how the client reacted to the prospect of pleading guilty to an offense when he didn’t really feel that he had done anything wrong:

Your client in this case is a large man but he has a gentle disposition. He has a good sense of humor, and he speaks fondly of his wife and their future together.  He regrets his involvement in the unfortunate incident, and decides he wants to accept the DSA.  He is not happy that he needs to stand up in open court and admit guilt.  But he takes the long view:  He doesn’t want to take the risk of ending up with a conviction on his record.

Your client looks at the sheet of paper you hand him outside the courtroom that lists the organizations for which he can complete the 40 hours of community service.  Yes, he says, I have always wanted to do this type of thing.  Now I finally have the excuse.

You have no doubt that he will complete the program successfully. You have no doubt that in nine months he will walk away from this case without a conviction on his record, the whole incident nothing more than a bad memory.

I received a number of emails shortly after I posted this from people who told me they had identified with the man in the story. I was pleased to hear that the composite character I had created seemed real to people.  But the character wasn’t real in the sense that he was based on any one person.

Good fiction is usually grounded in real-life experience, and can contain as many truths as any story taken out of the newspaper. Through the careful use of some creative license (the “truthiness” that Blonde Justice refers to), the blurring of both details and timeframe, and the jumbling of identities, we can draw from our experiences with real-life cases and clients without compromising either the interests of those clients or our ethical duties to them. Even if in the end the composite client exists only in the mind of the blogger who created him, the story is no less interesting, no less illuminating.  These clients don’t exist; and yet they do.

A couple of days ago, my friend and colleague Mirriam Seddiq posted a very flattering piece on me on the Not Guilty blog.  Thank you, Mirriam. This is one of the many good things that have come about because of my presence on the Internet.

The same day that Mirriam’s entry came out I also learned that someone has created a Twitter account using my name, my photograph, and my biographical information. This is one of the bad things. My response: You don’t have your own name and your own information you might want to use?  I understand someone trying to impersonate Chad Ocho Cinco or some other famous person.  But me?  Really?

I was alerted to my alter ego on Twitter by someone who had either been offended or annoyed by something this other Jamison Koehler tweeted.  She checked out my website and saw that the two personalities did not seem to match.  So she emailed me.  Thank you.  It had been going on for over a month by the time I found out about it, with the fake Jamison Koehler now having 10 times as many followers as the real Jamison Koehler. Who knows how long it might have gone on had she not alerted me.

The tweets from this other Jamison Koehler aren’t offensive.  They are just inane.  The most recent Tweet, posted 6 hours ago, was: “Really like the Wormhole!  Great coffee and Fritz Pastry donuts and muffins!  I mean . . . c’mon.” Or:  “Hii twitterworld!  i’ve been gone for a way to loooooooooong time!  ;( but.  i’m back!”

I have passed along this news to Twitter with the hope that they will take action to delete the other account.  It strikes me that the imposter must be committing some criminal offense, such as identity theft.  I also think I must have grounds for a civil lawsuit.  In the meantime, I remain puzzled over a person who seems to have no identity of his or her own and who, despite the lack of anything to say, still seems to feel compelled to say it.

Potentially related to this is another piece of news, both good and bad.  Yesterday, in an unusual demonstration of affection and support for a fellow blogger, over 15 bloggers spoke out on behalf of Scott Greenfield by posting an entry with his name in the title.  This was the good news.  The bad news is why.  Since I don’t want to publicize this any more by repeating the reasons here, I’ll defer to Mark Bennett’s entry on the same subject. As Bennett says, “The more the merrier.” It’s also comforting to be in such good company.

If that is the good and that is the bad, what is the ugly?   That’s the easy part.  The ugly has to be Gideon of A Public Defender.  The guy looks like he should be dating the woman from Grant Wood’s American Gothic.

Last week I had the pleasure of getting together for lunch with fellow D.C.-area lawyers/bloggers Mirriam Seddiq and Jon Katz. Regular readers of this blog know Seddiq very well, but may not know that Katz authors one of the most successful criminal law blogs out there, the Underdog blog.  I envy his blogging experience and numbers.

I have had the idea for a while now of organizing a poker game for D.C.- area criminal law bloggers.   Mirriam is up for it, as is Carolyn Elefant.  I’ve also been trying to interest Matthew Kaiser of The Kaiser Blog and a few other criminal defense lawyers in this area who also blog.  The idea was that, after we improved our game, we could challenge Mark Bennett, Mark Pryor, and other Texas criminal law bloggers at their own game — Texas Hold ‘Em – in a regional match.  We East Coasters could show those Gulf Coasters who is boss.

I regret to say that Katz’ reaction was at best lukewarm.  He did, however, take this video of Mirriam for YouTube.  That I refused to go in front of the camera myself had nothing to do with his lack of interest in my stupid little poker game.  Because that would have been petty, right?

My next idea, which I can only hope is more successful, is to organize a Fantasy Football league for criminal law bloggers this coming fall.  I know even without speaking with her that Mirriam is game. Katz will be lucky to be invited.  I am already studying up.

A creative writing teacher once asked my sister who her audience was:  Who is it that you write your short stories for?  When my sister responded that she wrote with her father and her brother in mind, the teacher looked at her and said, no, those people are not your audience.  They are your censors.

I sometimes have the same problem with blogging.

It’s not that I worry that I will offend my wife or my mother with something I put in this blog. Neither of them ever reads it.  After a very successful stint with email in the 1990’s, my 85-year-old mother has given up on trying to keep her computer and her Internet working.  And my wife has more important things on her mind.

But it is sometimes a challenge to write something, particularly when I find that I have multiple audiences in mind for the things I put in this blog.  And, as always, what may work for one targeted audience may not work for another.

Scott Greenfield posted recently about the large number of new bloggers seeking his advice on how to become a member of the criminal law blogging gang: “Some come in through the front door, sending me email asking questions about blawging.  Others try the backdoor, leaving a comment along the lines of, ‘I posted about this subject too!!!’”

I am one of the people who want to be a member of this gang. I’d like to think that the same group of criminal law bloggers that I read and respect also read and respect this blog.  So, in that sense, these bloggers – Bennett, Horowitz, Pryor, Gamso, Gideon – are all included among my censors.  Thinking about how they might react to something can’t help but affect what and how I write.

Greenfield himself is also a frequent reader of other criminal law blogs, including this one.  And he is a difficult, discerning reader. He likes to challenge people. Greenfield has said some very complimentary things about this blog. He has also said has some less than complimentary things.  In a recent comment on my site, for example, he cautioned that by avoiding challenging thoughts and ideas, I could be relegating this blog to the list of “tepid and simplistic” blogs that no one else would ever take the trouble to read.

With his enormous readership – Greenfield was just listed as #4 on the Avvo list of blogs – a single link by Simple Justice can send a lot of readers to a blog.  The flip side, of course, is that Greenfield, if he wanted to, could also do a lot of damage. In that sense, Greenfield is a potential censor for anyone writing on the Internet.  He is certainly one of my censors.

I read a Memorial Day piece recently by Norm Pattis that was so beautifully written – probably one of the best things I have ever read in the blogosphere – that I couldn’t think of anything to say but, gee, I wish I had written that.  My sister has said that this is the ultimate compliment you can ever pay a writer.  And, with respect to this particular entry by Pattis, my comment went beyond that.  It wasn’t just that I wished I had written that particular piece.  It was that I wished I could write like that at all.  Ever.

Pattis was typically poetic in response to this compliment:  “You do,” he wrote.  “I read it.”  With these five words, Pattis just became another censor.  Thinking that a lawyer and writer of Pattis’ stature reads this blog could paralyze me.  If I let it.

If Greenfield is the tough love reader, then Mirriam Seddiq is the supportive reader.  She is almost maternal in the feedback she gives me. She pushes me to improve certain things but she picks her words carefully.  She is always encouraging and she always lets me know she has my back. In this sense, she now plays the role once played by my sister back when I was writing short stories. But, to the extent I allow her encouragement to affect what and how I write, she too has joined my ever growing list of censors.

But I don’t just write for other criminal law bloggers.  I also have other audiences in mind.

Let me get go directly to one of my most controversial audiences:  Google.  I admit it.  I do it much less than I used to, but I still seed some of my posts with terms that will work well with Google.  When I have nothing better to write about, I occasionally do filler posts with an eye to improving search engine optimization (SEO) for my website and blog.

Mark Bennett has kidded me about this.  A couple of months ago, for example, he pointed out that I had included the very SEO-friendly term “criminal defense lawyer” three times in the opening paragraph of an entry I did.  He was right.  I had.  And in that case I had done it without even realizing it and in a post I had not intended as a simple filler. SEO had begun to take over my writing.  To the extent that I now think of Bennett every time I insert an SEO term, Bennett has now joined my list of censors.

I try not to apologize for the SEO stuff. Thinking about SEO is for me like choosing a magazine or periodical magazine with a higher circulation rate over one with fewer readers to publish a short story or an article.  Unless you are just writing for yourself, like Scott Greenfield says he does, you’d like to think that more readers will come across something you have written.  And they won’t read an entry they can’t find.

Greenfield, Bennett, Turkewitz, and others have cautioned against even thinking about SEO.  The process needs to be more organic, they say. The SEO stuff will put off the more serious readers, and the SEO will come about naturally over the longer term with quality posts and the large and growing number of readers the quality posts will generate.

I understand all of this. But, with a nascent law practice, I am also thinking shorter term, and this is where my next group of targeted readers comes into play:  potential clients.

Greenfield and other more established criminal defense lawyers say they get few if any clients through the Internet.  This makes sense when you consider the types of crimes they defend and the rates they charge.  Someone charged with a serious white collar crime or capital offense is not going to get his or her lawyer off the Internet.

I don’t do serious white collar crimes or capital offenses, at least in this point in my practice.  I do assaults, DWIs, thefts, firearm violations, and drug cases.  Someone charged with one of these crimes may well check the Internet for information on the offense, and I know from Google Analytics that the information I have put up on assault, firearms, and drugs are the most frequently visited pages on my website.  These visitors also spill over onto my blog.

I have no idea whether things I say on this blog puts off potential clients who might otherwise have hired me.  But I do know that the people who do hire me often tell me that they did so because of something they read on either my website or blog.  One client, for example, recently told me he hired me because of an entry I did on deferred sentencing agreements and simple assault.  When I met with the client’s wife, she told me that it was she who had found me on the Internet and insisted that her husband contact me.  She had read every single word I had written on the subject matter.

I also write for other criminal lawyers, particularly solo practitioners who are just beginning a practice.  My piece on flat fees versus hourly rates may not have been of interest to established criminal defense lawyers who have already thought through everything there is to know about pricing structures.  But, as I know from the many phone calls and emails I receive, the information is helpful to someone first considering these issues for him-or herself.

In addition, one of the things I have enjoyed most about private practice is the network of friends I have developed among other criminal lawyers in the D.C. area.  This blog has enabled me to expand that network. I will be meeting for lunch next week, for example, with another D.C. criminal defense lawyer who found me through my website and blog.

I also know that law students read this blog.  If the assault and weapons pages are the most frequently visited pages on my website, the three entries I did on taking the Virginia bar in February are among the most popular pages on my blog.  While I have no intention of writing any additional pieces on this subject, I know that law students are frequently among the most avid readers of criminal law blogs.  I would like to think that what I write – written from the perspective of someone else who is just starting out – could be of interest to them.

Friends and family are probably the last potential audience for this blog but here I have to agree with Greenfield that this is a very mixed bag.  I do know that my sister and brother-in-law are regular readers of this blog.  But apart from them, I find that most people in this category check out this site out of an initial curiosity but then move on.  There are also limits to this potential source of readers.  You only have so many friends and family members.

Some people say that the success of the Beatles was due in large part to the competition among John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. Each member of the Beatles pushed the others to become better songwriters.  While I am not comparing criminal law bloggers to the Beatles, I do think the same principle applies.

It can be a cranky and disagreeable group. And the criticism can sting.  Greenfield cautions that you shouldn’t put something out on the Internet unless you can withstand a little heat.  You shouldn’t be a criminal defense lawyer if you don’t have a thick skin.  While I agree with him completely, I still have some amorphous and undeveloped thoughts on civility on the Internet, on the movement toward what Mirriam Seddiq has termed a “kinder and gentler blogosphere.”  I think, for example, how political considerations within our government can sometimes be used as an excuse for simple pettiness, for grown adults acting like children.

But these are thoughts best left for a future entry.  The point is that, for the most part, the challenges and the criticism have been constructive and have improved the things I have written.  So has the support and the encouragement. The people who read my blog need not be my censors.  At least not always.  At least not unless I allow them to be.  As for the criticism, it is, as Greenfield points out, better to get that kind of reaction than to be ignored altogether.

Mark Bennett and Brian Tannebaum both announced last week that they have been practicing criminal law for 15 years.  While I have nowhere close to this level of experience, I recently celebrated an anniversary of my own. As of this past month, it has been six months since I opened my D.C. law office and one month since I began practice in Arlington, Virginia. Below are some preliminary thoughts on this experience.

Getting Started: There are a number of books out there on starting your own law practice, including Jay Foonberg’s How to Start and Build a Law Practice and K. William Gibson’s Flying Solo:  A Survival Guide to the Solo and Small Firm Lawyer.  The book I used – and the book I swear by – is Carolyn Elefant’s Solo By Choice:  How To Be The Lawyer You Always Wanted to Be.

Elefant opens her book with an inspirational chapter describing six reasons to go solo (autonomy, practical experience, feel like a lawyer, work flexibility, owning and not loaning your talent, and career satisfaction).  She discusses a number of potential challenges facing a lawyer considering this decision (e.g., whether you should go solo right out of law school, how to assure a smooth transition if you are leaving another firm).  The bulk of her book is then devoted to very thorough, practical, and realistic advice on handling every challenge that could confront a new practitioner.

A dog-eared copy of Solo By Choice sits on my desk as I write this.  I followed Elefant’s advice in every respect.  I supplemented this information with advice I received from other practitioners, bloggers, and Solosez, the ABA listserv devoted to solo practitioners. My practice is living proof that these things work.  You can in fact figure things out.  Networking does lead to referrals.  Clients do come in the door.

Clients: I have had only one client – my very first client – who hasn’t paid me in full.  (And I won his case, too.) While I eventually forgave the debt, I learned from that experience not to agree to any more payment plans. With the exception of one other client I decided to fire, I have liked all my clients.  They are good people who for whatever reason have found themselves in a difficult situation.  With my background as a public defender, it has been gratifying to represent people who appreciate my work on their behalf.  I recently raised my rates and, to paraphrase Mark Bennett, the more money people pay me, the more they seem to like my work.

Advertising: I no longer do any paid advertising.  I paid $147 a month for a couple of months to be featured on Avvo as an “Avvo Pro.” Over the same time period, I placed an ad in the Washington City Paper that appeared in both the print version and on-line.  The investment generated a grand total of one telephone call from someone asking for legal assistance in a jurisdiction in which I am not licensed to practice.  I have turned down what seems like a million telephone calls from legal referral organizations and search engine optimization firms.  As Mirriam Seddiq complained in a recent blog post, my website and blog seem to be doing fine on their own.

Networking: Since I am not the most outgoing person in the world, I initially dreaded the thought of the amount of networking that would be required to get my practice off the ground.  I dutifully scheduled lunches and get-togethers with other practitioners and I have attended numerous bar-related and other events.  I have been surprised by how many friends I have made through this forced social interaction.  That I have also gotten clients through this networking now seems like a welcome side benefit.

Blogging: I initially took up blogging because it was one of the things the “how-to” books recommended I do.  I don’t know how much it has actually helped my practice, but I do know it has become one of my favorite things to do. I greatly appreciate the phone calls, emails, and comments I get from readers.  Since I know from Google Analytics that a lot more people read the blog than comment, I hope to encourage more interaction with readers in the future.

It has also been fun “getting to know” such other criminal law bloggers as Jeff Gamso, Rick Horowitz, Mark Pryor, Norm Pattis, Carol D., Mark Bennett, Gideon, and Brian Gurwitz.  Mirriam Seddiq has provided moral support and encouragement both on-line and in-person.  I am also particularly grateful to Scott Greenfield for his “tough love” and link support.  While Greenfield has been absolutely correct with much of the advice he has offered me, sometimes children just need to figure these things out on their own.  (Can’t you feel him just cringing at that saccharine statement?)

Legal Research: While there are a lot of free legal research services out there, I am a traditionalist.  I subscribe to a LexisNexis package providing me access to federal and state courts for D.C./Virginia/Maryland at a cost of $125 per month. I think it’s worth it.

Malpractice Insurance: I pay less than $100 a month for malpractice insurance I set up through the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Other: I share my wife’s spacious office in Georgetown, but do most of my work out of my home.  I also meet many clients in the cafeteria of the D.C. Superior Court building. I use Fresh Books for my accounting but am thinking of switching to QuikBooks because that is what my wife and our accountant use.  I use Efax for faxing, and I recently set up a system to accept Master Card and Visa through Law Charge.

I am happy to say that, benefitting from extremely low overhead, I covered my firm’s expenses for the coming year within a month or two of starting the firm.  And while I will never be rich, I have been operating in the black for some time now. I enjoy taking on the clients and cases that appeal to me and turning down all the rest, a luxury I didn’t have as a public defender.  I appreciate the flexibility. I haven’t missed a single one of my younger son’s sporting events at school, and I was able to take some time off last week to pick up my older son from college.  Nobody cares what time I leave the office.  I appreciate making all of my own decisions. I am accountable only to clients and the courts.

Last spring my wife and I were preparing to move to D.C.  I had planned on opening my own practice had we stayed in Philadelphia, and our decision to move here just expedited that by a couple of years.  I had already updated my resume and sent out some letters when I turned to my wife and said, hey, I’m too old for this.  Why not work for the one person for whom my resume doesn’t matter, the one person who thinks I am just the greatest thing in the world?  Unfortunately, she didn’t want to hire me.  That’s when I decided to open my own practice.