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Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Lynda Shely. I’m a lawyer in Arizona and Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania and I actually represent lawyers and law firms. Yes, I’m an ethics lawyer. Yes, I do that for money. I used to be at the state bar of Arizona as the director of lawyer ethics and before that I was at a very large firm in Washington D.C. Now, I provide ethics advice to lawyers in about 900 law firms around the country. My job is to keep lawyers from having to meet their state bar or lawyer regulation offices. So, here are some tips on hosting or preparing a video for marketing for your services. These are ethics tips and the first one is I’m only gonna talk about Arizona rules, so make sure you look up the rules in your jurisdiction, because everybody knows the rules are different in every jurisdiction. But remember, you can start with doing your due diligence with any company that offers to host your video or provide marketing to you. For instance, you’ll see a bunch of disclaimers on this website. Well, those are there for a reason. It’s because this is a group advertising platform, which means you the lawyer control what’s in your video and how it can be used and how it can be reproduced. You do not want to use something that is free on the internet, think of all the things that you can think of that are free on the internet, to post your videos where somebody else can download it and maybe change it. You need to go with a company that will guarantee that they will not be changing your video, will not be changing your firm website, without your permission. So, you want to go with a company that will give you the rights to your video. When you’re presenting your video and when you are considering using this for marketing purposes, remember too that you want to be very careful about companies that say that they are general marketing and there gonna send you lots of leads. Remember that most jurisdictions, including Arizona and D.C., you’re prohibited from giving anyone any money for referring work to you. No really, there’s a rule about that. And, you want to make sure that you don’t unfortunately, or accidentally, sign up with a company that is actually an impermissible referral service. A referral service matches a specific consumer on the internet who would come to a website with one specific lawyer. You don’t want to sign up with something like that. You want to sign up with a group advertising platform, or some place that might host ads where consumers can come into the website, look at all of the videos, all of the lawyers listed in their jurisdiction and then the consumer decides who they’re going to hire. Now, last tip for videos for marketing of law firms. Remember to include all the disclaimers that your jurisdiction requires right there on the bottom, or right on your website where they’re going to be viewing the video, because it’s very important to include the disclaimers required by a jurisdiction, because it’s not fun to have to shoot a video again.