Selling legal services with … y’know

Roll on Friday are at their inimitable best, dredging up this brarmer from the depths of legal profession:

Hearty congratulations to Texan criminal defence attorney Melissa K. DuBose - the self-styled Law Lady - for her amazingly bonkers website featuring smouldering pouts, pearls and a quite un-lawyerly amount of cleavage.

DuBose seems determined to dispense with the traditional image of frumpy lawyers, all dandruff-speckled shoulders, square toed shoes and rictus grins. Instead she's pulled out her best body con dresses, sucked in her cheeks and generally upped the glamour stakes.

Raaaight oaaaarrrrrn!  (Like my Texan drawl there?) 

But I wonder how would clients would react if Melissa DuBose (and don’t get me wrong – she’s lovely and all that) was practicing in this country?  It’s certainly a distinctive style; I’m sure she’d get an influx of male clients, hoping she’d lead them seductively into her office and take down their particulars (of claim).  

And as for her colleagues?  Probably the usual mix of jealously, snobbishness and sexual harassment.  The blood pressure of senior partners would no doubt go through the roof.  But many might find her style off-putting, too.   

If a claimant’s been mis-sold PPI, say, they want to be compensated and want a capable, friendly lawyer fighting their corner.  Whether they’re a libidinous (we live in hope) smokin’-hot-sexy-piece-of-ass with  a cleavage to rival a page 3 girl’s is beside the point.  Well, a nice bonus, perhaps?  I don’t know.

But then again, maybe clients don’t want their lawyers to be sexy.   

Positioning the ‘brand image’ of legal services is a tricky one.  Old, dry and doddery on the one hand; sharp, hard-hitting and with a thong wedged up their booty-crack on the other.  Hopefully there’s a happy-medium somewhere there.  I guess it’s approachable, friendly, and professional.  But that’s such a boring response.  

Anyhoo, talking of questionable practices in the legal profession, on returning from my casual jaunt to Sainsbury’s at lunchtime, I overheard a few fragments of conversation from a couple of lawyers (I’d caught them emerging from the double doors of a local solicitors’ practice on previous occasions) walking down the same piece of pavement.  They were talking animatedly about “Susan’s file”.

There were a few mutterings about a) what a mess Susan had left it in, b) how she’s always doing it and c) something about the content of the file which probably wouldn’t sit well with the solicitors’ code of conduct.  Tut, tut... that Susan... she’s a one!

Rather than follow them all the way back, I decided to lurk at the bus stop and pretend I was checking the timetable.  It just didn’t seem right to eavesdrop like that!
hehe... the hell I did!!