NY Personal Injury Law Firm Uses Sympathy To Attract You

In today’s blog post I want to tell you about something that disgusted me.

I recently came across a competitor’s website. On his home page he had two feeds. For those of you who don’t know what a feed is, it’s a continuing source of news and articles from other websites. The first feed was about local car accidents. The second was a twitter feed. What caught my eye was the twitter feed. It focused exclusively on the accident cases that resulted in death.

Most people use twitter to form a relationship and enter into a conversation that’s going on online. Some attorneys use twitter to try and sell their services. As you can imagine, it’s often difficult to sell your services with a maximum of 140 characters per entry. This law firm was different.

In virtually every one of those accident cases that resulted in death on their news feed, there was a corresponding twitter feed that said “The law firm of _________ wishes to express its condolences to the family of ________ who just died.” Wow. A sympathy tweet. How awful. First of all, this law firm doesn’t know the family,  nor do they know the details of the accident, other than what their news feed reports.

While there is no ethical prohibition to putting out sympathy tweets, in my opinion and in the opinion of other attorneys and bloggers, it is distasteful.

Why would a law firm do this?

To optimize the chance that when a family member is searching online for details about the accident, they will find this law firm talking about their accident. The pedestrian thinking is that if a family member has legal questions and is looking for an attorney to represent them, then the person who is offering this sympathy tweet stands a better chance of getting that call compared to someone else.

Don’t be surprised the next time you see a law firm website with a newsfeed describing all the local car accidents and then right next to that seeing a twitter feed with condolences. Simply ask yourself why they would do this and whether this is the right law firm for you.