Quite simply, a legal practice premised upon dui/criminal defense success is the ideal foundation upon which to build direct mail success. Established legal precedent has determined that in such a field of legal endeavor, direct mailings can have a positive and valuable impact upon educating the public as to their legal rights in a timely manner.

As such, mailed informational resources have specifically been endorsed so long as produced in a manner that is not misleading and otherwise is in compliance with state ethical rules.

The fact that national legal organizations and courts have recognized and specifically sanctioned the value of direct informational mailings is not a small issue. For far too many years established law firms and/or those well connected within a community did their best to impede direct advertising from taking hold within their given communities.

Through their own whisper campaigns founded upon ethics or by manipulating legal associations within their jurisdictions, the old legal guard did their level best to prevent meaningful public understanding of the average person’s rights and legal options by eliminating competition such mailed resources represented.

The question in today’s legal marketing environment is no longer whether mailed legal resources can serve a valuable role in helping our communities, but merely whether proper and correct information is being disseminated.

To be sure, there have been untold numbers of direct informational content sent to arrested individuals and those who have been injured that have not only been of little value but deceptive.

Advertising manipulation whether in the form of television commercials, print media claims or misleading website content has and will continue to exist within all professions and business industries. However, unlike those traditional forms of advertising, it has only been a relatively recent development for direct informational mailings to have joined the ranks of public communication that can either bolster the standing of the legal profession or lower it.

Specifically as related to a dui/criminal defense practice, legal rulings have established the necessity of public awareness of legal rights within a timely manner. As there exist deadlines for criminal defendants to assert legal rights in all fifty states, time constraints that can otherwise toll when such mailings can be distributed have been disallowed when focused upon arrested individuals.

Despite attempts to thwart the effectiveness of direct mailings to criminal defendants by delaying when they can be distributed, direct marketing power comes from the legally endorsed ability to target and capitalize on the imminent need for legal services among those who have been arrested among the general public.

To meet the need of such individuals, mechanisms with which to notify those lawyers capable of providing assistance are permitted to be in place and utilized. Further, no longer will legal prohibitions among state ethical commissions be permitted to be put in place that can impede the ability to reach an individual in need of criminal defense services in a timely manner.

Although still quite effective, direct mailings for injury attorneys have increasingly been subject to “cooling off” periods in which mailed solicitations cannot be directed to injured individuals with potential legal claims until a certain period of time has elapsed.

Such arbitrarily created time constraints are not ideal to the most qualified attorneys ability to inform injured individuals of their rights prior to self interested insurance company communication.

In many circumstances, state legal bar associations have tilted the competitive playing field in favor of insurance companies ability to gain free unencumbered access to injured individuals in attempts to secure settlements far below what they could have otherwise been entitled.

Since delineated legal rights that can be effected by time and/or delay are constitutionally protected, such cooling off periods have not been permitted in preventing the distribution of mailings to those who have been arrested. Consequently, individuals in need of legal defense services are able to receive your lawyer correspondence as soon as one can deliver it.

Unfortunately it is a daunting if not impossible task for those lawyers practicing in such fields of law as divorce or bankruptcy to be in the same position to capitalize on the profit potential of direct mail advertising.

Unlike a legal process initiated by a state actor without profit motive in the area of dui/criminal defense, meaningful notification of divorce and/or bankruptcy proceedings can only come once lawyers have already been retained to have initiated legal filings on a respective party’s behalf.

Unless a lawyer is willing to preemptively saturate the potential demographic market for future retention as traditional direct mailings in other businesses have done, the hands down winner for prospective direct mail success rests in the hands of defense attorneys and to a lesser extent injury counsel who may both spring to action upon the filing of arrest and/or accident reports.

I am neither an expert nor advocate of the preemptive saturation method of direct mail advertising. In other words one or more informational mailings sent to a targeted social demographic who may or may not been in need of a particular legal service some time in their futures.

While online materials continue to tout the effectiveness of such strategies, I am a big fan of ultra targeted marketing to a person who is in immediate need of my services now.

Such is the extreme power of direct informational marketing for lawyers in the fields of dui/criminal defense and personal injury law.