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Is Total Attorneys Complaint a Total Joke?

By Robert J. Ambrogi

What are we to make of the complaint by Connecticut lawyer Zenas Zelotes against Chicago-based Total Attorneys and its lawyer-founder Kevin Chern? Zelotes has filed versions of his 303-page complaint against more than 500 lawyers in 47 states. He alleges that these lawyers are obtaining referrals through and sharing fees with Total Attorneys in violation of legal ethics rules. The Connecticut Law Tribune first reported about the complaint in July and now it is back in the news with a piece in the Norwich Bulletin. In a blog post written shortly after the story appeared in the Law Tribune, Total Attorneys president Chern defended his company's business model. Mr. Zelotes?s argument that the pay-per-performance model employed by Total Attorneys amounts to fee splitting defies even the most basic logic. Sponsoring attorneys pay fees based on exposure, regardless of whether or not a particular consumer ever retains them or they ever receive a fee. The truth is that the pay-per-performance model employed by Total Attorneys is the industry standard in online advertising and is most notably employed by Google as the pricing model for their AdWords program. Total Attorneys? program is a natural extension of the Google performance-based pricing model. Both...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on September 15, 2009 (boomark / email).